Craft – A fresh take on documents
craft.do
craft.do
I find no occurrences of enbubbled in the ngram viewer.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=embubbled
This new word is poised to liftoff into the Twitter Sphere.
With the storage framework in recent iOS versions, maybe we'll see more apps support it? It surely can't be too much effort, but I guess the demand is limited.
One part of the issue is most aren't even aware they're breaking the law (or their regulatory obligations). You're right, there's certainly an online "bubble" around privacy/security, but equally, from the other perspective if you speak to people outside of the "startup tech" industry, they'd say the notion of randomly using third party services with unmanaged storage on personal accounts (a la iCloud) simply isn't an option for them.
I guess when you add it up - regulated financial services, legal, anyone falling under GDPR who needs to show systematic measures in place, any serious business that needs to have processes that out-live any individual staff member, systems based around "convenient personal cloud" suddenly start to become the minority.
Most serious companies won't allow company IP/data to be stored on "personal" systems (which would encompass iCloud and similar).
That was the sentiment about wxWidgets and QT in 2006. Reality is, native platforms will always be a moving target.
QT in particular has come a long way and is used today for a lot of enterprise software, but it’s not the panacea that was once envisioned.
Accessibility does matter. It’s a fundamental element of usability.
Conceptually it sits between Apple Notes and Notion. You get native apps that work offline, support fast capture, and are satisfying to use. You also get the wiki-style support and block-level editing of Notion, along with lots of other nice Notion visual flourishes (page-level icons, cover images, etc.)
One area Craft really shines, is the way that it supports interactive, sharable documents. If I have text, images, files, and want to combine them all into a single page/starting point, Craft makes this super simple.
Here are some examples (which you could design on your own):
https://www.craft.do/s/VIAC9BTTJWdCxp
https://www.craft.do/s/09fqwC5rGqErmB/b/F19F87F2-0F04-49F9-9...
https://www.craft.do/s/09fqwC5rGqErmB/b/9041969E-127C-4439-A...
I use a git repo, markdown documents, and one daemon on each device, to sync and share notes across all my devices.
I have yet to find something that beats this in portability, flexibility, note quality (from markdown to interactive jupyter notebooks), file support (all files), math support (latex formulas for markdown), graph support (mermaid), presentation support (reveal.js),...
I agree that markdown in a git repo has quite a bit of flexibility. We use git+markdown for my software team's documentation. I prefer Evernote for my personal notes because of less friction when pasting in embedded images and because of better support for editing and offline access from mobile devices (also because of inertia).
But, compared to the Evernote I remember...
- Block level editing
- Backlinks
- Publish to web
- Better support for embedding different types of content
Notion/Craft are really in a whole different league compared to Evernote.
I haven't found that same shoebox aspect to Notion, which I think is by design, because people believe it to be an antipattern. But every time I want to save something, it needs to be need in some kind of database or as a subdocument to another document, and that's just not how I think of those things.
Edit: although I guess one solution would be to create a “Shoebox” page in Notion of the “List” type.
Speed matters!
But the one thing that is missing for me to use it, is a web app. It doesn't need to be as flashy as the native apps, or it does not need feature parity. But I don't like the idea that all my notes are trapped inside my Apple devices, and that I have no way to even look through them when I am on my pc.
It's buying into a promise that your monthly payments are going toward continuous improvement of the product – a promise that might be kept, or might not – and even if it is, for how long? If updates stall out after awhile, or if the new features don't solve anything for you, it's not like you can choose to skip an upgrade. And the more you use the product, the higher the barrier to switching away. I agree, Craft looks lovely, but there's no way I'm locking myself into its business model.
I say this every time, but this is a solved problem. Developers of software like Sketch and Bitwig Studio have the right kind of subscription model, where you subscribe to updates, not access. If you don't care for the latest version, you can let your subscription lapse and keep using the last version you're licensed for. Apple has all the pieces necessary to simply gate App Store updates via subscription, but they apparently have no motivation to do so.
I just do not subscribe to many things. I don't like assigning myself future financial tasks, and I don't like dealing with recurring payments[1].
As a result, I've stopped using a bunch of things that went sub-only. There are more I'll be dropping.
And this has moved a lot of things I did on my phone elsewhere. This, combined with the fact that the Iphone X (I have no need to upgrade it) is a bit too big, and the Screentime thing tells me I use it an average of 17 minutes a day, which is going to mainly be 2FA and texting with family.
I mean, I kinda welcome this - I don't like phone dependency. And I expect I'm not the median case. But Apple's strategy has backfired with me.
[1] I realize this is not strictly rational, and I have paid more for one-time-purchase software that I used once than a sub would have been. It doesn't matter.
Subscriptions cost future hassles and distraction, as well as the money. I'm busy. No subscription, no deal :D
Still could work but isn't easy, and probably throws a wrench in the whole modern idea of continuous develop -> deploy.
