Show HN: NotePlan 3 – Native (Mac/iOS) note-taking based on local Markdown files | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: NotePlan 3 – Native (Mac/iOS) note-taking based on local Markdown files

noteplan.co

56 pointsEduardMe59 comments

I _really_ like the idea but stopped short once I saw the IAP subscriptions.

I get why subscriptions are good for developers. But I can't subscribe to everything, and would prefer a single-shot purchase (even if I were to end up upgrading the year after, I would have the option not to).

Other than that, the app seems to be _exactly_ what I need when compared to, say, Agenda (which I already own and use). So, in a nutshell, I'd likely switch if the pricing were different solely for the plain text storage.

Since the developer is here I'd like them to know that, because of subscription fatigue, this is a dealbreaker for me too. (This isn't a critique of the creator or their choice, of course — I want them to be successful!)

I thought about it, but one-time payments always have this problem that you need to come up with upgrades to keep the bills paid. And upgrades are in many aspects bad for users and for creators. For upgrades you need to 'save up' features and you need to come up with flashy ones, because bug fixes and improvements are not an incentive to upgrade for many...

Others have face the same problem and solved it by "feature unlocks", i.e. Working Copy (https://workingcopyapp.com/), which sells 1 year "pro" unlocks, and all features released during that year remains active even if you don't renew your pro unlock.

It's not a subscription, as the software will continue to work just fine when the pro unlock expires, but you don't get new features.

This of course puts pressure on the developer to keep coming up with new features, but then again that's the developers job.

I would be willing to pay the $60, for the app, no subscription. If the app works well, it is mostly bug free, and it runs on the current OS, there is no need to come up with any flashy features. As long as it is kept up to date to continue to run.

If a new version comes each year, I shall buy it as well. I have done that with VMWare Workstation, and Arqbackup, to mention a couple.

Panic has a really nice approach with their Nova app. They keep updating it all the time; you pay once and get free updates for a year. You can choose at checkout time to stay updated for 50% of new-purchase price each year, or you can choose to pay for a new year of updates later on, when/if you need/want it. https://library.panic.com/nova/purchase-faq/

Do they sell it through the AppStore? Probably not.

I think Agenda App and Working Copy do sell through the App Store with the 1 year of features. They don’t do the discount of course like Panic with Nova is doing which indeed isn’t possible in the App Store.

Doesn’t work with any current App Store unfortunately.

Joining the choir. If it's subscription based i'm out.

Edit: To clarify, if it was a single purchase i'd buy it in a heartbeat. It looks exactly like what i need and would actually use, but subscriptions on everything is putting me off. If it's not a media platform (news, netflix, etc), i'm not subscribing to anything, and even those platforms are getting too diversified.

Subscriptions on software grants me (personally) exactly zero advantages over a single purchase that fullfils a purpose, and no amount of "spin" from developers will convince me otherwise.

I tried one-time payments with NotePlan 2, it's not a business model that enables you to grow nor plan anything in advance. That's neither good for the developer, nor the user. Except you don't want any updates, no bug fixes, no improvements, no new features.

IF you can't grow with one-time payments, then you will definitly will fail with subscriptions. Subscription are a high risk for users, so they most will avoid it, which is already shown here. This will mean that while the income may be more stable, the overall sum is lower, because there are less users, less advertisment, less community.

> Except you don't want any updates, no bug fixes, no improvements, no new features.

As A user I care for stability first, everything else comes after. But with subscriptions I don't know anything about what will be next year, or the year after. Updates are a promise, but no guarante. More likely with a stable income the developer has no stress to push out updates and get's lazy at the point. At which point the user is trapped in with a software which he needs to pay for, without getting any aditional benefit for it.

It would be different if the app offers a service which justifies subscriptions, like a cloud-service which creates cost. But it seems this app is classical desktop app. No benefit after first install, no change either. Updates might be worthful, or more likely they will be not.

Usage alone justifies no fee. Updates are a separate part which should call for separate fees. Everything else is just harmful. Jetbrains, the IDE-developer got this right with their subscription-system (after vocal compains). You pay for the software once and can pay regular again to receive updates. Without the fee, you will stay on the version that you got with the last payment. Additionally payments shrink over time, so good customers get some additional benefit for staying with the company.

This is a fair solution, because the user has the safe solution that their software will not become unusable some day, while they still get a real benefit for paying the fee.

I have to disagree (obviously).

Users are not trapped in with NotePlan. If your are not satisfied with the service, you can cancel, so my incentive is to retain you on the grounds of providing good software. And NotePlan is designed in a future-proof way. Your notes are saved as plain text files, you can open them even with TextEdit.

