Notes!

A huge new feature with an aggressive new price (free)

Today we launched one of our biggest features ever. Now, in addition to tasks, chat and collaboration features, you can take detailed notes in Birtly by creating documents using a powerful markdown editor.

Unlike some other tools that separate notes and tasks, you can view your notes alongside your tasks in list view, as notes can be assigned the same sections as tasks. This first view gives you an amazing way to add detailed information to a group of tasks.

As you can see from the image, notes live in sections just like tasks. You can drag them to another section or move the section header to capture a group. You can also assign an emoji to the note (since there’s no reason for statuses and completion states for notes) for quick identification. Finally, like tasks, you can add labels to further tag your notes. We decided to only show labels on tasks to keep our lists clean with the goal to maintain a single line on tasks while offering a bit more detail for notes so you could use a note as a section “description” or for other quick view info.

You can open the note and create far more than you see here!

Our note interface respects most markdown (maybe all - let us know what we’re missing). It also features a simple slash command if you don’t feel like using markdown syntax for certain things (like adding a table) and will respect most rich text shortcuts as well. It stores on our backend as a pure markdown string so export and deeper search are coming soon!

On the list view, you can always “hide notes” to get a pure list view of your tasks, but, you can also click over to the notes tab to see only your notes organized either by section or by date created or modified. Instantly filter by labels or sections here.

Our native Android app uses a slightly different editor, but the formatting is consistent between the two. Including the ability to add images in line to your notes. One of the things we add to this is any images you add will also be accessible at the bottom of your note and available in our files directory, so you can store your images in your notes where they make sense, but access or re-use them separately later.

Why did we build this?

Other productivity suites treat notes as something either different from tasks, and other note-taking tools treat tasks as simple checklists within a document. We believe that the things you need to know and the things you need to do are equally important. Sometimes, you need to write a lot about something and assign actionable tasks that make sense in a traditional list or board view to collaborate and take action.

For individuals, we think this system will be one of the easiest most powerful personal productivity tools ever.

Free for all

To put our “money” where our notes are we are opening Birtly to free for the next year for new users. That means that everyone who signs up will have free and unrestricted access to our startup plan (up to 5 team members in a single workspace) for 12 months after they register. Our paid plans will be reserved for teams of more than 5 or people who need to use more than one premium workspace (if you do client work and have a lot of different stakeholders, this might be for you). You can also still make a project public, and that means that now, any notes you have created will be available as part of a robust document library.

For individuals, we want you to enjoy and grow with us. Help us make Birtly the best place to organize your life.

What’s on deck?

This is an important pivot for Birtly, and merging note-taking with tasks and collaboration is a huge shift. We’re launching this feature early with a few things that we know are missing.

The biggest one is full-text search. It’s underway, and something we think is important to quickly getting back to a grain of a though. In the meantime our section and label filters will help you get back to your notes quickly.

We also want to add internal linking so notes can reference each other and even tasks.

We also believe your information is yours, and so exporting your notes as plain markdown files is on the way. This is a commitment that we are making and is early on the roadmap. We can’t make a promise on the date, but we want to be able to export our content as much as you do.

Beyond that, we want to hear from you - how important is a preview view? What other extensions do you want in notes? Are you using it on your own or collaborating - what features will superpower your note-taking task-finishing universe?

Can’t wait to see what you make!