Show HN: Kobble – Notes app that saves directly to GitHub
kobble.io
kobble.io
If I open the Gist on https://gist.github.com/ then go to the original gist at 'kobble-git/channel-groups.json' I can navigate to all the forks and see data for other users.
https://gist.github.com/kobble-git/87ea625d421177f9e9307c6ce...
And each fork is a link to a secret gist.
Everyone - revoke access to the app and manually delete all the gists it created in your account.
To view anyone's notes, all you have to do is visit https://gist.github.com/kobble-git/87ea625d421177f9e9307c6ce..., click anyone's "View fork", then follow the trail of gist links in the JSON.
This is not users misunderstanding how gists work.
Furthermore, your clarification: "Currently, Kobble stores all user data in secret GitHub Gists, under your account. Secret gists are not private." does not help because it does not explicitly state the fact that notes will be readable by anyone on the internet.
One way is as a content sharing platform. Gists are great for this purpose, because as you have noted, the discovery mechanisms are largely built into GitHub. Our use of gists for this purpose was entirely intentional. On top of that, we have built a flexible data model (similar to YouTube) for organizing and sharing the content. We are attempting to build an open content sharing platform where users have control over the data.
For note taking, obviously you want private access. We will have support for private repos very shortly. This was stated in the intros, and we have improved the wording to make it clearer.
Hope this helps.
What? I find that highly unlikely. In what way do I not "own" the texts I write in–for example–Apple's Notes.app?
And what is even meant by "own"? Even for something like Facebook, I'm pretty sure that I still own the copyright for texts I write in their app.
If you think that is ok, you're insane.
You really don't see that the above is an oxymoron?
reality is, github is a website, kobble is a website, there's no real difference in "owning" other than what those websites grant us in their Terms and Conditions.
weird.
The design is neat (I generally like dark themes) although the fading animations got a bit annoying after a few minutes using it. Some of the dialogs could do with supporting common shortcuts (e.g. enter to create a new track, escape to close the dialogs). Sometimes I managed to click outside of the presentation view without realising, and then left/right arrow keys stopped working. Sometimes I wasn't sure where to find certain functions (e.g. I looked for "Edit" on a presentation item on the context menu, but then realised I had to click it and then click the pencil icon). I couldn't get the Share functionality to work, and wasn't sure why it was in its own context menu with no other items.
I'm not sure I understand the purpose of the tracks/channels distinction. I can understand creating a project to store presentations (items) in, but why is there another level in Kobble?
Channels are for organizing tracks. Everything in Kobble can be shared. So say you make a track for some project and want to share it. Another user can add your track to a channel to follow it.
It's similar to sharing in YouTube or Spotify, except that instead of grouping videos or songs in channels, you're grouping tracks.
I love Quiver, but it no longer cuts it since I've migrated to Linux.
The landing page has side arrows? Is this meant to be a Powerpoint slides deck type app?
Why isn't it just a 1 page vertical scroll to showcase the 'notes app'? Or do all the pages in notes have to be a click page arrow?
edit: I looked around a little more (never logged in) but all I ever saw was the slides. I am still not sure if that's the only mode, or is there another preview showing other modes/styles of notes? As boring as it may be, I'd love to see some generic notes examples: grocery list, todo, programmer's notes, school notes, lorem ipsums, or anything more representative of a real world notes and less of just listed features.
If you log in (with GitHub), you'll see the rest of the UI.
If it's hosted on Github's servers, you don't really "own" it. Or at least you don't have sole proprietorship of your data.
* My summer project (2016):
http://public.docs.xstatic.site
* The pitch goes something like this:
<xstatic>| Docs is a simple, fast and easy to use, web based document editor.
It generates static (but editable) HTML files that can than be easily shared and printed. Like Google Docs inside an AWS S3 bucket.
* More info in this document:
http://docs.xstatic.site/markdown_db86ac26-f232-4400-a544-d5...
More seriously - Why so?
I think that:
1. It's on topic.
2. It's a project not a product. I ain't sellin anything.
3. There is no thunder to steal. Usually, more comments, more votes, more rain for the show.
4. Shameless has to be shameless.
5. It adds to the discussion. See, it just did...
There is no competition.
P.S - I've reread this: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html just to make sure I wasn't in the wrong.
Maybe you could have an "unsorted" channel by default, and then split out the context dropdown into little icons? Simplify the work flow to be: 1. Click "new markdown" button, 2. Write some markdown. 3. Save.
If you defer asking the user to name a file up front, you can auto generate a filename based on the contents of the document (like parse 1st line for # My Title -> my-title.md). The only sacrifice you pay is making them click "save" the first time; but IMO that is a lot less friction than having to name documents before I even start writing. Plus even if your parsing fails - you're no worse off than where you started by asking the user for a filename.
a beautiful notes app (to me) would be one where you start with writing a note
Kobble can be used for much more than just note taking. It's meant to share meaningful content with other users. A track is like a project, and channels make it easy to share them.
