A different approach to note-taking and research | Hacker News Reader

A different approach to note-taking and research

ummm.co

112 pointstrungdq8847 comments

What I learned from visiting the site: It's an app that lets you take notes horizontally - apparently there's a claim that this is an advantage. I'm supposed to buy a subscription for more than Evernote costs and hand over all of my data, which may or may not be encrypted, to a random person on the internet. Sorry if this is harsh, but the website didn't make its case to me, and this is an extremely crowded space.

Seconding these thoughts, but also I don't think they're harsh. After a minute on the site I still have no idea what makes this different from writing Markdown in Notepad. If I really need the "horizontal time" aspect I can come up with a dozen ways of automating that with my text editor of choice + a bash script.

And, ugh, with Firefox running on Ubuntu, clicking the "Changelog" fires a prompt to download a "hotkeys.mp4". What?

It does say it’s for “professional” thinkers. I’m a non-professional thinker.

(Sorry, can’t help the snark.)

Screenshots looks nice. Maybe you should focus more on the differentiating aspects? The note-taking application market is extremely crowded.

(which is indicative that the issues are human, rather than technical — people feel the need to record stuff, but are not really able to stick with it and get good results; I have a stack of paper notebooks where I tried different systems as a physical manifestation; the software cemetery is less visible, but no less extensive. I may have found my final system, but who knows how long it will stick…)

Are you targeting per-project, short-to-medium term notes? If you have “second brain” ambitions, and choose to provide a hosted solution with no standardized format for export, you have to have some sort of long-term commitment. I do not see how that commitment can be taken in a way that is credible.

I learned a lot from this post. it’s humble, gives compliments and addresses key points the product falls short of.

I upvoted the first harsher comment but then saw how you. framed it. I’ll try to give criticism more like yours in the future. thanks.

Congratulations on getting something out there! As a nitpick: it's really difficult to understand what the product is trying to achieve, and my friend had the same complaint. Might I suggest a more concrete way to explain how this approach differs exactly, with ample examples if at all possible. An interactive demo page would also be very helpful.

Spent 1 minute trying to understand how it works, so, I agree.

For a local filesystem alternative similar to this, Obsidian + Sliding Panes (Andy Matuschak Mode) plugin is similar.

That seems like an excellent alternative. Thank you.

Oh that's what this is doing. Thank you for the explanation; I couldn't quite figure out what they meant by "take notes horizontally" until I saw this comment. It just looked like dual panes at first.

I guess it's hard to convey with static screenshots

Like the UX (although I'm curious as to how the mind maps may look), won't use a service that bills me for having Markdown export. Or most things with a subscription.

(I got badly burnt by Evernote and tend to prefer having most of my notes on an actual usable filesystem, with the exception of OneNote since it's been around for so long - and I work at MS, so have learned to live with it).

I do something similar with https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ and there I have everything in my own repo in github

Not sure how a 9 euro monthly subscription is justified in comparison particularly since I can use vscode as a power user

This is awesome! Thank you for sharing. On the page you linked, the github link doesn't take me to the repo, just to a generic github page; you might see an increase in users if it did!

Can you embed websites[1] inside Foam?

[1] https://www.ummm.co/#:~:text=embed%20websites%20and%20links%...

Idea behind Foam is that they use GitHub and vscode features - answering on your question, I didn't find any extension with this feature. But more interesting question, do you really need this "copy/paste" feature in your research (or just simple notes)?

Opening external links in an external browser is too distracting and cumbersome for me.

As a former user of a number of proprietary, web-based notetaking app services, I come from the future to tell you never to sign up for one of these. Not even if it's free. The company will fold after a year or two, and sometimes take your notes down with it. You'll be left with the nightmare of losing all your notes—or, in the best-case scenario—at least having to convert all your notes to a new format.

You need: (1) free and open-source software, which (2) uses open and future-proof file formats. I use org-mode and org-roam on Emacs, but there are plenty of other solutions for those outside the Emacs world. Others in this thread recommend Foam for VSCode, and Obsidian for a standalone solution.

I've found the best note taking system that works for me is literally to store my notes in a full fledged programming language with built-in OOP support.

So for (a super simplified) example if I want to have a daily note system, I'll just define (say) a JavaScript object called DailyNotes, and everyday I'll just append some lines to my code saying, in effect, add the key for today's date to the object DailyNotes and assigns that key an array and each time I have a thought or idea I just pushes ["thought", "…"] into it.

So all of my notes comprise a huge code project.

