Yet another note app for iPhone, iPad and Mac | Hacker News Reader

Yet another note app for iPhone, iPad and Mac

lkmake.com

33 pointskailuo33 comments

This looks pretty nicely done, and that it could be a nice note app. Tagging + version history are pretty nice features to have in a Note app, and I like that this is a lot lighter weight than Evernote or OneNote. I use OneNote for everything for work, and some things for home/personal projects, but I'd rather just have another, dedicated, lighter-weight solution for home/personal stuff (and I don't love Evernote), so I'm excited about this.

I just bought the iOS & OS X versions to play around with, and I have three suggestions, if I may be so bold:

- When quitting & reopening Note, I'd love to see my last few notes automatically reopened (whatever notes I had open before I closed the app) and positioned where they were. Kind of like Stickies.

- Make the screenshots of the apps more prominent in some way on your landing page, and make the feature descriptions (e.g., under "Editing History, Multiple Tags, iCloud sync" more readable).

- Ditch the black "LKMAKE" splash screen on the iOS version; it's jarring to go from a full black screen to a full white screen when an app starts up.

And a bug report :)

- I don't see notes from OS X syncing over to iOS, or vice versa. iCloud is enabled for Note on both iOS and OS X, so something doesn't seem to be working right here.

And finally, a crazy idea that I would totally pay extra for:

- Ability to add notes to Note from the command line. Seriously. I would love to be able to do this from my terminal:

note "Buy bread" -tags home, groceries

I know you can't integrate with iCloud outside of iOS/OS X App Store apps, but I think you could build this pretty easily by having some backend web service that notes get sent to, and when your iOS/OS X app starts up, it just downloads new notes and adds them into the app, so it appears like a normal sync. Hell, I'd be willing to build the backend for you.

Nice job and good luck!

@king_magic Thanks for your feedback and suggestions. I love your idea about command line noting, and I will try to build one :)

For the syncing issues, I will check on that. iCould sync is a little bit confused: sometimes it synced in seconds, sometimes it just take a long time ... Anyway, I will focus on the sync issues in next updates.

Kai

Nice work! I've been looking for a proper Mac notes app with iOS syncing since before iOS was called iOS.

So I have a list of criteria. Not a long list (in fact length of feature list is a negative indicator -- I'm looking for something simple but of course it has to be the kind of simple I'm looking for. :)

Versioning is awesome, and something I considered most-desired but least-likely to find. I also like that you chose iCloud over a custom sync service, for a lot of reasons.

Do you have any interest in using strong encryption for data at rest?

Two notes regarding marketing: "yet another X" is an in-joke among UNIX people, so it works here, but might not fly in a wider audience. Also, posting on a Saturday at 3am US/Pacific might be self-limiting..!

Nice work and good luck with it!

One more note-taking app. http://www.voogla.com

Works in in cloud from any device. Real-time, no sync.

From the voogla site:

"We solved sync problems. Your data is stored in cloud and anybody in your team can access it in real-time from any device thanks to responsive design."

The first part is one hell of a claim (one I'm quite skeptical of), and the second part is downright bizarre. I'm not sure they know what "responsive design" means.

In fact, most of the copy is poorly written. Not a good first impression.

You are right, copy needs more love. The best way is to try it. If data is stored in database at server, than there is no sync between devices, right? If you access it on the phone and from desktop, you always get latest data?

I'm sorry, but the copy needs more than "love". It seems like you're misrepresenting what the product actually is, and frankly, I'm not going to try it.

You say it's a note-taking app. The site seems to make it out to be about "canned responses for teams" (still not really sure what that means), and while it says a few things about note taking, it really just isn't clear what the app actually does. Are notes... messages? Is this a replacement for email or a replacement for Notes?

Beyond that - "If data is stored in database at server, than there is no sync between devices, right?" - sounds like Voogla only works online, then. Sync issues are unavoidable when you bring in offline mode, and for a note-taking app to be useful, you pretty much need offline mode. So please don't be surprised that I find it really hard to believe that you've "solved sync problems".

I'm not going to trust my personal data to an app that is marketed like this. It's either deliberately misrepresented, or the authors of both the copy & the app have a poor understanding of the technical challenges they claim to be solving. Either way, not interested.

@quesera I am glad you like it :) For encryption you mentioned, do you have any suggestions?

I'm using Simplenote as platform to save notes. It has iOS app for iPhone and iPad, OSX app, web app. nvAlt also can sync with Simplenote via provided API. And it's free. Tagging, review history are also supported.

One thing I can't be satisfied with Simplenote it's iPhone app. It's very simple and UI is great but overall experience when editing and copy/pasting text is poor compared to native iOS notes.

As of this app - do you provide some API to get notes back from your app? iCloud doesn't and it's sometimes not very useful.

Hi schmooser,

I am a Simplenote user too, and loved it. But like you said, their iPhone app is too simple to use. Besides, I am not a fan of single window solution on the Mac. So I build this app.

Currently the only way to connect your Simplenote data from Note is by importing the data you exported from your Simplenote account in JSON format.

nvALT is great. The way Simplenote syncs on the other hand, not so great. Seems like every sync they do it fucks up data in some way. I store notes in a folder in Dropbox instead. Been working well with nvALT.

Having recently spent a lot of time look at software hompages, I'd like to at least commend you for a screenshot-rich landing page. Usually it's the first thing I want, and satisfies 90% of my questions.

You are right, thanks!

What kind of conflict resolution does the syncing perform? If it is done automatically by iCloud, what does it do when two notes are edited simultaneously on two or more devices?

I am afraid that note may fail to sync. iCloud can handle most of the conflicts well if only one person is editing at a time.

What I'd like to see is the ability to append to a current note like you can with the Drafts app to Evernote. Simplenote I can't do this as far as I can tell, and I prefer the simplicity and speed of it to Evernote.

Also, the ability to bold text would allow me to ditch them both and use one app (I'd settle for underlining or highlighting even). Best of luck on your app.

Thanks! There's still much more to be improved, it's 1.0.0 now :)

Just checked out the screenshots on the App Store. To whoever made it, you shouldn't call "yet another app". Not only does it look better than the default on iOS(duh!), but looks just as good as Evernote (though changing the icon outline and having a better font palette wouldn't hurt). And it has version control! Kudos, and hope much success with it

@pandatigox Thanks :)

agree - the "yet" sounds unnecessarily negative to me (even when you have started yet another wordpress blog before...)

Nice job! off-topic: I use OneNote on Windows/Mac/iPhone, perfectly syncs to your Microsoft account, rich text editing, password-protected pages, file embedding etc, it all works just fine. I really recommend that.

Add url scheme, so I could add add notes from drafts.app and use TextExpander (you could add that to). Would be great if I could specify tags in url scheme.

Sure :)

Is there a way to type a "tab" with this app on iOS. ByWord has an extra button for tab.

Somehow I always use tabs to organize my notes.

Sorry there isn't. Currently all iOS versions use standard system inputs.

But I think having extra buttons is a cool idea, I will consider that. Thanks :)

Would love to be able to sync via Dropbox (disclaimer: I work on Platform at Dropbox)

@daniel_levine Thanks, I will consider that in future updates.

is there a note app for iOS & Mac that can share notes with another person?

e.g. grocery list with my wife that we can both see and both edit?

PS google docs is not a note app PPS neither is iWork/Pages

Sure. Voogla (http://www.voogla.com) supports that. You and wife login with same email and you can create, view and edit all notes in real time on any device.

Cool thx!!

I use Trello for that. Super simple.

Looks good, I'll give it a try!

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