What's next?

Published: February 5, 2024

Capacities has changed a lot in the last few months! We released queries, bulk actions, extended search, and much more. We continued our effort to fix bugs and make the overall experience more joyful and simple to use.

We’re on the verge of releasing Capacities Pro. Here’s what we’ll be focusing on afterward.

Continuous effort towards simplicity and ease of use

Again, we want to stress how important simplicity and ease of use are to us. We see this as a continuous effort, and we’ll aim for it whether we are improving existing features or developing new ones. We want to offer a system that just works for most users and requires the minimum effort to set up. This also includes the following aspects:

• Better onboarding and seamless setup of your workflows: This includes the whole journey of creating and building your Studio for your Mind, so it fits your work and your way of thinking. We’ll double down on sharing ideas and use-case articles so you can pick what works for you and get as much value from Capacities as possible.
• Improvements based on user feedback: We constantly monitor our channels (feedback board, Discord, email) for pain points and friction our users have and try to continuously ship small updates and improvements to remove them. This also includes revisiting shortcuts and interactions in the app.

Improved infrastructure and performance

We made huge improvements in reliability (99,97% uptime) and performance. Nevertheless, we’ll double down on improving our infrastructure. This includes:

• Performance: Faster loading, faster updating of queries and all types of content views (objects, collections, tags, backlinks, etc.)
• Steps towards a better offline experience: You can already use Capacities offline for a train ride. With our planned infrastructure overhaul, we’ll be able to provide a much better offline experience. You’ll be able to do nearly everything offline.

Short-term exciting releases

• Simple table will be released soon, 🚀
• The mobile app will be released to everybody soon. 🚀
• A tablet app will enter a beta testing phase for all Believers. 🚀

Bringing the time dimension to the next level

Time plays an important role in our everyday work. Here’s what we have planned:

• Date property 2.0: End date and additional settings for dates
• Calendar integrations: Connect your calendars, see events in the Capacities calendar and quickly create objects prefilled with event information
• Time-based queries: Return objects based on a time range

Simple task management within Capacities

A few months back, we released Task Actions, and we’re super proud of it. Task actions allow you to delegate tasks to your task manager of choice, where you can then manage all your tasks the way you want.

Nevertheless, we’ll add task management to Capacities. It will be a simple and pragmatic solution for task management with a special object type for tasks in Capacities. It will integrate seamlessly into the interface and existing concepts. It will give you a birds-eye view of all your open tasks within your notes and several additional organizational properties that will work for most people in most scenarios.

Of course, there might also be a group of those who don’t want any task management in Capacities at all. We can only reassure this group that we don’t plan to turn Capacities into a full-blown task manager with all kinds of special use cases. We’ll keep it simple and will offer an option to deactivate it completely.

Media types 2.0

We’ll overhaul all our media objects: Images, PDFs, Audio, Tweets, and Files. We also plan to add new types.

• Video object type: Video will allow you to save YouTube videos and more as your own object types, allowing you to watch them inside Capacities and take notes.
• Email object type: You will be able to send emails to Capacities and save them as email objects. You will be able to take notes, tag them, and search their content.
• Overhaul of all existing media types: Standardized views, image zooming, better PDF rendering, audio transcription, a global audio player, and much more!
• Web clipper: The Web is the ultimate medium, so bookmarking and clipping content from any website you visit is a crucial part of working with media. We know that this is highly requested, and we are super excited to work on this.
• A note on media annotations: We decided to move media annotations further back on our roadmap as there are more important features and improvements we should add to Capacities first. This also includes reader integrations. Nevertheless, it will stay on our roadmap and will be added at some point.

Importing from other note-taking apps

We’re actively working on a bulk import system. Creating such a system is challenging since Capacities works differently from most note-taking apps. We want to enable you to import as much of your structure and information to Capacities while still enabling you to use the unique way of organizing content in Capacities.

The following are features and improvements we have concrete plans for but will most likely not be ready in the next couple of months.

Deeper AI assistant integration & smart context

AI is becoming a crucial tool that helps many people to be more productive. We will continue to integrate the AI assistant into more and more areas of the app, wherever it can add value. Eventually, we envision a system that understands all your notes on a semantic level, lets you ask questions about any of your content, and automatically surfaces semantically connected notes while you are writing.

It will remain an opt-in feature since some people do not want to use it at all.

Reader integrations and Annotations

• Reader integrations: Reading is a major activity in knowledge work, so it’s no wonder that integration with readers is such a highly requested feature as well. The challenge here is to integrate it nicely with existing concepts such as daily notes and objects, to make our infrastructure ready for integration with other API services, and to think about it with a comprehensive annotation system in mind.
• A comprehensive annotation system: It is super important to us to have clean concepts for working with annotations across different kinds of media and contexts. We think annotations should also be considered for your own content in the form of footnotes, highlights, or comments. The same applies to any snippets, highlights, or quotes coming in from the above-mentioned reader integrations.

And finally, a couple of words about what drives us and where the company is heading.

Our values

We envision Capacities as the best “thinking environment” for individuals. We want to enable people to spend more time in a calm place where we can capture, process, think, work, and create amazing things. We want to remove any friction and be a tool that is as useful as possible for you. We want to achieve this goal before we do anything else.

We remain convinced that a relentless focus on users and individuals is best guaranteed by staying an independent and sustainable company, and we are on a great track for that.

Capacities as a company

We already achieved a lot. We’re so grateful for our users and the enthusiasm, excitement, and constructive feedback from our users and the community. We both would have never expected so many positive vibes for our work. Thank you all for being part of this journey.

We’re happy to announce that we’re a sustainable and growing business now. Due to the incredible support from all Capacities Believers, we have started expanding our team.

Beth (PKMBeth) will become a full-time employee at Capacities starting in April. On top of that, we’re currently looking for a full-stack/backend developer.

Thank you all for making this possible. We’re so excited for what will come. 🚀