(My actual system isn't quite like that, I use a custom syntax + language server that serves my purpose better and faster (in particular, it makes it easier to write multiline notes without need of escaping and makes it easier to default to do the literate programming style of defaulting to text))

The nice thing about it is I get to piggyback on IDE features of vscode. All the "roam-like" features are available in VSCode and implemented better (think the "peak" feature, and the wiki link feature, which can easily be simulated by using function calls! (And you can project-rename a function name at a reference just like in Roam)

Can you share any screenshots of this system with the text itself blocked out? I am super curious to learn more.

I haven't used it much, but I think Dendron's schemas have some elements of this. It's also a VSCode plugin to take advantage of IDE features: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/c5e5adde-5459-409b-b34d-a0d75c...

I've been using my CatWiki[1] for making notes since 2016 and find it quite easy to use. It stores notes as Markdown files on a local hard disk.

[1]: https://github.com/cabalamat/catwiki

Obsidian[1] uses a similar approach.

[1] https://obsidian.md/

I’m working on Bangle[1] which is similar that saves notes locally in Markdown but provides a nice notion like UI.

[1] https://bangle.io

thank you for posting this.... it looks like exactly what I've been wanting. Looking forward to where the product goes!

Thanks for the kind words, my goal is to make note taking portable and delightful.

Bangle looks like an interesting project.

I tried using it but couldn't get it to work. It relies on keystrokes like Ctrl-P and Ctrl-Shift-P, which I dislike for 2 reasons:

(1) it forces people to remember commands when they shouldn't have to. GUIs have used menus, buttons etc for this for ages.

(2) Perhaps importantly, it doesn't work for my setup (Firefox on Linux), where Ctrl-Shift-P opens another Firefox window for privater browsing.

Also I note that File System storage only works with the Chrome browser. This is probably a good thing because I do not want random web pages being able to look at my filesystem!

Those are great points, I will be working on the product to improve upon those.

> Also I note that File System storage only works with the Chrome browser. This is probably a good thing because I do not want random web pages being able to look at my filesystem!

Just like how a random web page cannot access your webcam, similarly a random web page cannot access your file system without your permission.

I didn't see if it was possible to self-host. Is that a planned feature?

Hey, I'm the creator of Ummm. Not really on the roadmap anytime soon, but it's also still early for the product! Right now it's more about getting a grasp of what people want out of it, squashing some bugs and improving the UX further — before moving development further into a specific direction.

>Right now it's more about getting a grasp of what people want out of it

Looks like at least some people for sure want a way to store things locally and in current setup the only option they have is to ' want to be out of it'.

Have you consulted with any researchers on this project? I would suggest it would be a good idea to ask your target audience what kind of pain points you can solve for them, and I think your product would benefit greatly. As someone who would be your stated target audience, I can’t see anything here that would benefit me. As an example of my greatest pain point when conducting research would be organizing all of my research sources. The mind maps and cross references are a good start in this direction, but there are tools out there that do a much better job and are free. You’ll need to explain why this is better than all of those.

It's kinda hard to get what the "different" is in the approach.

I think they are trying to combine the pages of a physical notebook with the endlessly long digital page. So just like pages in a notebook, you align your markdown documents next to eachother.

Also, if you scroll down and click the squares on the features page, you get taken to little animations that shows off each feature. They're pretty good. https://www.ummm.co/features

It’s hard to tell exactly how the horizontal note taking and linking work, but it does remind me a bit of Gingko [1] which works as a nested outline style note taker. I think having nested lists is a “natural” way to organize your thoughts.

[1] https://gingkowriter.com/

Why shouldn't I use Obsidian for free? Why should I subscribe to this software?

I bought a Catalyst license for Obsidian a while ago because I like to toss money at neat projects (especially when they are NOT subscription based). I expected it to get to a decent state and then slowly get abandoned, but I am very happy to have been wrong about that. I'm impressed with the rate of development and community support for Obsidian.

Given the incredible variety of note taking apps, I decided to just be happy with Obsidian and stop agonizing over non-essential features.

The note taking is such a crowded space that I wonder how did we get here? Is this a signal that there still is no clear winner or just that this space is easy to enter but difficult to find success ?

Everyone’s mind is of different shape. We won’t ever have enough note-taking, to-do and email apps. And all existing ones will be bad in some way.

Oh great, another note taking app I can buy for $9 a month.

Best Wishes to your Work.

The name reminds me of Phil Libin's mmhmm - https://www.mmhmm.app

This helped me discover https://gingkowriter.com/

no tool can organize your thoughts for you.

all these tools only allow you to store/record them. the tools do not provide the organization.

Just heads up that the videos don’t work on iOS Safari here.

What video? I am on chrome and don' see a video.

It’s on the feature page.

$9/mo wow lol

I agree with some of the other comments here. I think that features can be best shown with videos or GIFs, as it took me a while to see what exactly "horizontal note-taking" was.

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