Paperwork: An open source Evernote alternative
paperwork.rocks
(note: i'm not the author, but i believe he's welcoming help in taking it further)
paperwork.rocks
Evernote's strength lies in its Desktop application and very useful clipping service.
The fact that Evernote uses its own cloud storage instead of say an encrypted folder in Google Drive/Dropbox etc is a negative of the service. Sync is required but implemented in the most undesirable way in Evernote currently.
Paperwork is promising, but seems to have replicated the negative of Evernote, while foregoing the reason why people use Evernote in the first place.
So, if you want to Paperwork to take off:
1. Implement it as an offline Chrome App with Dropbox+Google Drive sync. 2. Implement a web clipping+screenshot extension.
I hate this trend towards supporting only one or another kind of proprietary service.[1] What is wrong with WebDAV? That way, you can use a cloud hosting provider, or self-host.
[1] I'm looking at you Scrivener.
Firefox ? I'm sorry, but Firefox lost relevance a couple of years ago now. Firefox is ethically the best , but it sucks in implementation. Firefox is now the broccoli of the web, stale broccoli at that.
Of course, that's just my personal philosophy. Everyone is different.
Related: Are there any decent WebDAV servers out there? I don't see any recent development being done on any.
And Box is using WebDav too: https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/200519748-Does-Box...
The fact that it's not a true cloud service could be seen as a downside. Your data is only stored at one server without failsave mechanisms. And you're responsible on your own regarding the data.
This will really limit the potential user base and really eventual growth and uptake of a service like this. When easily accessible "personal cloud" tools like Dropbox and Drive exist why not make them potential service mechanisms? On an open source service like this it seems you may want to have some sort of cloud abstraction service and let other contributors plug in separate cloud services.
Proper personal clouds may be on the horizon when you don't have to become a sysadmin to run one. FWIW, I'm working towards this - http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/
(having Condoleezza Rice on the board is just _one_ obvious reason not to trust them)
I've also used a wiki as what amounts to little more than a note taking app, and it works. There are a couple wikis that can speak git as a backend store.
Is there a rationale for paperwork not doing this? I'd like to hear it.
[1] http://openmirage.org/blog/introducing-irmin
[2] http://nymote.org/blog/2015/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/
As a Firefox user I already dislike Gmail Inbox and WhatsApp (web) being Chrome only. The former has said "Chrome only for now" for quite long already.
They recommend mysql (especially for bigger systems), but not a requirement.
Some of my highest-voted comments have been pure humor. A few examples, with parent comments included for context:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8690893 (86 points, and 24 for the followup comment)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6447007 (43 points)
Even this silly one-liner got 23 points:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7863205
That one won't make sense out of context, so here's the article it refers to:
http://www.newstatesman.com/business/2014/06/bizarre-secret-...
My point in sharing these is to give some examples of kinds of humor that have gone over well here. Of course as they say, "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."
All the functionality is there, but as I see it, an app like this is all about good UX and very little about the technical features.
If you've ever tried to use a computer in a foreign country, you'll realise why icons are an extremely good idea.
I agree the floppy disk symbol is dated though, as is having to save a file.
>The current development status is far from being worth called "version 1.0". However, if I could get you interested in this project and you feel like contributing, don't hesitate to ping me by e-mail...
You can fork the project and begin contributing...
I edited one note and pressed "library" instead of the floppy, since there appeared some text, that said, it was autosaved .... But when I got to the library, the note was in the same condition as before the edit.
So, according this test, "auto save" does not work (correctly) IMHO.
I played around with it a bit and it's still pretty far from being a true Evernote alternative.
A lot of the value in Evernote comes from its crazy powerful search and rich ecosystem. Both are currently still lacking in Paperwork.
As of yet, it does not search within PDF documents and it does use OCR to extract text from images, though both could be achieved with open source technologies such as Solr and Tesseract.
The lack of ecosystem (iOS/Android apps, desktop integration etc.) also makes sense, but the APIs are all there, so there is no stopping anyone from adding those.
This has been done before with, eg ODBC.
* RemoteStorage.js[1] (they plan on adding support for Dropbox, Drive, etc.)
* CloudRail[2] (nonfree source)
* CloudDock[3] (proxy service)
* byoFS.js[4] (encrypted cloud storage, I maintain this)
[1]: https://github.com/remotestorage/remotestorage.js
[3]: http://clouddock.co/
- Apache Libcloud/Deltacloud/jclouds
- CDMI
- NDMP
- NFS
- remoteStorage
- SME
- WebDAV
Not good for rich text and images and web clippings and such, just great plain text syncing.
Are you a contributor to Wallabag?
I'm looking forward to an open source alternative.
I agree with everyone that the UX needs some clean-up (default notebook created automatically, large Add Note button, etc.), however, there is one functionality that Evernote removed a long time ago, and I'm still searching for an alternative, and this new app also doesn't support it.
The feature to create unlimited child notes. It used to be that you could have a tree structure with a parent note, then a few child notes, then a child of those child notes, etc., but last I checked, there's only one layer of depth. Only one child note can be created for each notebook and you can't set that child to be the parent of another note. I love all the other features, such as tagging, clipping, etc., but this was a killer feature that I haven't found anywhere else.
Do any of you know an alternative app that has this feature in a note-taking application?
They really seem to be trying hard to push away their current userbase and attract...something else.
I love Evernote. Since they are very slow and expensive, a real competitor would be great for them.
