Product updates: inline videos, tag merging/importing/deleting, and more

Hello to our growing Amplenote community! We come with new gifts to offer, driven in large part by customer requests. To keep our update as short as possible, we'll jump straight into five updates since our last blog:


link1. Upload inline videos across all platforms*

Exciting times continue as this week marks the launch of videos that can be embedded within a note:



Shu's latest in the Amplenote tutorial series: how to get rid of barnacle tasks. Check it out now on Youtube, or see all tutorials he has created so far 🤩


Videos have always been dear to our hearts, as evidenced by the number of animated gifs featured in our constantly-curated Help Center. But there's a big difference between an animated gif (our only prior inline video option) and a true video. The most important difference is sound. Gifs don't have it, videos can.


We would love to see creative applications of videos within notes, so drop us your ideas on Reddit or Twitter if this is a feature you end up using? The potential to create higher quality how-to content by using video seems ripe.


Oh, and by the way, the upcoming release of Amplecap will include video capture, to notes or Rich Footnotes. 🎁


* See the help page on videos to understand the caveats of uploading videos from mobile. tl; dr it's possible, but Apple makes it so Chrome can't play iPhone videos easily


link2. Now live: Most everything you've asked to do with tags

It's generally well understood that, whether you use tags or folders to organize your notes, the naming system you devise for your hierarchical tags will change over the years. And yet, we're aware of no other note taking app that facilitates allowing tags to evolve. This leaves power users the nagging feeling that their tag hierarchy is getting "messy" as years pass.


All this helps explain why our voting item for "Need to be able to rename and reorganize tags" had ascended to the top-5 most voted. Amplenote users are a fastidious lot, and they don't want a tagging system that feels messy. Lack of order distracts from possible productivity.


You can read about all the new tagging actions at our help page dedicated to the subject. In short, you can now delete tags, merge tags, rename tags, drag tags into a new hierarchy, and delete all notes that possess a certain tag. ✨


We've also published some recommendation on naming your tag hierarchy, based on discussions with power users who apply tags voraciously.


link3. How to keep subscription momentum?

If we've been a little slow updating this blog lately, it's in part because of the numerous conversations we're engaged in across our support and email channels. It seems that two-way calendar sync in particular has resonated with note-taking productivity enthusiasts:


Amplenote subscriber growth during 2021: up 400% with three months to go. How to keep up the momentum?

Since it's a core customer value of ours to be transparent with our community, we can admit that we're not sure how to present Amplenote to a broader audience? It seems like we're delivering unique value to note takers who want to be productive. We get lots of kind emails to that effect. 😊


But getting the attention of mainstream productivity enthusiasts (people like Ali Abdaal, Thomas Frank, etc) has been tough. Is there a magazine, a writer, a Youtube personality, or some other source where you think that the users would benefit the idea execution funnel? Please drop us your ideas in the blog comments or over at reddit. 🙏


link4. Insert a note section in another note, and other smaller updates

Building upon our Double Brackets [[ syntax for Note Creation/Linking, it's now possible to use the double brackets to insert a note section into another note:


Inserting content with double bracket and equal sign ([[=)

And here is a more granular rundown of recent Amplenote improvements.


link5. What's next?

Some of what we've got in our sights for September/October/November includes:

Sharable tags. When you're working on projects with others, or when you're trying to share many notes that explore a particular topic, it is tedious to individually share each of many notes with each of many people. We will soon allow sharing at the tag level so as to permit better transmission of your related notes.

More tag-level settings. Batch-adjust Task Score for all tasks with a given tag. Set goals for how many total tasks to have present in a particular tag.

Calendar tweaks. As users continue to adopt the calendar, we find more and more opportunities to polish it into a wonderful experience across all platforms.

Community section. We're looking to create resources that allow Amplenote users to more easily talk about the ideas and tactics that have worked best to help them get stuff done.

Themes. Not everybody loves Amplenote's default blue color theme. We look forward to soon offering a variety of different feels for Amplenote.

Slightly further down the road, in Q4, we'll be looking back at our feature voting board. "Inline tags" and "Tables" both seem like goals that should be achievable in a month-or-less per task, once we have time to start them.

Plot twist

Thanks for stopping by the Amplenote blog. Did you know that the content of this "blog post" is just a plain old note, lifted from the author's Amplenote notebook? Rich footnotes, industry-leading to-do lists, and a security-first mindset make us a solid option for modern writers. Try it out yourself.