Show HN: Beyondpad – New kind of note taking and data management solution | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Beyondpad – New kind of note taking and data management solution

beyondpad.com

59 pointsdzjosjusuns45 comments

This is a brilliant application. I wish I could trust it to hold my brain dump, but this seems to be registered and hosted in the United States, which is no longer a secure place to store my data. I'm unable to determine how this is to be monetized, or if at all, so would it be possible to free the source of this application, so that it can be hosted in a trusted location, such as Seychelles?

I have a similar project, it's licensed under the GNU license. You can host it wherever you want to.

It's early in its development stage, and I would love all and any kinds of feedback.

[You can find it here](https://github.com/Azeirah/brainstorm)

exactly what I was looking for. I plan on installing this tonight. thank you.

Some of the user-interface problems I recognised in my few-minute-test:

- Many notes I have are longer: I.e. tend to be made of headlines etc. So i need something like markdown for structuring. Using the mouse seems to cumbersome and to hard to maintain a visual consistency.

- The delete button (particularly on the default notes) was too hidden in the menu. I had to search for it.

- Adding a link didn't automatically select the link field to immediately copying the link.

- Copying a link in a empty text field didn't convert it in a link field (seemed like a good opportunity to shine)

- I didn't find a "new note" button after entering a first node (because I had to save it... doh). I think I would prefer an auto-save and/or a "new" button to avoid the confusion.

- When clicking "link to tag" I have no method of aborting my uneducated request (esc?) I had to enter the tag to safe it even though I changed my mind.

- I often had to click "..." when trying to edit an entry. 6 menu items: I think they could all be shown side-by-side?

I must agree, there are these subtle usability issues. I'll be definitely addressing these in next updates. Thanks!

Do you plan an open source version for self-hosting?

I too liked the look of this but would want to self-host.

I use Google Keep on my phone and this looks like a great alternative except that it doesn't have the incredibly useful feature of being a widget on my phone's home screen.

Hosting this service myself and an installing an app on my phone with a widget would sell me on it for sure. A hundred million bonus points if I can create a checklist and mark items off using my pebble.

Please. Another vote for this. This would seriously become my tool of choice, but I would become so dependent on it, as an extension of my working style, that I wouldn't want to invest unless I knew I could know that it wouldn't go away and that I could also hack changes into the code. Would definitely be willing to pay for the Open Source Version. I've also had ideas very similar to this, but am much more interested in having it than developing it.

I'm working on something that's very similar. It's early in development, and lacks many features. But if you private host it, it's already very usable.

Take a look here https://github.com/Azeirah/brainstorm

When I was brainstorming this idea about self hosting or federation kinda came to mind but i was not sure about interest in that. Actually at the moment As its Node and MongoDB there would be not problem to self host, but I need to think about that :)

Please please allow it. There are a ton of features I'd love to add to a fork of this.

Exactly.

I don't mind paying for self-hosted version of this - I'm looking for something like this for quite a long time, basically a spiced up cross between org-mode and Tiddlywiki.

Another vote from me. It seems from the comment that you have a product that is kind of exactly what many like me were looking for.

I have brainstormed about this problem for a long time but I never took to implementing it because I was busy with other interests. I'm glad and excited to see someone come out with the product I wanted. I take so many notes, I've tried so many apps, but very few of them take advantage of the spatial organization human beings already operate with.

I think it would be beneficial if you kept in mind that there's a huge advantage in spatial placement of information, and took the suggestions of others on this thread regarding notes moving around. If you nail that and make it so notes stay put where I put them, you'll have a brilliant product.

Feel free to reach out if you ever need ideas or brainstorming. I have several drawings and notes on interfaces for spatially organizing notes and I should probably make them available somewhere since I don't ever plan on implementing them (I'm more interested in using the tool than making it, honestly) but hopefully people like you could use these rough ideas as inspiration.

The video went pretty fast for lay users to follow.

As a survivor of online projects that ended up closing down, I will wait for a way to export data before using this seriously.

That video give me no sense of how this really works. I just see a jumble of boxes and colors, and a voiceover who keeps throwing single words out there without any context. Nothing on that page or in the video makes me feel like this would truly organize my work any better than my trusted, permanently open, plain text to do list.

I wonder if creating relationships between notes would work well for me and my very large to-do list. However, it may be a moot point since at the current rate it's more like a never-do list. ~/ideagraveyard.txt

It looks interesting. There are two features that would make me really excited (could be that I just didn't find them in the few minutes I looked for them). The first is the ability to link notes directly to each other and then view the notes in a graph view, mind-map style. I see the graph view for tags, but nothing for viewing notes in a graph. The second is a mobile app, cause I do most of my note-taking on my phone. The web interface is useable on my phone, but not really ideal, as many of the controls are too small for my finger to reliably hit. I don't know how much I line up with the target audience here, so there could be good reasons that those aren't planned or prioritized.

Mobile is with high priority. Linking notes to each other - basically if you promote note to tag (from options in edit mode), then it can be linked, to other note. but simply linking notes, not at the moment. As for mind-map feature - similar thing you described is also in a future vision - basically you should be able to vie your notes in graph with relation to other tags (and thus maybe even create meta links/tags to link those together).. but that's for the future of Beyondpad!

Looks very interesting. Like a combination of Subtask and Trello. Each of those have limitations that keep me from adopting it for all my note-taking and project management... Perhaps this is the perfect middle-ground.