An Xcode deploy target can require a minimum OS version, and when an app's minimum version increases with an update, the update is not available to users who haven't updated their device. If the device doesn't support the new OS version, the user is stuck with the last version supported on the old OS, and will not receive any future patches.
To provide a counter example, I subscribe to Ulysses. They embody “subscription for access done right” (at least so far). I liked the app enough that I bought into that promise, and so far, the developer had delivered with excellent updates over time.
What I dislike is that there’s no guarantee this will be the case.
But to be fair, this is how reputations will be built: both good and bad. Developers who build a bad reputation will not succeed in the long run. It sucks that someone had to be the guinea pig though...
So while there’s risk in buying the promise, it can pay off.
I’d still prefer the “subscribe to updates” approach.
The problem is that this isn’t the only incentive, or rather, not a well-defined version of the incentive at play.
The incentive is to simply keep the customer as a customer, over time. Multiple strategies will work, which includes being nice to the customer, but also includes lock-in strategies like data availability (proprietary format, no export), logic availability (custom proprietary language, stdlib, etc), etc
That is, Jetbrains and Oracle both run on subscription models, with very different interpretations of how to process those incentives.
Also, we’re starting to reach the point where money is an ineffective incentive.
I'm not saying the paperless office is here, but with everyone WFH and no access to the office color laser printer, who is generating much paper any more?
You know what would be better? A feature to generate an epub or kindle document. https://www.literatureandlatte.com/blog/epub-kindle-and-mult...
Is it better than iA Writer? If so, why?
"Let's get started!"
"Please enter your email"
:-o What?
Uninstall
There are a huge number of anonymous email services available. I came across this list from a basic search [0].
In fact, recently, there was submission for https://33mail.com on ShowHN also.
So, my question is, why don't we do this and add comments about the application itself.
I agree there are many ways to persist data even without a login. But that in turn means wasting a huge amount of resources for anonymous users with hardly any return at all. Why should developers do that?
In my opinion, what I find worse, is this expectation of getting something for nothing. Facebook, Google and others have grown to this size because of this sense of enlightenment. And we complain about them all the time.
So, in short, my suggestion is - if you don't find use of a service without submitting an anonymous email, don't use it. There's really no point in adding a comment which does nothing towards the understanding or increasing our knowledge.
[0]: https://www.techuntold.com/mailinator-alternatives/ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25434753
A comment like OP has 2 purposes: saves me from ever trying the app; suggests to the author that they made an unpopular choice.
Why is it better than a username?
I usually go there and scrub apps I tried but did not want to keep using.
I quit using that model in future projects as I just assumed that block-based editing would always be too “programmery” for users trained on and anchored to Word. I guess I was wrong :)
Basically going back to Front Page.
:/ I'm still on High Sierra, 10.13.6. Next time Craft, I'll keep using Dropbox Paper, Obsidian, Notion, Evernote and Airtable.
I'm estimating because the app is newer, is the reason why they didnt' put special effort in support very old versions like that.
Good luck. It does look pretty, perhaps that's enough to reach the target audience.
- WTF happened to .mhtml/.eml ?!?
- .odt : the least bad I guess, but is still a bit heavy, clunky, and uses discrete pages without reflow by default. Also, the underlying language isn't designed to be tinkered with, which is a critical shortcoming in many situations.
- .pdf : inconsistent .mp4 reader support, discrete pages with fixed layout.
- .epub : no .mp4 support
I guess the patents associated with .mp4 might be to blame? I can't wait for AV1 then! (And bring mhtml back!!)
Also, what did happen to .eml? Isn't that just a well known extension for raw email format? So in a sense it's used.. billions of times a day?
Similar to what you do when trying to display a color document on a monochrome display - do your best ?
> Also, what did happen to .eml? Isn't that just a well known extension for raw email format? So in a sense it's used.. billions of times a day?
It's actually identical to .mhtml, which makes browsers dropping the format even weirder…
"Mac Catalyst is a technology that enables you to run iOS code on macOS.."
> You data is stored in the cloud (AWS), it's encrypted during transfer (TLS) and also at rest (default RDS encryption for document content and personal data, and SSE-S3 encryption for uploaded binary content). However at this point we do not provide end-to-end encryption of your data.
Though it is not syncing over iCloud, so Apple doesn't see the data unless it is also backed up to iCloud (for instance, in your phone backup).
EDIT: They have this! This is wonderful
Proprietary.
Edit: they do have export. No canonical format. Probably good enough though. https://www.craft.do/s/zw95bDIcSkoDsq/b/70E1E8BF-41C4-4099-A...
tti seemed to be saying that Craft reminds them of Google Keep, not that Scrivener reminds them of Google Keep.