Show HN: Organizedly – Linked notes, todo's, calendar and queries | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Organizedly – Linked notes, todo's, calendar and queries

organizedly.io

63 pointsgabriel0r57 comments

It looks slick and this is something I'm looking in to (again), but with slightly different goals in mind. I had some feedback on the copy, though, that I hope isn't just me being a pain in the a$$.

  > Are my notes safe?
  > We are committed to protect your information. Your data is stored on our secure servers and we use SSL encryption to protect data transmissions. Your notes are for your eyes only.

So, my first instinct when I read this was: "No, then." I apologize for jumping to sarcasm, simply because short of asking you to bake in end-to-end encryption, the fallback is to honestly state the situation. Though, I'd keep that sentence in the middle and ditch the rest. For those that might care, that's clearly not end-to-end encryption[0]. Hopefully they know enough to understand that "secure servers/SSL" means "the server, somewhere, sees the actual data" ... just like most of the rest of these sorts of apps.

For me, incidentally, the security you provide would be fine. I'm more interested in a note/to-do/calendar app for my family with easy sharing/tracking for the kids -- this doesn't appear to be a goal of your product, so it's probably not right for me at this time.

[0] Yes, you could simply say: "There's no end-to-end encryption", but then you could just use my original, sarcastic, answer and clearly this page is meant to market the product to people.

Even though there are hundreds of note-taking and to-do apps, I could not find one that combines notes and to-dos properly. I ended up using separate tools for notes and to-do's. Therefore, I decided to create a product that combines the best of both worlds.

A few things make Organizedly stand out:

1. Notes, tasks, and a calendar are tied closely together 2. Drag-and-drop tasks from your todo-list directly to your calendar. 3. You can write todo's inside a note, in a todo-list, or the calendar and it is automatically synced across the board. 4. Queries that show notes dynamically based on their content. 5. Graph view that shows how notes are related to each other. You can traverse the graph by clicking on the notes.

Hi,

I'm pretty excited to try it out. Could you speak to the following questions?

1. Do you have plans for API access and note export?

2. Do you have a roadmap for native clients and/or mobile?

Sure!

1. Note export will be implemented soon. API access is not on the roadmap for now. 2. Yes, we are already testing our desktop apps for windows / mac. Mobile apps will be released within the next 6 months.

> I could not find one that combines notes and to-dos properly

Amplenote, ClickUp, NotePlan, and couple of, that I don't remember now. But I registered to your app and it has potential. One quick feedback from my testing: in calendar one can move day task to specific time, but it's not possible to make it again a day task, only in task section one can remove the date and schedule it again as whole day task. Or I just can't find way to do this from calendar view.

There is, actually - Using Emacs with org-mode and org-roam does roughly the same thing. But of course it’s more of a nerds thing, yours is more accessible to the broader public.

I love all these Roam Research style tools--always felt this was a really cool idea.

If anyone is interested in open source options, I'd recommend:

Foam - A Roam-inspired tool for markdown note taking--ahem, personal knowledge management (same features as Organizedly)--that runs on VSCode/Codium. I personally use and love it. Syncs across all my devices with Git, and deploys easily on free-tier Vercel, which is a nice way to check my agenda or read a note on my phone. https://foambubble.github.io/foam/

org-roam, for those emacs/org-mode people. I always wish I had the fortitude to become productive in emacs, but it seems it never will happen. https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam

Agree, and I'll add the tiddlywiki-based alternatives Stroll [0] and Drift [1]. They are simply self-contained, single html+js-files - easy to back up, genius for longevity

[0] https://giffmex.org/stroll/stroll.html

[1] https://akhater.github.io/drift/

Big +1 for tiddlywiki and all of the tools built on it. The single html file really makes it easier to distribute across devices. There's a pretty cool ecosystem built up around it:

https://tiddlywiki.com/#%24%3A%2Fcore%2Fui%2FControlPanel%2F... https://www.reddit.com/r/TiddlyWiki5/wiki/pluginsandresource...

Nice. I got one bit of feedback for this part

> We are committed to protect your information. Your data is stored on our secure servers and we use SSL encryption to protect data transmissions. Your notes are for your eyes only.

I found it less than convincing. Saying "your notes are safe" because we use SSL and stored on our "secure servers"... I know that something hosted in the Netherlands is probably slightly safer than anywhere else but you might want to spruce up a bit that section. Notes are extremely personal. They could contain crypto keys, receipts, recipes, someone's Intellectual property, etc.

Thanks for the feedack! I do agree, notes are extremely personal. We will be updating the security section in the course of this week. We are also experimenting with end-to-end encryption, that most note-taking tools lack.

E2E encryption while having a useful search engine seems pretty hard to do from what I'm understanding.

I switched from Notion to my own electron-based markdown editor just for the peace of mind of not having my notes stored in clear on someone else's server.

It's okish to implement, here is an example...

https://blog.excalidraw.com/end-to-end-encryption/

The harder part is probably from a UX sense, how do you make sure people understand that the key is important, and how do you or not store it on their computer.

I want to see the words "encrypted at rest", or something similar.

Unless they're self hosting, this might even be a super easy thing to add. With AWS and many other cloud providers this is either the default or a simple checkbox.

On the off chance that someone physically steals the server?

Or steals bits at rest remotely for later analysis

Standard Notes [0] are allegedly encrypted at rest.

[0] https://standardnotes.org/

In Standard Notes' case they are AES encrypted before leaving the device using a note specific key encrypted using your master password (or at least that's how the underlying system Standard File used to work). Encrypted at rest could just mean the volume is encrypted but they can still read your notes (since they have the key).

They say it's XChaCha20-Poly1305 [0], and "no one but you" can read your private notes [1] (I don't know what that means).