That's not to say that you can't or shouldn't try to scratch an itch. It just seems that attempting to create an alternative to Evernote is a target which is unlikely to be successful as an open source project or as a commercial project. Evernote has a budget, a full time, full-stack development team and lots of mojo. You aren't going to create a better Evernote. Instead, you should aim to create a far more powerful tool to address the target which Evernote is shooting for. That's the only way a small, scrappy dev shop with a product lacking polish is going to rattle a much larger competitor. Sure, this is open source, but it still needs to be compelling enough to grab momentum.
If you feel you don't have an answer which is much better, then perhaps throw your weight behind an existing open source project which is already kicking ass in that space. For example, Org Mode is arguably far more powerful than Evernote. There are pros and cons of each, but part of your effort could be in addressing the weaknesses of Org Mode.
As a person who works or has worked for a few companies that would never accept sending company data out to evernote I say making a better product for them shouldn't be too hard as long as you can install it locally. ("old" OneNote 2010 is brilliant here, but the new one insist on logging into the cloud. Fortunately the old one is more than good enough for now although I have a few things I'd really love to see. )
Unless you hook it up to a cloud service, it's more or less dependent on your local browser storage which is easily lost.
If you want to chat more email me at brian at iCouch.me. I'd be glad to share some knowledge about the space if you want.
I kind of feel that for me the pinnacle of Evernote was version 3. The lure of being able to dump any information into it and sort it later was basically what got me using it. I could launch the app, type in "Phil", and get Phils contact details from a business card I scanned in previously. I even used it a few times to save maps and a travel itineracy to my phone for conferences I attended. As the marketing put it, it was like a reliable "second brain". I don't think any of the alternatives I have tried have nailed this at all.
Support told me to save my note before moving to another device ... I guess I was the first user to forget that. They never apologized for their bug and I was a paid user back then.
I did quick search, and it actually looks feasible. Libs are available, PyQT, text file for storage, sync and storage reliability provided by Git. I even picked up name 'Lookout' :-). Now I only need the right motivation, perhaps if akonadi or k9 mail piss me off again.
It worked ok, until my needs started going beyond simple text and images. There is a horrible issue that caused due to file locking after you make changes because the Google Drive client and Zim aren't really talking to each other at all. Every once in a while GDrive will attempt to sync exacly when you are editing the file and fail.
Evernote's clipping/reading functions of the browser extension finally won me over. Evernote also has much better UX+UI compared to Zim.
Previously I found
https://github.com/grena/gruik Demo http://gruik.io/
https://github.com/shubik22/BetterNote Which clones the Evernote UI, demo http://www.betternote.us/
See also his request for help on HN.[2]
How can I create a note? When I press "New note" simply nothing happens. I can take no notes, add no documents -- nothing. Just two big white areas that are plainly saying and doing nothing.
Ok, I found the problem: When I use "German" interface language, it does not work. With English interface language there comes a new dialog. Guess, this is a bug.
username: test
pass: testtest
email: test@test.com
This is awesome, definitely a great start (as others have said). I'm currently working on a similar thing (in that it is open source and replaces some of the pay/ad-powered products that exist in that area) and appreciated seeing this.
Have you considered starting a small hosted service?
Could you please share the roadmap? When is the support for desktop clients planned?
When can evernote documents be migrated?
Judging by some of the comments here, something that simple would likely get more people to try it.
Will check this out!
Multiplatform is the difficult part.
If you would like to switch to are more capable framework it would be much easier to add some collaborative features. I recommend strongly looking at the Python Pyramid framework or at Flask (or at Django, if you want more "rails that lead you") as soon as possible, so this could grow into something really powerful. Many java frameworks also have everything you will need.
Unfortunately there are still many frameworks used nowadays, that are missing very important things around groups, ACLs / RBAC and collaboration. I do not know why, but especially in the PHP world these things seem to be looked at as some "advanced science", with a few exceptions.
Not integrating these features from the very beginning into your product will determine the long term direction of your project without you even knowing about it. This is the dangerous result of using popular, but very limited and limiting frameworks that do not support your growth.
An experienced developer will of course identify these weak points of a framework immediately, unfortunately many people still waste a lot of time with these misleading trap-frameworks, just because they are cool today.
It is important to spot at the weaknesses of these half-assed "frameworks" and clearly tag them as dangerous for serious project work. Laravel is ok for a quick and dirty prototype that helps you to model your ideas, like a brainstorming session, but should not be used for a real project. And this modelling phase should be very short, quickly moving on to the more involved engineering process that takes all aspects of a modern web app into consideration.
Hopefully it is not too late for your project to switch - it will be a very good investment of time, I promise!
> Unfortunately there are still many frameworks used nowadays, that are missing very important things around groups, ACLs / RBAC and collaboration.
The framework doesn't give you everything, but there is a huge community out there for these kinds of things. For example, there is a package that plugs right into Laravel called Entrust: https://github.com/Zizaco/entrust.
> An experienced developer will of course identify these weak points of a framework immediately
What other weak points do you see in Laravel?
> Laravel is ok for a quick and dirty prototype that helps you to model your ideas, like a brainstorming session, but should not be used for a real project.
This seems like an extremely biased opinion again.
I am not trying to start a framework or language flamewar, but it just seems like you are more comfortable with Java or Python and as such you see those as being better. Objectively I think that is far from the truth.
I am the first to criticize PHP, but I would never argue, that it is only good for prototyping. Of course you can use it in production. Also I do not see why you could prototype anything beyond a contact form faster in PHP than in another language, i certainly can not.
Flask has in no way integrated RBAC, you have to use plugins for that. I do not know Laravel very well but Google told me, that there are authentication plugins to implement role-based access, too, just like you would expect from any web framework that anyone has heard of.
OPs code also looks clean and well documented so I see no reason to make such a recommendation other than PHPhobia.