The fact that you need to explain it is a good indicator that it's unnecessarily complex.
[quiver]: http://happenapps.com/#quiver
Also, check out http://standardnotes.org/
You've got a good start to something; take two steps back, consume and digest the feedback you're getting, then use it to better your approach.
First make a notes app that people love. This will be harder than you think. Once you've done that and have enthusiastic users it will be much easier to move into other areas.
Hasn't this been the Evernote Recipe For Disaster?
Better to slightly misuse/expand an existing know term like projects or notebooks to cover more than it does now, than to invent a new term that covers all the meanings that apply, but whose meaning is initially unfamiliar to people.
E.g. "my way is da best, you should do WHAT I SAY"
Though the one I listed is the first lemma.
Also, it's inconsistent. Youtube organizes channels because it is a video app and people coming from tv immediately understand. Spotify uses tracks because it is a music app and the term track has been synonomous with song since probably the first record player.
Its a good try, but just mashing up two concepts into one causes confusion
I don't manage projects with a notes app. I don't create tracks with a notes app. I don't create channels with a notes app. I don't create playlists with a notes app.
It's pretty and functional; play to your strengths instead of trying to create new brand vernacular.
model it after something in the real world before you appropriate words from another paradigm
Spotify has Playlists and Songs. Both are domain-related concepts (the domain being music).
YouTube has Videos, Playlists, and Channels, again all domain-related concepts, referring to historical domain terminology (Channel as in "your private TV channel", where you create content for others to view).
So both services use terms apt to their use.
Channels and Tracks are not concepts/terms related to note taking. Thus, the analogy to YouTube's and Spotify's use of their own terms is broken.
We have the concept of 'tags' in our app, which are used by our users to delineate anything from company departments, social groups, locations, age bands etc. - basically anything they see fit. It saves us creating a mess of drop downs to try and cater for all edge cases, and they feel the freedom to think of them however they like.
I first want to write -- directly, as a thought/task/etc comes to me, and only later to organize. And much later I'd care to share my note (if at all).
I'm sorry. I just don't know what this means. Can you show some examples?
EDIT: I tried it. Tried adding a URL, but just got errors. Filenames worked though. Now how do I share it with my mom? Does she need a github account to look at it? I don't immediately see the use of this. You may need to explain it better.
You can see the confusion, given that you described it as a "notes app" in your submission title.
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2016/10/24/distrusting-new...
https://security.googleblog.com/2016/10/distrusting-wosign-a...
Kobble is hosted on Firebase.
Anyone have a suggestion for a better cert I could get? Starcom was so nice and simple but seems like it's causing issues for users now that Mozilla and Google are going to distrust the cert.
Tracks are associated with audio and channels with video. This isn't something that should be unique or creative. The notebook/note paradigm works exceedingly well becayse everyone intuitively understands it. I spent two minutes before I just quit. its too bad, the apo seemed nice
Even before i saw the note about the security issues i wouldn't click on try because why should i invest my time in trying it. I have no clue what it does beyond saving markdown files to github. I've got plenty of markdown apps that I like quite a bit, and uploading my notes to github is not something i've been going "damn i wish i had an app that would do that" because anyone who knows about github already knows how to commit their files and push them up...
doing it in gists is even worse (ignoring security aspects) because at least with my manually managed notes their organized in folders, browsable, greppable, etc.
One of Kobble's primary uses is as an open content sharing platform. GitHub gists were chosen for this purpose intentionally, because the discovery mechanisms are built into GitHub. On top of that, we have built a flexible data model (similar to YouTube) for organizing and sharing the content.
Private repos (which are coming shortly) address the other use case where you want to keep data private. We have clarified this in the intros.
The user interface is, indeed, beautiful. But that's not enough to make me use it.
Notes on my iPhone can't be stored in a hierarchy of subfolders. In order to do that, I made my own notes app in PHP, but it's pretty awful. I plan to port it to JS+Github, but I have other priorities right now.
Is it possible to only commit changes to a file using git, instead of re-uploading the whole file? I wish there was an easy way to append to a file without a download-append-upload process. Please teach me if you know how to do this in git!
I have both apps because iWrite is my reach-for text box while 1Write opens to a Dropbox folder that has a semi-organized idea box (a "personal wiki" of sorts, but informally so).
Why do I want this instead? Versioning? I've thought of moving my ersatz "personal wiki" to Github for that, but I don't wish to make it visible to the world.
I got a proof of concept working but was too lazy to integrate with GitHub and canned it.
Working on something more fun now and learning vue.js.
What versions are you working on?
What do I generally need to use this?
A web browser? Git? Github? A Markdown Linux editor?
I would love some further explanation!