They also list some security audits, though not without problems.

[0] https://standardnotes.org/help/3/how-does-standard-notes-sec...

[1] https://standardnotes.org/help/1/who-can-read-my-private-not...

Interesting idea of pushing a free early access that will convert to ?$/mo soon. Im sure it'll be affordable but Im actually not comfortable onboarding in the dark.

That said, looks like a very interesting project.

I was going to say the same ... there's a positive cost to the user to learn how the service works and have it become second nature (like writing on paper). There's no guarantee that a Venn diagram of your idea of "fair" and mine overlap as we're both (so far) imagining what $? might be.

There are two additional hurdles that keep me from signing-up (well really from entering data since the sign-up is free). My notes might be for my eyes only but there's no mention of being able to export them ... are they really mine then? If there were an export feature, can any other systems use the exported notes?

You have a “Try it out” button that forces me to create an account and login. This is a turn of for me, completely. So, no trying out for me

Yes, currently the only way to try it out is by creating an account. A live demo with data could help us demonstrate the platform without the need of creating an account, but that is not yet implemented.

I wanted to post the same thing. Demo with static data would be fine to browse around in but I don't create an account unless I plan to use it.

On the positive side: Creating an account via Google is fast and easy. Had that not been available I'd have walked away too.

If the author so desires, create a temp account with temp-data

The concept may be nice, but the landing page can be more appealing. Images are not having enough text, not large enough also to make out anything.. Write better headings also... overall feedback - work on your landing page. make it communicate.

Thanks for the feedback!

Hm, yet another cloud based app with zero privacy and questionable life expectancy. Personal notes are very valuable and may go back 30 years.

What I need:

- self hosted server app

- data stored in human readable independent format with revision history (text+git)

- auditable security

- clients for web, mac, android

- integration with other platforms

You might want to take a look at org-web[0]. It's a webfrontend for org-mode. But I think it could be used without Emacs as well. It's self-hosted and uses org files to store the data. It should meet most of your criteria. Not sure if it is still under development.

[0]: https://github.com/DanielDe/org-web

I feel like calendars should allow filling spaces other than half hour blocks. I think I understand why the Google calendar might do this. The target usage might be more for events or meetings which fit more nicely in these blocks. For usage outside of events and meetings, I want to be able to paint the calendar at whatever minute and intervals that I like. And if we're only doing 30 minute blocks, aren't we just doing yet another recreation of the king which is Google calendar? Seems like there's a high bar to get people off the king, which is probably also why so many recreations have features to sync there.

I'm pretty sure you can do that in AmazingMarvin.com, they have trial version so you can check that if you care.

thanks for the feedback! The possibility to create shorter blocks makes sense, we will consider implementing that. Also, we are working on an integration to the king.

It's fast, looks polished and I love that it has scheduling. That has been missing from my life (does anyone know similar projects?). If you could now assign completion times it might be possible to auto-schedule some things.

2 gripes I have after a few moments of use:

Why, just why, do so many apps including this one only allow one layer of sub-tasks? Infuriating.

The other is a bit less simple: Do I really want to invest my time into and become dependent on a SaaS that can do whatever with my data and disappear whenever? I tend towards no; the code being available would ease my doubts significantly.

Always interesting to test out a new productivity app in the search of the perfect solution :-) Looks promising! Really like the clean layout.

A bit of feedback: (maybe a bug?) when I tried to add new tasks to "Today", tasks added after the first task did not have the current date set and therefore did not show up. (At first it seemed like saving tasks did not work.)

thanks for the feedback! The Today filter filters out tasks that don't have a due date today. If you are on the Today page and click Add new task, the day is automatically set for today. However, if you open the add new task field on another filter page (e.g. Overdue) and navigate to Today, the due date is not updated.

Do you have even a rough sense on pricing? I'd have to have all my notes and then get hit with a crazy price!

We are planning on something between $5 and $8 a month.

Good app and nice execution, some missing things for me:

- I would like to have the possibility to repeat tasks in a predefined manner, like daily or some particular days.

- When I create a task I would like to have the title focused so I can start writing right away.

- Keyboard shortcuts to create/go to each of the different items.

Also it would be nice to have the possibility of dragging the calendar events to extend them both in the same day and along the week.

Thanks for the feedback! Repeating tasks and more keyboard shortcuts are planned. Makes sense to focus on the title, that's a small thing and will be done soon.

Yikes! Your login page hijacks the browser's back button. (in FF latest anyway)

> hijacks the browser's back button

That really should be illegal. It's so annoying when pages do this.

Looks very promising.

Do you have a timeline for collaboration features? I’m already using NotePlan for myself and am looking for a similar feature set for use with my teams (and cross-platform). It looks like Organizely might fit perfectly.

Thanks for the feedback! Yes, our goal is to implement collaboration features during the second quarter of the year.

Sounds great!

Couple of things / questions.

1. Can I schedule a todo more than once? Some stuff requires multiple rounds if work.

2. My back button doesnt work from the login page. I press back expecting to go to index but instead refresh login.

1. We have repeating tasks and recurring tasks on the roadmap

2. Thanks for letting us know! I'll have a look.

It’s not so much repeating tasks but working in the same task over multiple time slots.

Off tangent: Why are there so many apps that name their apps with the following structure {insert word} + "ly"

Perhaps it's because all the {insert word}'s are taken, often squatted!

Maybe because it's easy to domain hack the .ly TLD?

can you not delete the 'getting started' note? i can delete notes i create but i can't seem to get rid of 'getting started'.

sorry, there was an issue with that note. If you delete the content, you can delete the note.

Is there any way to created shared notes?

Unfortunately not at the moment. Sharing notes is planned for later this year.

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