Transpose: A structured alternative to Evernote
transpose.com
transpose.com
At the moment it's keyboard-driven, desktop-only. But everything you need to know is on the screen, and it is very efficient for note-taking, brainstorming, making lists of lists, everything interlinkable, and lets you store either lists of blurbs or as mapped to reality: ie, entities that have attributes like an object model built on the fly by virtue of just using the system. There's a mailing list ready for use.
Again, I meant to have the web site better updated with the current status, but the INSTALLING in github is accurate, the tools works well and has good data integrity and high efficiency. I use it for everything now. And I'll try to post a jar within a couple of weeks. I'm just really slow right now.
I think the possibilities with the concepts are very big, and it's a working foundation.
I think the really difficult problems for that project will probably be importing data into the model (i.e. semantic analysis of content) and scaling the model to a great enough extent for the real benefits of using a semantic structure to appear. The problem of defining a networked object model is arguably already solved, but I don't think there are any solutions that could scale to the extreme number of concepts and connections that such a system would require.
I also have to say, that site really made me want to use Smalltalk as a PIM for some reason.
I.e., if several people start putting our notes in a structured, computable model, and we collaborate, then we have all our notes in a possibly single place. That could become a community of practice. That's a step toward having all useful info on that topic, in a single, extremely useful model. Etc.
(At a minimum, I get to use it. :) If there are other effective Free systems for this, I've missed them but am interested.
Sadly I know the price of the Prime membership before I know what the free tier or Prime membership even get me productwise.
If this isn't vaporware, I hope the founders see this comment and the others in this thread and re-work the copy.
On a mac though, I still haven't found anything better for notes than VoodooPad. Too bad it seems to be languishing with few updates.
Cross-commenting as the other's right at the bottom of the page, but yes, a user friendly database with easy custom schemas is something I feel there's a great need for.
Perhaps I work differently, but 50+% of my notes in Evernote would be better as structured data, so I can make better use of their contents, both in my life and cross-referenced in other notes. E.g. I record foods I like, places I've eaten (my private TripAdvisor) and structuring that data would be really useful for plotting on a map, making lists and the rest.
Are there native clients? The screenshots appear to show a web interface.
Evernote's clients are a selling point for me personally.
Otherwise the idea is good. I mean, Lotus built a big business on top of the same idea.
The idea behind Transpose is the lack of options between something as simple and ubiquitous as note taking apps like Evernote and fully fledged database solutions like FileMaker and Access.
What we found out from our research is the a lot of use cases and critical applications should have been built on a database if it was feasible, affordable, cloud based and anyone can build without the need of hiring a software house or even dedicating an enterprise IT department to build something from scratch. People have been tracking orders, leads, assets and even critical project planning on various apps including even Evernote which is not designed for those use cases.
With Transpose we are also tackling the growing epidemic of having a dozen of different apps all stitched together somehow duplicating the data across and demanding the team to learn and use each one of them just to visualize information differently; like Trello on boards, spreadsheets in table form, notes just for ease and cross platform functionality. We shooting high aiming to disrupt and fix that as well. If the data is structured and we extract all this extra metadata on top of that automatically so why not utilize your data and get as much value out of it?
Here is a quick intro video on Transpose https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfKeTljl5ro
We have all sort of amazing technology working seamlessly behind the scene. Text Analytics, Entity Extraction, Voice Transcription, OCR on images, Filtering by fields, sorting syncing online and offline with a native iOS app and a new Android app coming out next week. You can see your data in multiple views, plot it on Calendar, see it as an editable spreadsheet, or even on an interactive Kanban board. There are more than 20 patents in many areas technological and UI its all BY DESIGN blends in to be invisible.
I do agree though, its really hard to put what we are doing and describe it in one sentence. I love Peter Theil's talk at the Launch where he articulated EXACTLY the situation we are in now.. what category shout that FIT in? what is that like? who direct competition do we have? You can see that segment https://youtu.be/ryFB6mvy4uE?t=34m49s and Claire from our team just wrote a piece on Huffington Post about our "Peter Thiel Problem".
We grew from 0 to 100,000 users viraly with ZERO dollars in Marketing. Awesome Makers create templates to solve every single problem you can think of and then they share that template with their followers to clone a copy and they also invite collaborators (typically co-workers) to work on a shared template data set feeding new data and manipulating it.
Would love your feedback and thanks again everyone! You can also feel free to reach me directly by email (hussein@transpose.com) would love to hear from y'all!
P.S. We are re-working the homepage completely to be 100% visual to SHOW what we offer instead of just trying to ramble and try to explain it in words...
Unfortunately, this does not address the core usability issues with Evernote.
- Sync: many times, it takes too long to sync. I want something on my phone, so I will save it on Mac and then get ready to leave but it will take 10-15 minutes to sync to phone. (Even after forcing sync on both devices multiples times)
- Editor: The editor has been stagnant for too long and has lots of issues. Undo does not work reliably if you paste something from other apps, there's no Markdown support.
Also, iOS app is too bloated and generally slow. I have resorted to using Drafts as my note taking app and then saving to EN.
You mention that you have taken notes on the IOS app - I've never done that, so that might be one difference between us.
I do have a paid membership though, and I recently downgraded from Premium to the new $2.70/month "Plus" category. It will be interesting to see if there is any impact to sync speed.
This reminds me of how bad their Firefox extension was for a year or so. They introduced new version of clipper (6) for Chrome, Opera and Safari but Firefox stayed at 5.9 for almost a year. They had a long forum thread about this but took too much time! As a paying customer, I hated that and still feel that for a company with main focus on note taking and clipping, they should have been faster.