One thing, though: That demo video went waaaaaaay too fast. I couldn't keep up with it at all, and just stopped watching. I understand you're trying to fit all the many features into a single, short video, but that's just too much. Why not go at normal pace and just feature the most "a-ha!" features?

Thanks I guess ill do that with video, split it in kinda introductions to main parts of the app

This looks awesome, well done!

What are your plans for the future? Is this just a hobby project, or is it something you plan on monetizing or open sourcing? The reason I ask is, I've seen a lot of projects like this fizzle out, which makes me weary of investing any time into using it.

That being said, I'm excited to see your future developments and refinements on this project!

Plan is simple - to keep going, keep improving, making it better. Vision and pipeline is full of awesome features. And maybe some day Ill manage to monetize :)

Good luck :) By the way, on the map and calendar view, you have "can be seen hear" instead of "here".

This looks pretty good. It's similar to Sortd.com but is without the very useful email integration.

Sortd has just released another 200 invite codes. Apply fast at http://www.sortd.com to get into the private beta or Tweet for an invite code.

Seems really good, takes some things from google keep and adds the complexity that keep lacks.

Nice!

It looks very interesting. Congrats!

Is it possible to have more than one widget associated to an item. Let's say, I create an item and add a countdown timer and a to-do list. Would it work?

Yes you can add multiple same type items to a note, no problem!

I like the idea, but I think there's probably more friction than I wanted to. Nevertheless, I'm not your target customer, I don't have a team or manage projects.

I've also published this app to chrome web store - http://goo.gl/nH6Cqj

Awesome. Can you make that an app for offline use?

This feature is partialy developed, I plan to enable it in a while when i'll fugur out all sync quirks and edge cases

It's like a productive Pinterest.

I was looking at this because I want to make something similar. I've been looking for the software I want for the last ten years, and nothing comes close to the image in my head as to what software can do. So, I'll explain what I want.

I want something similar to this, which will replace email. It doesn't necessarily have to replace email, but it will accept emails and you can send emails out of it. The idea being that email will manage the projects. I'll explain. You create an email to people. You tag it as 'project' and it will create a new project, a distribution list, and automatically give the project a name (based on the subject). Any files emailed between you and others in that project via email will automatically be added to your project's workspace. Appointments set will be assigned to the project, and each appointment occurrence will have notes that you can keep for that occurrence. Tasks can be created for projects as well, and people can be assigned those tasks, and get email reminders.

With those features, if I don't recall what happened in the last meeting, or some client is asking about a file that I supposedly received, I don't have to go looking around trying to find which email on which day it was, as I'll have all project's emails together.

Once a project is finished, then emails between people in that project won't automatically be categorized, but there will be 'suggested' categories.

-- that said, this is nice, however, I can't figure out the ordering here, it appears there is none. Here's a simple test. Add 21 new notes. Just 1 enter enter 2 enter enter... it appears that the new notes are added to the left and that pushes everything else to the right, except when it comes to the extreme right and then it pushes that one all the way to the left and down one. That's an easy way to do it, but it's not easy to read. People are used to reading newspapers, Newspapers have a columnar format, and you read your columns. Classified ads are vertical columns as well, and if you are looking for something you look vertically within the categories. This on the other hand is horizontal categories, which is very confusing, especially since the category something is in is related to what's left of it, and how large that left thing is... in the example I give, you notice now 1,2,3 are from right to left on the bottom. Then 4 is slightly higher than those, on the very left. and then go right again, 5,6,7 all good, and 8 is once again higher... continue on until you get to sixteen, and now it all looks nice and tidy. Now edit 14 to say "14 this is a much longer note just as a test to see what happens with the columns". Now the whole thing looks like a mess.

tldr; use vertical columns to make the output predictable. People are used to spacial relation, so changing that because the content of one cell changes, makes the spatial relationship memory useless.

Nice read! About ordering - notes are shown in order they were added or reorganized. As for masonry layout - you are absolutely correct in cases it can be hard to read, that's why Beyondpad has two options in settings, max number of columns and should those columns be arranged in rows or tiles, I guess Row layout is what you would preferred (this layout option can be changed also from context bar (three dots near search bar)) About email solution - that would be indeed interesting to see implemented in some email client. Just to give some reference context in Beyondpad - one point in vision is to allow attaching emails to tags, thus when adding tag to a note or stuff that note would be shared with those contacts.

Not quite, row layout gives too much white space between items. I would prefer columnar layout. It's like row layout but vertical.

Oh, and this should be delivered over SSL... but I'm sure that's in the works.

Yes I understand, I need to think about that and ordering.. cause then it seems to me that scrolling would have to happen horizontaly.. but thats and interesting idea! Meanwhile there are lists :)

+1 to SSL

Will do in few days, its nothing much but I want to wait till traffic calms down not to disturb initial users.

SSL is ON

What happens when someone is included in multiple projects? Where does that email go? What happens when a feature spans multiple projects? How do you auto-magically track that as well?

Ah, and even though I can drag notes around to sort of order them, in my 21 notes example, doing that re-arranges notes that I already ordered, so that's a useless feature.

Sortd.com is possibly something that might be of interest to you.

you might be interested in http://opp.io/

Seems like the kind of note-taking app I was looking for - something that does not constrain me to the one-dimensionality of text, and isn't just a poor work-around that fact as outlines are. I particularly like that one can visualize the nodes in a canvas and then switch to the columns view. This is really good.

Now the dealbreaker question: can I export my data without losing relationship metadata?

At the moment if you are into it you can get all your data, including relations in json format just by inspecting traffic source and getting that json. But I plan to add more civilized way of getting your data out!

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