Comment by EduardMe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EduardMe | Hacker News Reader

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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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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