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Comment by dpatriarche | Hacker News Reader

I've been looking forward to OneNote on the Mac for years. I installed it and found out there is no option for offline notebooks; all notebooks appear to be synced through the OneDrive cloud. WTF? There's not even the option to encrypt notebooks in the cloud. I'm just not going to share all my personal thoughts and notes with the NSA. I'm disappointed.

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The future is in the cloud though, and OneNote has always (for the ~3 years I've been using it) worked this way. Everything is synced with the cloud.

Which is great! My business is based on cloud computing. I totally see the value of syncing my business notes through the cloud to my other devices. But I need the option of flagging certain notebooks as private and not to be synced. So I guess I'll stick with Yojimbo for personal notes.

Or try Turtl (https://turtl.it). We're early stage, but everything is private by default (client-side encrypted) before syncing to "the cloud." Your data is available everywhere but completely private. This is great for small businesses who don't want to have to worry about whether what they're uploading is sensitive or not.

Disclosure: I'm the one building it =].

  > The future is in the cloud though, and OneNote has always
  > (for the ~3 years I've been using it) worked this way.

No, it has not always "worked this way" and it still doesn't across the board. I've been using OneNote for ~13 years (since the 2000 version). And in fact, the Windows versions continue to support offline notebooks despite Microsoft's attempts to shoehorn people onto the cloud.

A rather common OneNote usage scenario I see is a OneNote notebook on a company file share, or a shared Dropbox folder. OneNote supports multiple concurrent edits of a single notebook.

Not everyone wants everything in the cloud.

"shared Dropbox folder" is still the cloud, just not Microsoft's.

So I share my ideas with Microsoft and the NSA?

NO WAY.

Well, if you want cloud sync, the NSA is in no matter what: Dropbox, Evernote, OneNote, you-name-it.

Unless said app uses client-side encryption for everything.

This is going to mean I can't use it, unfortunately. At least not at work.

A lot of businesses don't allow sharing work-related information with other businesses.

>I installed it and found out there is no option for offline notebooks;

It scares me the way this seems to be a statement on the future of Microsoft office. The windows 8.1 styled version of onenote functions the same way. It is also crippled so that you can't lock sections the way that you could in onenote for desktop.

It's early stage, but try https://turtl.it. Works on mac. Encrypts everything. Offline mode is in the works.

Disclosure: I built it.

I like how you can run your own server. Have you considered integration with services like Dropbox? That's my go-to for syncing data between systems. I understand that would make monetizing the product more difficult though.

You aren't the first to suggest this and it would possibly make it easier for people to get started. There are two main problems though: monetization (as you brought up), and also the fact that many privacy-conscious individuals may not even have a Dropbox account to begin with because of its implications.

I'm always open to suggestions though. If there was a viable way to charge for Turtl while also making it easier for people to adopt, I'm all ears =]. I think it would be hard to charge a one-time download fee for an open-source app though (and open source is essential for anything dealing with crypto).

I'm honestly not sure what the best way to do that would be. Perhaps a guide on your website of how to configure the server to sync via Dropbox (or other syncing folders), but with a request for donations at the top and bottom of the article. "If you found this useful, please consider..."

Does that ever work? I couldn't tell you.

and no OneDrive for Business support still. Really tough to sell any company on using that service unless they're a homogenous Windows environment. "It's kinda like DropBox except you have to always use Windows".

Microsoft: supporting BYOD as long as you're bringing Windows.

On a positive note, it's nice to see Microsoft being a good ecosystem citizen and using the Mac App Store. OneNote is visually pleasant, at the same time familiar to Windows users but not foreign to those accustomed to Mac OS.

That's odd, because I have the OneDrive client for Mac and iPad. But I'm using the consumer version tied to my outlook.com account.

I've been an Evernote user for years, but now that it's available on all my platforms, I'll at least give OneNote a test drive.

Same issue, installed and remove right after.

What, are you afraid the NSA is going to steal your business ideas?

Of all the things I would not want spooks snooping, my meeting scrapbook is pretty low on the list.

Don't be silly, local notebooks are a really useful thing when flying and when out of range of cell service (like camping, which is a great time for continual thinking without distraction). Without a capability for offline notes it will be less useful than if it had that capability.

You can work offline just fine. Notebooks will sync when you are back online. Seems like that covers all of your use cases just fine.

Not sure how well the merges work in practice, though.

   > Not sure how well the merges work in practice, though.

Not too well in Evernote has been my experience. It seems like every time I work on something offline for any length of time it gets into a manual merge bucket.

So there's a local cached copy that you can back up if you're a stickler for keeping local backups of your data?

I guess it depends on what you keep in your notebooks. Business notes in the cloud, fine. Personal stuff I keep notes on -- medical history, financial info, etc. -- all in the cloud, possibly encrypted with some key owned by MS also in their cloud, living forever? Nope.

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