Yada — Never Rewrite Anything Again
Have you ever wanted a platform to brainstorm, iterate and present all your ideas in one place? Whether you’re writing a story, taking notes, developing software, or refining a recipe, you rely on an iterative process. As humans we rarely get things right on the first try. We often use cluster thinking where an idea’s core concepts, explanation, and presentation are all being iterated on concurrently. Unfortunately, the writing tools we use today do not facilitate this way of thinking and limit our creative potentials.
To fix this, we built Yada, a platform for document creation and dynamic presentation. Yada enables you to start writing a document and, at any point, define “views” for it (such as a slide show). Then any changes to the source document will automatically propagate to all views. This enables you to iterate on the content and its presentation in a natural manner without ever having to repeat yourself.
Yada presents itself as a text (Markdown) editor where individual lines (which we refer to as “blocks”) can be tagged. These blocks are used to define the content inside of a view. Now any modifications to the content in the tagged blocks will automatically make their way to related views.
Supported views include flash-cards, slideshows, and text documents, which can be used for various purposes such as studying, presentations, project planning, and more. In addition to view generation, tags provide a novel way to search text, which makes knowledge navigation and organization a lot easier.
The other document editors and note-taking apps, such as Google Docs and Notion, do not offer the same feature set. The paradigm of a single source of truth document being used to generate and update views with ease is unique to Yada. We believe that the ability to tag blocks within a knowledge base and use them in other documents is a novel idea that takes advantage of the way humans normally think and create.
Check out Yada at yada.dev and share it with your friends! We hope you enjoy using this tool and would love to get your feedback on this post or at yada.bugs@gmail.com.
Yada was built and is maintained by 4 friends studying Software Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Built with ❤️ from 🇨🇦!
