aen Pro it's a brand new visual notetaking application which sort of combines notion and
miror well that's at least how they're marketing it and in today's video we're going to overview
what it does how it works and whether it's worth your time to check out as a note-taking experience
welcome everyone my name is Franchesco if you're new here to the keep productive YouTube channel
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productivity apps everything will be linked below so if you need anything including the app that we
review today find it there so this is alen pro and first of all I thought it was an Italian company
aen I thought it was I genuinely was like okay this is um this is an Italian company it's got
to be but it's actually Japanese based company so it couldn't be farther from the Italy um and
you can see here um it's trying to combine the likes of writing drawing and planning with AI
and um it's trying to be part of two markets um the team market and the individual Market um and
it's got quite a lot of stuff going on with it and they've taled themselves this notion with
Miro which I think it's actually craft with Miro which is a document space application combining
with miror which is a whiteboarding application and I actually chatted with the team probably
about two months ago he went through the product with me I'd rarely do this but for an application
like this I was so curious about what was behind the motivation behind the company because it's a
very different concept um and I wanted to sort of dig a bit deeper and one thing I was very
impressed by was how they did whiteboard so we'll dive into that in a moment moment so it
is offline open source local which is good and it is available for teams as well this is what
it looks like it's available on Mac and there are sort of three features I want to talk about
documents or pages whiteboards and the journaling which I'll talk about near at the end so here is
how you create a new page and okay what's this I can scrubble between two views one is called
edgelist mode and one is called page mode now if I for for example wanted to create a note I
could go ahead and start typing the regular stuff a note and I can press SL command to
find any of the relevant stuff like content media databases and actions and things like that styling
multimedia things you'd expect to be inside for an application um and the one thing I can do is
add databases I want to show you this first because they call it notion versus notion and
mirror but I call it craft versus mirror and the main reason is because whilst the databases they
have are functional they're nowhere near the level of notion I can understand why they did obviously
bring it together because of the alert of the way it looks in this application but this is their
table View and very simply I can add an item can change the title I can change the status change
the column type to anything from progression all the way to multi select and I can create
them and I can add new columns I could add a new record and I could use some basic um properties
filters grouping and I believe they have sorting too I don't think they have sorting I'm not sure
whe they have sorting yes they do do they I don't think they do have sorting so again what you're
getting here is is is a much much much lighter version of databases in notion and I'm not going
to sort of bore you with the databases too much because it's I don't think it's the real Source
inside of um a them Pro and it's uh can band view is also available so I can move stuff across and
what you'd expect with a can band view you've got some of the basic properties filters grouping and
you can add an additional view as well I can rename this a board so you can start to get
the idea of how it works it's it's very simple in terms of its nature which is good something that
you want maybe to start interacting with but this is where it gets a bit more magical and this is
where I was more impressed the page the page view can turn into Edge mode edgeless mode and if I go
up here I can see there that my page is already turning into a edgeless mode experience now the
real magic is where I can go ahead and add a block in maybe even uh you know type like hello and I'm
just keeping this as as a basic demonstration so this is showing only in edus so if I go over to
my page it's not showing there because you can choose where it shows in both or in page only or
in edgeless only and this is really nice because it separates the visual functionality so that was
one of the things for me that really impressed me from day one because they've seemed to have got
the conceptualization of between the difference between whiteboard and Pages it could be a real
mess if it was the other way around now the other thing that I liked is for example I'm just doing
this as demonstration purposes just cheuck a couple of shapes in there maybe some text um
here oh I can use the pen there we go blah blah blah blah blah um and throw an image in there of
this smudge mark on a tablet oh I've still got the pen activated um oh I still got the pen activated
stop pen I think I think I've still got the pen activated oh there I've got to press the select um
let me get rid of a few of these lines uh because it's going to ruin my demonstration and finally
I'm going to Chuck an image of a cat in which you can do to demonstrate stuff um the cat should be
appearing some some somewhere did I press it I didn't press it oh I did it just took a little
