It seems pretty snappy aside from the first page load (and refreshes, ...). Not perfect (some actions take a few frames sometimes), but not anything I'd spend more dev time on.
The first page load is nightmarishly slow. I tend to avoid services that pull in that much data because they're nearly unusable in low bandwidth scenarios (e.g., lots of stores or other commercial buildings made from steel, if you wanted to check a note while travelling, if your customers are among the 5-10% of the USA without home access to top speeds of >1MBps, ...).
As something of an aside, you're hijacking keyboard shortcuts that you don't actually use (at least, they don't appear in the help menu and don't seem to have any effect).
Also, it might be worth considering the privacy of the friend finder. When I add a username you instantly tell me their name if they're on your platform, even before they accept my request. On the one hand that isn't much different from twitter showing your name and handle together, but on the other hand that seems like surprising behavior for a note taking app, even one with collaborative features.
Thanks for the feedback! After first load the assets should actually all be cached in your browser, so subsequent loads will be much faster (including full page refresh). But yes the initial bundle size is one of those things we could probably spend more time optimizing for.
We recently released desktop apps (and will hopefully release mobile apps soon) where this is of course a non-issue.
Could you tell me which keyboard shortcuts you are having problems with? Our intent is definitely not to hijack anything we don't use.
Thanks for the note on the friend finder. Unlike many other platforms, we don't actually require users to have a surname, so we felt that if privacy was a concern with regard to name the best solution is for a user to only include their first name. But I can see how that still isn't perfect from a privacy perspective. We are working on improving the way friends work on the platform and will try to improve that as part of it.
I appreciate the response! Sorry to only be pointing out problems by the way. Plenty of other components do seem well done. I just know that in your shoes I'd want to know where users struggle.
> Initial load
I just poked around a bit, and I think the other commenters on mobile or firefox might mostly just be noticing main.[key].js being slow. The inital load is structured as a couple of sequential requests followed by a lot of js (device dependent, 0.5s - 7s+) and then a lot more requests fired off mostly in parallel.
> Refresh bandwidth, caching
Your heaviest assets are set with max-age=0, and the server often responds to an if-none-match header by regurgitating those assets. Refreshing after doing stuff in the app (or just waiting) for 3min reliably generates nearly as much latency as a cold load.
If you expect most mobile users to prefer your mobile app it might not matter, but a workflow that looks like doing something on your site, navigating to another site or app for a few minutes, and then coming back can often trigger a mobile browser to refresh the page -- especially on lower end devices where the cold load is most expensive.
> Native apps
Awesome!
> Shortcut hijacking
Mostly a misunderstanding on my part. It looks like the following things are happening:
(1) Keyboard hooks apply across the whole app, even in screens where they do nothing (like using CTRL+SHIFT+I in the settings) or when the elements they would apply to don't exist yet (like navigating between cards).
(2) I falsely assumed the cheatsheet of commands was comprehensive.
(3) Nearly every navigation keystroke (space, shift+space, arrows, ...) is actually used by something in the app, mostly stuff that doesn't work till you have cards and friends and whatnot.
The net effect for me was that it looked like all my favorite shortcuts were being swallowed and not doing anything useful in return. I don't have much useful advice here, but easy discoverability of all commands might be nice.
> Privacy
That makes sense. Reflecting back on exactly why I found that off-putting in the first place, I don't necessarily think the problem is with the search feature (some people probably disagree), but with the fact that it wasn't clear the information would be public when I was first asked for it. That might lend itself to a simpler solution.
The first page load is nightmarishly slow. I tend to avoid services that pull in that much data because they're nearly unusable in low bandwidth scenarios (e.g., lots of stores or other commercial buildings made from steel, if you wanted to check a note while travelling, if your customers are among the 5-10% of the USA without home access to top speeds of >1MBps, ...).
As something of an aside, you're hijacking keyboard shortcuts that you don't actually use (at least, they don't appear in the help menu and don't seem to have any effect).
Also, it might be worth considering the privacy of the friend finder. When I add a username you instantly tell me their name if they're on your platform, even before they accept my request. On the one hand that isn't much different from twitter showing your name and handle together, but on the other hand that seems like surprising behavior for a note taking app, even one with collaborative features.