Besides the full-time development of the app, you also get quick, direct support. Try that with most one-time payment software. I sit down and reply to emails every day for 2-3 hours.

Further, your suggested model is not possible with the AppStore. Updates go through without license checks.

> Your notes are saved as plain text files, you can open them even with TextEdit.

Plaintext is worthless if you lack the business-logic used to utilize it. Your vendor lockin is the software itself, it's abilities and the users habits and workflows building on it.

True, it's not a strong lockin, but for 99% of all new users it's the major reason to avoid your software. Which is ok, you should know your numbers best, but you should be also aware that this price-model does kill off your growth completly in the area of casual & random users. So I hope for your your community has enough harddie-fans who will still go with this.

> you also get quick, direct support.

How many percent of the users make even use of this? More than 1%?

> Further, your suggested model is not possible with the AppStore. Updates go through without license checks.

That's not really true, though yes, not possible as directly as described. But there are many ways to reach similar effects even with the app store.

Well, I see I can't convince you. I tried one-time payments already and don't like them as developer, nor user - it's just my opinion. Thanks for sharing your arguments, I guess we can agree that we disagree :)

same here... I get why subscriptions are a popular business model, but I can only sign up for so many services.

As soon as I saw the word subscription I regretfully lost interest.

I feel the same way.

To be clear: I understand why subscriptions work well for developers. As a consumer, I'm finding I have an enormous amount of subscriptions and it becomes harder and harder to justify an additional $1/month, $5/month, etc. for an app.

Maybe that means I'll be more selective in what I buy, which doesn't hurt. But it does lead to a "well that's a bummer" when I find a cool app I'd be willing to pay an up-front fee for, but realize it's subscription.

Right now I'm using Obsidian, which has been awesome, but it doesn't have a native UI feel to me.

A one-time payment is a nice financial boost, but it's not sustainable over time. My plan is not to build an app, make quick money and then forget about it. I'm working on this full-time, every day. It's long term and I need long-term users to grow.

Why this over Agenda? Because of the plain text? Would you prefer Agenda for other things still?

Hi HackerNews

NotePlan 3 is going live today on the App Store (Mac, iPhone, and iPad)

I have created NotePlan to be your task-manager, calendar, and note-taking app in one (Bullet Journal style). All your notes are locally saved as plain text-files and are [[linkable]] (+ backlinks).

Markdown makes the content of your notes future-proof and highly portable. Apple's CloudKit service is used to sync everything across your devices (you don't need to rely on private sync solutions).

NotePlan is a 100% native app written in Swift. This means: a beautiful, clean design, super-fast, and highly integrated into Apple's ecosystem (iOS included). It also syncs with iCloud calendar and reminders.

If you are looking for a native alternative to Obsidian and Roam, which has iOS apps, NotePlan also supports bi-directional linking and is compatible with Obsidian (change the file-extension to .md in NotePlan's preferences) and Roam (when you export your data as Markdown files).

With NotePlan, you can build your favorite productivity workflow:

- Zettelkasten ([back-]linking, folder support, notes)

- GTD (tasks are first-class citizens, create project notes and schedule)

- Bullet Journal (daily notes, re-schedule tasks, undated notes as lists).

Read a quick walkthrough here (with videos): https://noteplan.co/walkthrough

Read more about NotePlan's features here: https://noteplan.co/features

If you have questions, just ask :)

Best,

Eduard

Really cool. Does the calendar syncing go beyond iCloud?

You can add Google, Exchange and Yahoo to your iCloud calendar accounts. Or use CalDav to have more options. See "Internet Accounts" in your System Preferences.

Looks nice! I wish it would be part of the Setapp subscription :)

It’s supposed to be coming. Dev said as much in the last beat/first official release doc

That would be great! I don't see any reference to it yet

This looks awesome! I’d switch to this immediately, but there’s a couple things I’d love to confirm before downloading/paying for another app (I’ve tried nearly every MD editor on iOS!):

1. Does it support opening external folders from other iOS apps? I’ve started using Working Copy so that I can store and sync my notes in GitHub repos. I’ve been using iA Writer as my Markdown Editor (since it interops nicely with Working Copy), but I’m interested in something with better Roam/Obsidian-like features.

2. Does it have a Markdown preview? Or just the editor + navigation support? I often use a lot of Markdown tables, and so having a preview mode is pretty critical to efficiently reading the content later.

1. At the moment it's restricted to NotePlan's folder in your documents folder in "On my iPhone/iPad". This is due to the sync and having different external folders on iOS and Mac. I'm not sure how this should be handled. But I plan something around that.

