AFFiNE

What AFFiNE is

Most note-taking apps force you to choose: either you write text in a document, or you drag boxes and arrows on a whiteboard. AFFiNE lets you do both in the same file. You write the business idea as ordinary text, click over to Edgeless mode, and there the same text sits as a card on an endless surface where you can draw around it, add sticky notes and draw lines between things.

For a company, there are mainly two modes that get used. One is planning for a trade fair or a launch: a board with everything that needs to be done, movable. The other is the logbook, meaning the running text about what you did and why, the one you benefit from when someone asks why a decision was made, and which you yourselves forget if nobody writes it.

Install on Windows

1. Go to affine.pro and choose the download for Windows, or get the file named affine-VERSION-stable-windows-x64.exe from the project's releases page on GitHub (there is also a .nsis.exe variant, the regular .exe file is enough).
2. Double-click the file. If you get a warning from Windows about an unknown publisher, choose More information and Run anyway.
3. Start AFFiNE. The first time, a local workspace is created for you automatically.

You can also run AFFiNE entirely in the browser at app.affine.pro without installing anything. Good for testing for ten minutes before you decide.

Install on Linux Mint

Download the file that ends in .deb, for example affine-0.27.4-stable-linux-x64.deb. The version number changes over time, the rest looks the same.

1. Double-click the downloaded deb file in the File Manager.
2. Mint opens its package installer. Click Install package and enter your password.
3. Open the menu at the bottom left and search for AFFiNE.

There is also an AppImage for anyone who would rather run the program without installing it. Then you must first mark the file as executable under Properties and Permissions.

Three things to do first

1. Write a document and switch to Edgeless. The button is in the top right corner. Seeing your own text appear as a movable card is the quickest way to understand what the program is.
2. Learn the forward slash. Type / in the middle of the text and a menu opens with headings, lists, tables, images and code. Almost everything in AFFiNE is reached from there.
3. Decide where the logbook lives. Create a document called Loggbok and write the date at the top each time. Three lines a week is enough, but they must be written in the same week.

The most common trap

The workspace you get from the start is local. It sits on the computer where you installed the program and nowhere else, which means a colleague who opens AFFiNE on their own computer sees an empty workspace. Many people in the company only discover this the day before an important meeting, when someone opens the program on their own computer to fetch the logbook, sees an empty workspace, calls the person who wrote it, and learns that very computer is in a summer house in Västervik.

If you want to share, you must create an account and move the workspace to cloud mode, or run AFFiNE on your own server. The alternative is to decide that one person owns the document and exports a PDF when something needs to be shown to others. Both paths work; what does not work is assuming it syncs on its own.

Also get into the habit of exporting the workspace now and then. Under Workspace, Settings there is an export that writes the workspace to an .affine file, and that file should be stored somewhere other than on the same computer. Individual documents can also be exported separately as HTML or Markdown.