Show HN: I wrote a local-first notes app for Mac, with data longevity in mind
noteship.com
noteship.com
I spent the past 3 years working on a personal notes app that focuses on data longevity. Everything is saved as simple files and folders. In fact, you can open any folder as notebook. External documents/files/PDFs can live alongside notes (the app shows a preview).
Files are saved as HTML to ensure that even in 20 years form now you can still access your notes with a browser even if the app should not be around.
Tags, bi-directional links, rich text, images are supported. I also added a few neat features to extract knowledge from notes like a spreadsheet view and one page summaries.
For example, let’s say you keep monthly project review notes, each with a section “Lessons Learned”. You can generate a page with all “Lessons Learned” sections from all notes tagged #postmortem to see them all on a single page.
I’m very happy that the app finally went live. Many of you will know that the last 20% of actually getting a project out of the door seem to take just as much work as the first 80% (hat tip to Vilfredo).
Looking forward to your feedback!
But my pet peeve is hidden pricing for paid products. If it's worth buying, then show the price up front. I can't easily view the price anywhere on the website, and it's not displayed on the App Store description either. I was ready to download the app and try it out if I could view this information up front
> it's not displayed on the App Store description either.
Developers don't need to (and, imo, shouldn't) put pricing in the App Store description, because that's what the auto-generated "In-App Purchases" list is there for.
It just never works out for me to be worthwhile.
Sorry.
And if I ended up using it a lot, I'd hope for upgrades and would be happy to pay for them.
What I don't want is to bleed cash. That is a negative feature. Can't tell you how many programs I don't buy because of the SAAS model.
Don't be overwhelmed by the negative comments on the pricing model. To be honest, I'd prefer a one-time purchase over subscriptions too, but the recurring pricing you've kept is modest and isn't a dealbreaker for me. And as someone else commented, the monthly subscription in a way gives a sense of safety that the app is going to be actively developed and maintained.
Also I like that you've decided to keep the app usable for all actions other than adding new notes if a user stops paying. I'd need that guarantee before I can commit to a new note-taking app and migrate all my notes.
I'd echo the request of introducing mobile apps for this as well. Preferably on both iOS and Android, as I find that while a lot of folks use Mac because of their work, a significant number of them use Android phones. Also, markdown imports would be great, if it's not already supported.
I'm not taking this personal, I appreciate the feedback and I knew beforehand that subscriptions are controversial.
I contemplated the pricing model for a very long time going back and forth between the two options in my head multiple times.
In the end, the argument that convinced me what that with a subscription my focus is on adding features for my existing users. I'm constantly thinking "How can I make the app better for my users to keep my subscribers"?
Whereas for a single purchase I have to constantly think "What can I add to attract more users"?. All my other apps use one-time payments and sometimes it really pains me to put feature requests on my backpack knowing that I will never get to implement them, because they would not increase the visibility of the app.
Mobile: I have an iOS app planned, but it will take some time because I have a number of features that I want to add to the Mac app first (block based editor, smart search folders, larger calendar view).
It looks like you've settled on an App Store-only distribution model and a subscription-only pricing model. I'm curious about how you made that decision - subscription-only would suggest you're revenue-sensitive and want to provide continued updates, but App Store-only distribution means giving up revenues and putting someone else in control of updates. As a result, from the outside looking in, it seems a little incongruous. Just wondering :) obviously don't feel obligated to answer, either way it looks like a great piece of software.
What would be your use case and is there something in particular that leaves you undecided between Joplin and StandardNotes?
A must have for me is a code-block (three backticks enter or similar).
A killer feature would be a rest api so I could integrate with cli tools (bash, jq, grep, etc) without having to parse html.
I’m excited to try this out.
I'd gladly pay for the software and repurchase at major releases (if I wanted to upgrade)! I'm not looking for more subscriptions though. Give it a thought. I'd like to be one of the paying customers :-)
The application is sold as, "with data longevity in mind", but the subscription model makes me feel like that is only the case while I pay for a subscription. From what I read in some of your other comments, that may not be the case, but it's still a worry. What if I can't access my notes/data in the future unless I have an active subscription?
You are not Adobe or Autodesk to pull off a subscription model. Not successfully.
Sell a perpetual license that is valid for the current version plus anything that is released in X months after that.
Then, sell an option to extend the access to upgrades for Y% of the original purchase price once X months are almost over. If X months are over, sell the same option with a mark-up.
This is universally perceived as a fair arrangement and it gives you a recurrent revenue from people who do keep on using your software (just like with the subscription). Best of both worlds.
This looks good if you are looking for something a bit more for school or something.
Using HTML instead of Markdown gives some nice advantages if you want to use more than just text, so I am going to give this new app a try.