2. There is no separate preview, but most of the markdown is being rendered, so you don't see it. To be specific: Headings and tasks are rendered properly without markdown characters. But tables are not supported yet.

Thanks for the quick reply! Like I mentioned, I would gladly pay the annual fee right now, since NotePlan looks _very_ close to what I’m looking for.

But I’m pretty invested in using GitHub for my notes, and so I only need an editor to be an editor, not managing/syncing my notes.

I’ll keep an eye on NotePlan in the future. Awesome job on the app and congrats on the launch!

I evaluated NotePlan on V2 I believe. I do this with every note app like this I see. NotePlan is very close to what I need/want, with the daily logging approach.

Unfortunately, NotePlan doesn't support inline PDFs as IMAGES (not links, displayed inline like a PNG). Without support for this, it's unusable to me (basically every note taking app is).

Latex symbol / equation rendering is also important, but I can live without that.

If you added that functionality, I'd be more or less happy to pay whatever you want for the app.

I love the dated notes by default + undated notes as an option!

Would love to use this but need something that works on android as well

Really like the overall look/feel, but I had to delete after a handful of dealbreaking bugs:

1. Installing on second machine led to daily note being constantly wiped while I typed

2. Could not add/modify events to calendar

3. When entering a task I added '3pm-5pm' and nothing showed on calendar (probably related to #2)

Looks great, just don't think it's ready for prime time.

Some of these have unfortunately been the fault of Apple's own iCloud drive sync problems in the past. I've noticed many apps that use it struggle to maintain consistent data across multiple devices in the case of conflicts / offline devices coming back online and having to catch up.

Edit I don't know who's downvoting but Apple has documented cases of file sync inconsistency bugs with iCloud, and I've personally lost half a dozen files over the years to iCloud bugs. https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSBeta/comments/cz4rkn/news_icloud...

I recommend to switch to CloudKit sync and check if you don't have changed the file extension in the preferences.

Any plans to implement Dropbox sync? iCloud or CloudKit is a no go for me.

Dropbox is an option already, but it's not as stable and has problems.

I changed to CloudKit and changed the extension as well to ".md". I was able to add a calendar event once or twice, then the same issue came up again where it could not add event and asked me to email support. I've deleted the app and reinstalled a few times. Anything else I can try?

I'm looking into the event creation problem. Restarting should usually help at least temporarily.

I’m a huge fan of Noteplan since Noteplan 2017 I think it was. Then got the iOS version and used Setapp’s Mac included version for V2.

I don’t have subscription fatigue yet however money is a bit tight. So I was on the fence since being native is so amazing. Seeing the latest change log mention Setapp inclusion coming was the best news for me. Can’t wait!

Loving the trial of Noteplan 3.

I used the first beta when it came out and paid for the v1!. Been watching the development for a long time now, the progress has been awesome. Congrats and great work Eduard!

Thanks! It has been a long way so far!

I've used this a ton, and it's great. I get it via Setapp, so that helps WRT subscription fatigue.

OT: I'm on the fence if I should create an app in an related field in Electron or native macOS. Anyone in a similar situation, how did/would you decide?

I have steered away from Obsidian and the like because they are not native. I tolerate and use many web apps, but the only Electron app I really enjoy using is VSCode, because it's optimized beyond belief and has a specific use case.

I want my notes apps to be native, thanks :)

I am actively looking to switch off OmniFocus and OmniOutliner for something with more open file formats, but subscriptions are a deal breaker. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Try Notable, its basically a collection of markdown files that you can tag, search and organize. I really like it.

It looks incredible! I wish I could use something similar on Windows. Congrats on the launch Eduard!

Thanks! Maybe one day as a web version.

You can try Obsidian[0] with the Calendar plugin[1].

[0]https://obsidian.md/ [1]https://github.com/liamcain/obsidian-calendar-plugin

Recently I started using Typora(https://typora.io/). It not native, but its performance is decent.

it does look very appealing, the cost of use may be a tad high, but a teams gotta pay themselves somehow I guess. have been trying to shift to Joplin for too long, it never quite works great for me, maybe this can tilt me from my free Notational Velocity world...

This looks awesome! But do you plan to add support for code blocks (not inline)?

Shit. You just reminded me of one of my biggest issues with this. No code blocks is very annoying for me. From the looks of the user base, it may not be a highly wanted feature. Would love to get it soon though assuming I go through with paying.

Amazing man, this is what I wanted Markdown files to be used for!

Thanks!

A positive blurb from Brett Terpstra is enough for me.

Nice lookin app! Using Catalyst?

Nope, its written in Swift, but optimized for Mac and iOS separately with their respective UI libraries.

Please add encryption

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