Show HN: Milanote – A notes app for creative work
milanote.com
milanote.com
Milanote has replaced my previous workflow — an entire wall of post-its, and roughly half a dozen moleskines - with pages of others tacked in between the sheets.
There's a few cool features too — my favourite being ‘view as document’. It takes series of interconnected ideas, and then serialises them into a linear narrative that can be viewed as a document. Perfect for presenting your idea to stakeholders.
I particularly like Milanote not only because it helps me to visualise my ideas, but I can ‘reflow’ and organise them in ways that helps me to make connections between ideas I never saw before. It helps me be a better creative thinker.
It's an odd decision in this age of "mobile first" and Electron-wrapped apps like Slack. Especially since it's not in beta and the only plan is a paid one.
+ it's free
+ it's a flat, text format, human-readable and editable even outside Org Mode
+ has one of the best table editors ever
+ off-line first, no cloud bullshit
+ can handle source code and images pretty well
+ awesome export options - including LaTeX, HTML and nicely formatted UTF-8 plaintext
+ infinite flexibility of Emacs
- infinite flexibility of Emacs
- not Markdown (for those who care)
- you have to do sync yourself (I do with Dropbox)
- limited support for mobile (Orgzly is OK and works w/ Dropbox sync, but very limited
functionality compared to what Org Mode in Emacs provides)I agree completely on Laverna, but I think it's the closest to what you (and I) are looking for. I wish I wasn't so lazy/busy and got the motivation to fork it and implement the changes I want (I don't care for the double panel and the white space everywhere).
That's astonishingly expensive for what it is. Microsoft OneNote is free. Even office 365 "home premium" is only $100/y and comes with a load of storage.
A company like Microsoft can afford to price its consumer software to maximize marketshare. Bootstrapped startups shouldn't bother to compete with the same approach.
Freemium applications usually have nothing between the free tier and the professional tier. I'd pay for a lot more services if there was a personal or supporter tier. For something like this, I'd pay $25 / year. That means every time I launch it, I'd be paying between ten and twenty-five cents.
Basecamp is another service that's worth about that much to me, but they don't offer a personal or family tier.
Easy, simple, no botnet.
If you replace that with owncloud then maybe no botnet.
I'm also evaluating using VSCode (it's perfect markdown preview) and this plugin for easy image pasting https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=mushan.v... .
And I was also looking into using mkdocs for serving a bunch of Markdown files in a directory to a structured webpage including search (which works great it seems).
But I'm not 100% happy... does not eliminate all of my bucket list but is a pretty independent flat file format.
You can customize it with lots of extensions to do this "creative" stuff, from drawings to mind-maps, etc.
Apps targeted at designers are usually pretty expensive. I already pay $79/month to have full access to Adobe cloud apps.
Curious how you think they'd be able to keep the servers running indefinitely at a one-time purchase price?
Edit: You made some really good UX detail choices: - Grid that snaps on releasing items - Column object (smart!) - Omitting zoom is also probably a good idea (complicates a lot of stuff in the browser: fighting with native zoom, text rendering bugs in firefox etc) - In general being very resistant against feature creep is probably a good idea (in our case, users demanded tons and tons of stuff to be added)
Although, I think this deserves a bit of recognition:
>Milanote is used by creative professionals from these companies
...very clever way to put up some fancy logos that could almost be interpreted as endorsement but isn't really endorsement more like a factual statement without any sources attached, so just enjoy the logos and move on heh.
Notes that become blogs posts, notes that are todos (need reminders, deadlines etc) and prompt an action, and notes that are supplemental to todos (a blog post content note can also be seen as supplemental to a "write a post on this" todo). Notes that are reference and need to be put somewhere it can be found (a blog/wiki?), etcetcetc.
My knee-jerk to the pricing was that it's too much. On the other hand, as a brain-storming idea-gathering space maybe I don't need more than 100 notes at a time -- once I'm done brainstorming I export and delete, I dunno.
By way of comparison, I have 1600 notes in Evernote including PDFs, images, presentations I'm working on, web-clipped articles and their contents, encrypted notes... and they're $99/year. I don't think Milanote is positioning itself as the "everything box" that Evernote is. If they are I'd love to see a roadmap to help me evaluate.
Please add an API for programmatically accessing notes and boards. I don't need the layout information necessarily, but how great to tag a note #todo and have some agent somewhere pick it up and start tracking it, or sync an entire board out as part of a build process to make a larger publication.
In terms of a roadmap, we've got pretty big plans—here are some things (including an API/integrations) that people have requested: http://www.milanote.com/poll. But obviously there are lots of things we're planning to build which aren't on that list :)
For now I use Quiver (http://happenapps.com/#quiver) which uses a documented json format simple enough for me to do anything I want with if/when I move on. It's mac-only, and development seems to have stalled, but I threw together a crude Android client for my own use.
Writing a proper Android version is currently tying for first place with a micro.blog (http://micro.blog) client for my next project.
Should you really be interested in a Linux version, Quiver's author has written up the json format: https://github.com/HappenApps/Quiver/wiki/Quiver-Data-Format. It seems simple and sane.
I also like the general notion of "Standard Notes" (https://standardnotes.org/), but can't see text-only notes becoming 'standard' in the 21st century.
Minus one on the score for not having a privacy policy. Oh, yes, there is one that the user can find by going to the support pages, searching and then getting to a privacy policy document on another subdomain. I thought it was standard practice for service providers to have a privacy related link on every single page, but seems like this service is an exception.
Additionally, this seems to be targeted at companies and "creative professionals". There's nothing in it for personal use. Just a "free" 100 note limit plan, with the next immediate one for professional use at $12 a month, which is quite steep.
We're also looking at some other pricing options at the moment to make it a bit friendlier for personal use ... stay tuned :)
Major complaint so far - it's a bit laggy on FF.
Currently I'm designing a large VR environment for a game. Without notes of what needs to go where and when, that would be going... less well.
On the other hand, I make visual art: Usually drawing and painting, but sometimes I head into sculpture. Ideas don't always come when I can actually do them - and sometimes I have to source materials and things to do an idea. Sometimes the idea isn't complete and I need to add to it before beginning, and sometimes I start yet stop part of the way through.
It simply isn't linear enough to do as you say.
I'm not really sure why it is stressful this way, though. I nearly always have something to work on that have various difficulty levels and it isn't a big deal if I don't get one or two done - some never get done at all. Of course, it depends on how many ideas you actually have. Good time management is a plus sometimes, which seems to take care of some of the stress.