HTML is nice for more advanced documents, but I prefer note taking in markdown as it's a simpler syntax, even when viewed in raw text.
I think HTML is perfect for this app because it's more for academic use and less personal use like grocery/todo lists, reminders, etc.
Having a synced mobile version is crucial as you want to access your notes on the go right? (at the grocery store, etc.)
Requiring a subscription makes me ask what happens when you stop supporting the project? Relying on the App Store makes me wonder what happens when Apple decides to ban your developer account?
I'm not saying these are dealbreakers, but I'd like to have some sort of answer to these concerns.
Having a self-hosted way to download and pay for the app would increase my confidence level, even if I did decide to purchase through the app store. Similarly, there are 'subscription' apps that let the user keep using the latest version of the app if they cancel the subscription, they are just no longer able to get updates. You can also make a pledge to open-source the app if once you're no longer commercially supporting it.
When cancelling the subscription, all existing notes and all data remains fully accessible (read and write). It’s a knowledge base, after all. Projects with more than 50 notes will not support adding new notes, but all other features remain fully functional.
About the idea of keeping the latest version without updates: interesting, but tricky to implement in the App Store. You'd need a feature switch for everything. OS compatibility updates would still need to go through or the app would not survive in the App Store (typically this is what would get users to upgrade for apps distributed outside of the App Store).
Even if the app were to disappear, you could still access your notes with a browser and copy the data over to another app. Not as convenient as using text files, but the ability to embed images into the notes led me to go with HTML.
Happy to answer more questions!
I am a simple man, I see a well-made installable desktop software, I upvote it. Even if it's just for Mac.
Well done, OP. Break a leg.
-- Edit --
I have to withdraw my praise and the upvote. Subscriptions for installable apps are completely unacceptable.
I just downloaded this, tried it out. Fantastic work. The editor is excellent and behaves how I'd expect. I love the calendar right there. The app uses a small amount of memory/cpu.
What keeps me on Notes:
1. Subscription. I'd pay for a one time license. I'd pay for upgrades, but I'd want to own it.
2. It needs a mobile version with sync.
3. I don't see a way to switch into light mode.
2. agree, syncing is to a mobile device is required
2. iOS with iCloud support is planned.
I'd love to have this, but as latchkey says for a one-time purchase. Ideally, the app would be open source and available for Mac as well as Linux, so one could add bespoke extensions. Note the reason I say "open source" is not because I would want it for free, but because open source means I will still be able to use it in 20 years on whatever platform will be mine then.
Wish list:
- plug-in for Emacs, Atom and Sublime.
- versioning support (Git integration)
1. If you cancel your subscription you cannot add new notes, but you can still access, edit, move, etc. your existing notes. All features remain active (and you get updates, important for OS upgrades).
2. iOS and iCloud Drive support are planned
3. It changes between light and dark mode automatically with the setting of macOS.
2. Great! It doesn't do me any good to keep a shopping list in my notes and not be able to edit it at the super market. =)
3. This needs to be a setting that the user can choose. I like my OS dark, but my notes editor light.
Recently found and use 30% of something called Obsidian so native UI and attachments are welcome.
I saw the option to view as Spreadsheet but wasn’t obvious how one was made? The concept of fields seems cool. Are there plans for data extraction/APIs?
Congrats again!
Let's say you have a number of notes for your contacts. You tag each note with #contact and add a few fields like "Name", "Department", "Diet".
Type #contact into the location bar to find all contacts and switch from there to the spreadsheet view.
You'll get a list of your contacts and you can quickly tell who is a vegetarian, for example. Great for planning a party (once in person meetings are a thing again).
Another neat thing:
Add a new note and add the tag #contact. The right sidebar will now suggest fields and headings that you used in other contact notes. This way you can use the same fields to keep your notes consistent.
I always find myself looking for a mobile companion for these types of apps, though (it's what made me stop using Roam). Do you have any plans for a mobile app in the future? I assume the files could probably sync over iCloud as an optional feature.
While I confess that I'd also like the option to purchase a 1.0 license and then pay to upgrade to 2.0 later, I fully recognize that the App Store makes that sort of arrangement extremely awkward and difficult to achieve, and think you priced it more than fairly anyways.
Pricing: yes, agreed.
One Page Summaries: I have more ideas on that front. I'd like to add a way to "save" the summary config as kind of a "smart search" so that you could have them in the outline on the left or even embedded as a block inside a note.
Another idea is a kind of command line syntax for the location bar:
. / #meetingminutes / H2:Lessons Learned | View:OnePageSummary
This would find all notes tagged "meetingminutes" in the current note and below, pull all sections with level 2 headings "Lessons Learned" and show them as summary on one page.
