Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mikescher | Hacker News Reader

Hello HN,

For the last few weeks I made my own notes client (mainly for [simplenote](https://simplenote.com/)) because the standard Electrum client felt pretty ... heavy.

Multiple backends are supported via plugins. Currently you can use it to access your notes on simplenote, Standard Note, Nectcloud/owncloud or no remote (aka local only).

I plan on adding Evernote support (only for plain, unformatted notes) and a better editor with a little bit of markdown highlighting (similiar to [qownnotes](http://www.qownnotes.org))

Tell me what you think and if you have ideas/criticism :D

View on HN

You might want to indicate somewhere that this is for Windows only. I downloaded the source on my Linux machine and took a while figuring out that it's a MS Visual Studio project.

Hmm good point, I will add it to the landing page

Ran into same issue. Noted you put (Windows) on the download button, just assumed Linux had to be built from source.

I think you could add a UI project using Xamarin without much trouble and make the whole thing cross-platform with Linux, Mac and potentially Android/iOS support. From what I've seen the WPF-specific code is restricted to the AlephNote.App project in the WPF namespace. It should not be difficult to reuse the non-WPF code in a separate UI project.

I've been dying for an open-source replacement for Evernote and I've been looking for an opportunity to learn Xamarin so I'm willing to contribute this if you're interested.

That sounds - actually - pretty interesting.

But isn't Xamarin.Forms only for mobile platforms? I can't find any information about building desktop apps with it (but also my only experience with Xamarin is currently MonoGame).

Yes you're right, Xamarin Forms seems to be targeted at Windows/iOS/Android portability with a common XAML codebase. For cross-platform desktop apps the best choice seems to be something like [Gtk#](http://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/gtksharp/] But I think the same principles would apply: the UI projects would utilize the non-platform specific code in AlephNote.App and the plugin framework etc. It would probably be necessary to have a separate Mobile UI project anyway, but it still would reuse a lot of the existing C# code.

I'm totally a beginner with Xamarin and Gtk# but I'd be willing to give this a shot. I really like how multiple backends are supported via plugins in AlephNote.

I created an issue [0] for this. I'm trying to find time today to organize the project structure for this, so that it shouldn't be too hard to add other UI frontends.

You are more than welcome to contribute, especially because I'm also completely unexperienced with GTK# :)

[0] https://github.com/Mikescher/AlephNote/issues/1

How many notes have you tested this with?

Similar apps choke pretty hard on large collections of notes (1,000+)

Wow, 1000+ notes o.O

My max. test case is around 100 notes. I honestly don't know how that many notes would perform, because all notes are always loaded.

If there is demand I could look into only lazy loading the actual note content and probabl other tweaks for big collections.

As an example, I use these apps for daily journaling, so I'll generate at least 365 notes a year. In practice, it's quite a few more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com