Inkdrop: Organizing your Markdown notes made simple
inkdrop.app
inkdrop.app
https://joplinapp.org/ does the trick for me, Synology NAS makes sure notes are copied over to multiple devices at any given time.
At least with Evernote (far from perfect) I get a dialog informing me a conflict was found and it keeps both versions allowing me to do a manual merge.
Not saying it's bullet proof, but I've never lost anything before.
...that has not happened in the last few years, despite my intensified usage.
Not affiliated, just a big fan.
[1]: https://fsnot.es/
- Close the main window and try to figure out how to get it to reopen. This is probably the reason Cmd-W doesn't actually close the window (unlike every other app).
- macOS menubars are still just empty defaults. All functionality is exposed in custom in-app menus, rendering it all undiscoverable through the Cmd-? search.
- Wonky context menus that don't follow macOS standards. E.g. right click on a note and type the first letter of the action you want. Result: nothing.
- Weird, cross-platform verbiage litters the app. E.g. "open in system explorer" instead of "open in Finder"; some hotkey tooltips say "Ctrl/Cmd," while others use the Cmd symbol "⌘"
- Horrendous focus styling and keyboard support – they've cast out all the good native functionality here. Try Tab-bing around the app and attempt to figure out what's focused. This is so much worse than most Electron apps, as Chromium's a11y is typically a big cachet.
Gosh, I could keep going. It's a terrific app, and this is all fixable, but boy does Obsidian wear those Electron origins on it's sleeves today.
It definitely supports the Mac menu bar though, the window closing behaviour is completely configurable, and you can of course customise the wording of actions to the platform. VSCode does all that for example.
So incredibly useful to me since I don't own a Mac at all, nor any iphone. Perhaps if you considered that people use other operating systems you'd see why your solution is a nonstarter and electron will continue to dominate the area?
I can buy a private VPS for $20/yr with 30gb of storage and slap sync thing on it, and find an existing markdown editor if I wanted.
That could easily pay for itself with 4 users. And that's just scraping the bottom of the barrel of low cost servers.
Yes not everyone can set up a server, and yes this takes the burden off spending time doing that. But your average software engineer with some server knowledge could set this up in a day.
The value proposition is just not there.
If I'm building something that needs to "stand the test of time", I find a day lets me relax, meander, think it through, and not get stressed over not moving fast enough.
I've also learned from experience to always over estimate these things ;)
Q: Why a subscription? A: Because lifetime pricing is not sustainable. We know there are similar apps with lifetime pricing out there, but it doesn't work for long-running business. The sustainability is crucial especially for note-taking apps because you will store a lot of notes in them day by day.
Q: $5 per month is too expensive. A: It is for professional use, not targeted to the mass of people. We believe it would improve your productivity worth more than $5. This is the price we would pay as a user.
Q: If lowered the pricing, you would get more customers. A: We would like to provide good, quick and warm user support. If we got a lot of users, we won't be able to support them all.
That being said, there are free alternatives like Obsidian that are really great. Sync with your favorite cloud provider you are already paying for. Sync with Git. Lots of plugins.
Obsidian is not open source. Its free for offline use, but thats about it.
I just love Notable due to it's simplicity and performance. The UI looks just right, every note can have it's own tab, there are no themes for now (apart from light and dark one), but they are nice and contrasty, the keyboard shortcuts are just right, the app is fast and responsive. I don't need anything more. Fabio (the author) knows whats he's doing and I like that he respects his users. Obsidian is more like: lets throw everything we can think of in, damned the performance, UI, or usability. The only good thing I can say is that I've managed to get both of them to play well together in iCloud Drive (or any "cloud" drive would be fine). So on my computers I use Notable, and on mobile devices I have Obsidian to edit the same notes.
Didn't find it bloated at all as it contains mostly functionality directly related to notes. The ability to support community driven JS plug-ins is just icing on the cake and search is blazing fast. I've got 10,000 notes in there and I can search through all of them using full and partial text search in less than a second.
Fascinating how we had such a completely different user experience.
Although it's not as much an editor as an outliner; notes are strongly hierarchical, and it's difficult to use for writing plain markdown files. But that shouldn't be a problem if your main need is note-taking.
"You need to pay for Obsidian if and only if you use it for revenue-generating, work-related activities in a company that has two or more people."
Not sure how to read that if you are, let's say, a freelancer. My guess is you are a one-man "company" and the other company is your customer?
But practically speaking, if you have an employment contract or have employees and any of your notes are work related you are supposed to pay for obsidian.
And since it can't operate off the file system, you can't even painlessly switch to the inevitable next subscription-based editor app.
notable: https://notable.app/
The one killer feature for me would be a gui for neovim that can display images. (Inserting images from the clipboard works with clipboard-image.nvim.)
I used to use gists, but my browser wanted to spellcheck me all the darn time. I just want to write with a bit of sensible formatting, no distractions.
Regarding Inkdrop: this page really doesn't tell me what's their USP, why would I use this over something like Obsidian or Roam (just to name some examples)?
Note: I’m the author of the project.