When it’s Electron/Web: wHy nOt nATivE
When it’s iOS: wHy nOt aNDroId; 80% oF tHe wOrLd
When it’s Android: i pErSoNALly prEfeR iOS fOr tHe UX
Maybe I should take a break from HN
Wouldn't be a bad idea, since it seems to bother you that different people ask different questions, and none of your cases is related to my question. Unless you think "why are you intentionally limiting your market" is the same as the ones you've listed.
PS: I think your keyboard is broken.
Though it's just the case of the loudest people voicing these complaints.
It doesn't represent everyone, but it certainly is prevalent and can be demoralizing hearing all the hate.
I love Mac apps, I like their silly use of euphemism and laissez-faire design language, but I will outright not integrate it into my lifestyle if I can't run it on my 5 other devices too. Getting work done comes first, and I'm sure as hell not going to boot up my QEMU container just to add a bullet point for my shopping list.
That being said, congrats to OP for launching. The execution seems to be great with attention to detail and focus on the right things.
Regrettably, the percentage of Windows users that do value build and design quality over the abundance of features and low pricing is, maybe, 10-20%. On the plus side, however, this acts as a natural filter and you end up with the userbase that really groks what you make and how you make it. This alone is a huge plus. "Those who like it, like it a lot."
Long story short, if you can take your well-made Mac app and port it to Windows, retaining the polish - do it. It's totally worth it, in all aspect of it. Just make sure it looks and feels native, and it's not an Electron ;)
...no, I really just wanted a good notes app that had all the features I wished for. So I went ahead and got started (not done yet :). That was 3 years ago. 2 years ago I wrote an importer and transferred all my notes over from the app I was using at the time and have been using my own app ever since. And I plan to use this for the rest of my life to save the things I learn(ed) along the way. That's why the focus on data-longevity.
Would you make different technology choices if you started today?
Sometimes I wonder if I should have gone for a Catalyst app like Craft, for example, but again, at the time when I started Catalyst was in a very early stage. Today I'd probably give it another try. I also considered a Swift wrapper around an HTML/JS core (kind of my own slim Electron version) but decided to go for a native Mac app.
I'll definitely have to try it out.
I added two additional ways, the spreadsheet view and one page summaries. The summaries are shown towards the end of the demo video. If you take lots of notes, this might be useful for you to extract knowledge from your notes.
As the name suggests, all notes are stored as markdown files.
I'm also not sure whether HTML is such a great format. Maybe it's fine for reading the files and content in the future but for interop with other tools, I think sth like text or markdown would be better. Or Org-mode.
"Learn from the past an become a smarter person today"
Typo on the homepage.
Notational Velocity is mostly search based. I mean, it's a list of messages, a text editing field and a searchbar, nothing more. So system-wide shortcut to pop it up, Cmd-L to search and there you go. I'm mostly doing a bit of "SEO", so intentionally write content in the node that makes it easier to find. Tried tags, but that just added another layer and "Here's another good Bash Shell tip for Linux Servers:" makes it both more readable and provides hooks for searching.
Synchronisation has change a few times, it's just text files after all.
I'm trying to check whether the Zettelkasten method would help me, so I've currently switched to Obsidian and might try some others. They're still writing text files, so I can backport them easily when/if I'm done with it. Right now, I'm not sure whether just having a GUID/timestamp is enough even within NV. Sure, I can't just click on it, but that means that I just have to Cmd-C/Cmd-L/Cmd-V after it.
And being quite fond of Emacs, I try and fail with Org-Mode once a year.
With the app I tried to provide additional access points into the data. Page links are an additional way if you use them like "@ mentions". Let's say you have a person or topic that a note is related to (for an email this would be the sender). I created a folder "Contacts" and added a note for each person. Now if I write something down I mention the page for that person on the note. Later on I can go to that person's page and see all notes connected to that person (the power of backlinks) or simply search for "@james", for example.
Zettelkasten: I'm still trying to wrap my head around this one. What is great about it is that Niklas Luhmann figured out a way to have page links and backlinks between notes in a setup in the physical world on actual paper. With digital notes, I think GUIDs and timestamps to identify notes are not necessary anymore, because the file path (or URL if you will) uniquely identifies a note.
Org mode: yes, same here with the added difficulty that I have a vi background :)
But yeah, I don't have that many cross references now, this is one part where I'm looking for better solutions that don't depend on too much technology. Thus my Zettelkasten research. Probably will implement a lot of this with scripts and shortcuts (I'm quite fond of tools like Textexpander/atext for this).
If you rename a note through the app it will go though all other notes and update them to use the new name.
The app also adds datestamps, YYYY-DD-MM, to the file name of each note exactly for the reason you mentioned. File metadata might get lost when copying a file around. The added benefit is that if you sort files alphabetically in Finder, they show up in the order you created them.