Show HN: Umbrella Note – Simple app for notes and journals | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Umbrella Note – Simple app for notes and journals

umbrellanote.com

71 pointsarpban37 comments

This looks nice! The homepage confused me for a while until I saw I could scroll down and not try to click on the blue open link like a donkey.

Also, probably the only feature I use with evernote as a paying user is its OCR and search engine.

But, true, the UI is not fantastic for that kind of tool.

Thanks. And i should probably remove those blue 'open' buttons. It confused a lot of people.

seconded.

I was trying to click those and checked my console for errors for roughly 1 min

That's exactly what I did, too. :)

Same here!

I would not have scrolled down if I didn't see this comment :)

I'm still looking for an app that works for notes and as a journal.

Evernote and OneNote are the big note taking apps. Hierarchical, nifty searching and tagging, easy to include all kinds of images, pdfs, etc.

Journaling (for me) focuses on easy and quick entries without distractions. OneNote can do that via Win+N, but it seems to have no good way to show me all the entries in chronological order, so I can do post-processing when I have the time.

I like Simplenote. However as soon as you edit the note comes to the top. The synching is phenomenal, but it may be a bit too Simple.

I've been using Joplin for my daily journal. I used to use evernote & tried google docs, but so far Joplin has worked well for me, it syncs with the same targets as this and more and most importantly has an android app.

I might circle back on this when I have some use case that joplin isn't meeting.

https://joplin.cozic.net/

Joplin would be great if it just had some organization of todos approaching GTD (inbox, views based on due date). I really want an app that combines my notes and todos together but anything that does that (which i've tried) treats todos as notes with a checkbox next to it.

Why? GTD has a clear separation between reference materials and tasks. Why try to combine them?

Because its very natural to mix them into your daily notes, and reasonable to have them auto-collected and managed by a note tracking system. I have a notes app that does this, but haven't had time to clean it up and publish it.

Why do you mean by “mix”? It is not very natural to use the same system for both as you end up with non actionable data (notes) clouding your todo lists...

To take an example from this weeks notes:

  - [ ] fix `params.key_` copy pasted code
  - [ ] add ui to search mls listings  
  - [ ] review pr  

  Not sure how the extra param ended up on the search API but its there. Now have to pull it out and see if any systems are relying on its existence.

Etc. I have one system to write everything out, and put todo's wherever is relevant to what i'm writing about. I then have the system parse the notes, pull out all the todo's and collect them in a single place. If your needs are less "estimate, time track" and more "here's things I need to do, and whether i've done them." it works great.

Is it possible for the user to add their own data? In other words, can I use my preferred front end (my desktop text editor) to create notes, but display them using this app? Browsers are the only sensible choice for displaying content with links, but they are a horrible way to create content.

I wasnt able to write any text? Windows version presented a plain panel tried to put my cursor there kind of wrote brief a title. clicked that edit pen and this duplicated the page. But no delete button. I got q few copues of the titled page but I wasnt able to add text to the pages?

Is this website for real? Links that don't work, text spread out from end to end, low res images, and poor product information. I'm not sure what I'm looking at or what it does just that it takes "beautiful" notes. Beauty is subjective. I just see a layout that has been used over and over again. It looks like a note album?

I'm sorry you had a bad experience. Right now, website is getting a lot of traffic. I will change those blue 'open' buttons. A lot of people confused from those.

Looks very nice!

The only small criticism would be that most people are not professional photographs, so they wouldn't even come close to having cover photos for every one of their notes.

Also, a Mac version would be nice.

Easy fix might be rasterizing the first few lines to an image or doing sentiment analysis and having pictures default for the type of emotion being exemplified.

That doesn't really fix that that's ... pretty dumb. I don't need an image telling me nothing polluting the list.

I can see the appeal from the graphic designer's stand point, but it's totally superfluous information I didn't create and that just distracts.

FYI, Downloaded the portable version but Symantec Endpoint Protection advised not opening it. Have PM'd you a screenshot on twitter

It looks like it's designed to keep adding to another note, or you have to manually delete all the text to create a new page.

Am I missing a button?

Self-hosted could be nice, though I don't see any other advantages (aesthetic or otherwise) that this offers over Bear (http://www.bear-writer.com/) - though I assume Bear only appeals to markdown users. Also would be good to have an opened note screenshot on the Umbrella site...

No mobile support? Hopefully that's coming. I'd download it in a heartbeat.

Any plan for a mac version?

Awesome, self hosted!

Electron. Just gonna leave it at that.

You know Slack, VSCode, and Spotify are all built on Electron? Better leave it at that if anything.

Sure you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but if the book has poor multi-threading, bloated mark-up, and requires everyone you share it with to download another copy of chromium...

I really get sick of people shitting on Electron just because it's the hip thing to do or whatever.

Umbrella Note is a whopping 78mb versus Evernote at 129mb. I'm not sure "another copy of Chromium" is a big deal. I'm not sure what you're talking about in regards to the bloated markup. Are you referring to HTML and CSS? I'm also not really of the opinion that a simple note taking app needs to be multithreaded. This would increase complexity in any language.

My first thought when looking at this project wasn't "oh no Electron!" My first thought was "I could actually contribute to this project," because I, like many many others, use and understand what is likely the most prevalent programming language in the world.

> I really get sick of people shitting on Electron just because it's the hip thing to do or whatever.

This sounds very much like a comment I saw where a person said that they thought most atheists were only on board a bandwagon because it was hip. How terribly offensive.

Some people genuinely dislike certain projects and have no interest in being hip when they say so.

Electron has its place as a framework. Blindly disliking every single project that uses it is silly, and I really don't mind offending anyone who does so.

To be fair there is quite a lot of space in between "supreme performance" and "supreme bloat". We can all accept some bloat because it makes life easier for developers/maintainers. But when you push the bloat border, suddenly users need 4 cores, 8GB of RAM, and several GB of disk space for a lagging block notes app.

Electron, and no macOS binaries... I wonder if this was a conscious choice or more of a "not enough time" situation (curious, not complaining)

Building binaries for macOS is painful and also requires a mac hardware itself.

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