Lattics for Creators

Brain-like knowledge managements notes, Lattics

Knowledge is power and at this time; Personal knowledge is your superpower.

There are endless choice of available tools to support your journey in ‘managing your personal knowledge’ and as a tech & personal productivity enthusiast, I am always looking at the horizon of this space for new apps and tools.

Writing is like meditation for me, and a big part of my workflow are my note-taking apps. I prefer to collect all the ideas and thoughts throughout my day and once in a while I sit down with this collection of thoughts for review. There will be ideas to drop and to expand on and this quick snippets are the foundation stones of my long-form writing.

Collecting ideas on the go is just one part of the story while expanding on, thinking and writing about it is where a good note-taking app or system is a minimum requirement.

Lattics — is the latest entrant in my workflow.

Why? I had gone thru the shining new toy syndrome myself and after jumping from apps to apps, believing that this app is the ‘solution, realization came the hard way. But as we all know ‘Experience is the best teacher’ and my personal experience thought me to believe in the process, the system or workflow whatever we call and you need to build your own knowledge system, no one else can do it for you.

So nowadays, whenever I came across a rising star on the ‘productivity space’, I review it for my personal use and also share my early impression for others to review. But my commitment with my so-called workflow do not change.

This might not be the case with Lattics.

Here’s my top reasons for considering Lattics in my workflow:

1. Lattics is an ‘exclusive writing app’

I write, not just take notes and this was not realized until I met Lattics. Collecting notes, capturing ideas and meeting notes are different from writing in your own words. To build on your idea, without any distraction and context switching is the bare minimum and best scenario for any writer and Lattics offers just that, no more and no less.

For me, Lattics is an additional tool in my workflow of following apps:

1. Note-taking — Reflect
2. Task Management — Todoist
3. Project & Knowledge Management — Coda
4. Calendar or Planner — Routine
5. Writing app — Lattics

2. The simplicity of the connected notes app

as Lattics says; it is a brain-like knowledge management notes system. You can use it’s core idea of ‘Cards’ to collect and connect idea, build and use it. Simple yet powerful feature for any writer, student or researcher. Cards can become your digital library of messy and fragmented thoughts and idea you collected over period of time and the same can be brought into light to be your next blog post, a short story or a novel. Lattics uses @ syntax to create or link a card.

Cards or content cited can be used in multiple locations and any change in the content cited or card will automatically updated in all the locations. A great way to keep building your cards, content ideas.

How that works? An example:

Personal knowledge is your superpower — I can insert only link or title

Or

Entire card

Personal knowledge is your superpower

Polymath — is not a myth and I love the idea of having interest in multiple subjects. It is not easy to keep working on all the area of interest simultaneously but with the help of right digital tools we can keep building our knowledge of interests on that subject.

For example;

I love writing and within the space of writing, I enjoy poetry, short stories, a novel and technical writings all at the same time.

One of the best use case of Cards for creators is the Aerial View, which offers ease of overview and revising the texts.

Inside the Aerial View; you can drag the arrow between the links and establish the relations, set color, line type and have option of view only title, Memo or entire card. Super useful for the character building of my first novel.

3. Interface for knowledge and notes management

Lattics follows simple hierarchy of Projects-Article-Cards, for example; Project can be your next novel or different writing projects. Articles can be used for writing and organizing body texts and Cards can be used for any quote, idea or inspiration.

For instance: A Novel about a successful businessman renounce his social life and returning back is the idea I am living with for so many years now. I can build character sketches in cards.

Here’s: S. Anand

Character theme:

a middle aged monk — late fifty years old, successful businessman with family of 2 children and beautiful wife — renounce the social life 10–11 years before and moved to Himalaya for seeking self realization and staying in minimalist wooden cabin near to Kedarnath.

With Lattics, all related extended information is available at your fingertips, tags, card info, links etc and it can be accessed easily from the right side bar.

Not only this, all the required support system for knowledge workers like us is made available in the same layer of the interface. you can compare the article side by side just by a click, word count, focused mode, style template, access to all cards, graphs with mind map, plot view and aerial view options, export options PDF, Markdown, Word, Text & Image etc.

The whole experience of working inside Lattics is designed and build keeping ‘creators, knowledge workers’ in mind and execution of the design is the proof that ‘getting into the flow of writing’ is easy once you have access to all your extended information available.

4. Lean learning curve and all the universal commands

This one is the best for people like me, I started exploring and reading about tools and apps that supports one’s personal productivity and out of sheer curiosity started writing down my experience about the same. Based on my experience and impression of more than 50 apps, I realized that I prefer the apps which offers simplicity, a clean UI and UX, security and lean learning curve.

Exploring apps and tools is one thing but if you have to give it a serious try, you need to invest your time and energy inside the system. That might not be the best case when you have to climb the stiff learning curve of the exclusive app. I myself has faced the experience of investing too much of time in organizing, learning and working on aesthetics of my notes app instead of actually working on my ideas and content.

Lattics fits in my workflow of Lean Learning Curve:

• it offers clean, minimal UI
• markdown syntax
• universal slash commands
• with all the relevant options of Header, to-do, image, table, card, citation etc.
• focused, distraction free writing experience
• multi-column layout
• drag and drop functionality
• word count and statistics
• access to extended information like tags, cards and links
• export options.

5. Complete offline support with backup

As Lattics shares on their web; A person’s knowledge base is one of his most private dataset

I can not agree more on this, the approach to offer ‘Offline First’ is something which caught my attention as we are moving towards ‘everything online, all the time’. There is a great risk of losing your knowledge online where as with Lattics there is no need to sign up or register and all your content will be saved on your computers and will not be uploaded on any servers or networks. Super safe.

This scenario not only safeguard our long-term invested ‘knowledge’ but also helps us in focusing and working with our notes without ‘all the online notifications and distractions’

In a nutshell,

Lattics is build for Creators, Knowledge workers, Researcher and Students with the core idea of simplicity, connected notes and knowledge management, simplified zettelkasten with cards, tags and links, markdown syntax, complete offline support and security. A Perfect tool for your PKM.

Lattics is available for Mac OS and Windows.

Most of Lattics features are free which makes it the most viable, zero cost notes app for normal users and Lattics Pro is at a price of US$ 3.99 paid monthly and US$ 20.99 paid annually.

Within a space of note-taking and knowledge management, Lattics offers a unique approach to writers, researchers and students. Give it a try and experience — Lattics.

Thanks for reading.

Keep reading, keep sharing.

Astu.