bit of a lag so let's say I'm doing a presentation about cats and what they did to this this smudge
mark there there's going to be there's going to be a point to all of this I promise I was most
impressed by this feature drag over it and you're like okay this is grouping Franchesco it's not
you can group it framing framing is probably the most powerful feature sort of like a screenshot
and if I press insert into page it will link it so if I go back over here scroll down bam
really neat visualization tool and the reason why that's so powerful is for two reasons because in
page demonstrations are hard to do you're always adding screenshots you're always add trying to
add context visually and having those two in there is so nice so you can have these screenshot type
things and the second thing is if I hypothetically made a second one with this element and um I'm
just really just trying to demonstrate quite fast if I demonstrate frame two and assert into page
yes I've got it there I can go back to it if I want to I can actually um I can actually have it
so that I can choose the framing section Etc the real magic is where I can turn into a presentation
so if I go out of um make it small of view I can have a presentation here I can um hide the there
we go can make it look a little bit neater and this way I'm like right I'm in a presentation
mode let me just sorry I screwed up again um there we go I can scrubble through and be like
whoo here's my presentation and I'm doing little effort but I'm quickly converting let me know in
the comments if this available feature in Miro cuz I've missed that big time um but I love that I
love that ability to quickly S A scrubble between stuff and I can still zoom out outside a page and
still go into the content and I can I can go ahead and modify information here which is really nice
so this is one of the things that I've most liked about it you do get a way to um for example I can
bring in some to-dos and things like that um I can also add in things like brainstorming like
the SWAT analysis which I should have remembered what it is strength weakness opportunities and
threats did go to business school I promise um and oh there I've I've just created a giant shape um
but you can start to see um how helpful this is in terms of being to visualize stuff some of the
stuff they didn't get quite right like I feel like some of the templates are Half Baked but
I think they they they wanted to get this out fairly fast um you can scrubble through more of
these and sort of visualize some of the other ones you can use an eraser text images you can
use connections between things um and if I wanted to uh like hypothetically I could frame this one
and I because I didn't I didn't press um insert into page if I go over to the note there we go I
got a SWAT analysis nice and easy in here and I can even go into the the page straight away some
of the stuff is a little bit difficult I feel like there's some loose bugs around but largely
I've been impressed with how they've been able to visualize that that's one of the most difficult
things I think in whiteboard and and that space so you can view stuff and P Pages collections
which is basically folders and in settings you can change some of the other stuff there is some
pricing plans um am I on Pro I don't know whether I'm on Pro I could be on Pro I normally asked for
Pro in my account to be able to get things set up but this is the pricing for pro $7.99 um but with
the zero pricing with the zero per month pricing it's unlimited login limited uh local you can have
a number of members three members uh per workspace which is pretty good so that's pretty good and you
can collaborate with other people as the sort of real Digger they've also got the ability to
use this as your um your Journal as well which is really nice so I could for example start tallying
away some thoughts and notes and whenever I'm on a page I can always see what's been created today or
what's been updated today which is a real neat one so overall I am very impressed by this application
primarily because it does a few things differently those are open source local offline secure and the
Whiteboard abilities those are the most important things that separate from other applications it's
no notion it's maybe even no craft but I feel like it's craft with Miro is probably the closest
comparison now if you're curious at whether this application is right for you there are a bunch of
these visual note Takens popping up everywhere um most recently and most interestingly craft
is looking to add whiteboards I believe from a couple of tweets I saw so at the same time these
uh applications these notetaking applications are realizing they need this visual canvas element to
be able to enhance it and I think that's rapidly coming um true now I have been playing around with
this quite a while but actually they had a product hunt released today um I naturally um saw it and I
was like I probably need to get to this one um but um they are seemingly out in the wild now
with this application so um it's really nice the onboarding is super lovely if you haven't
tried it yet um not saying that's the reason to get this application but very interesting to say
the least so folks I hoped that you did enjoy this feature if you uh are new here to the channel do
subscribe if you want to find productiv detals you know where to go and finally I will see you
in a future video if you're hunting for more productivity tools so thank you very much and
cheerio