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Thank you! Yes, I have plans for an iOS app, but want to add a few things to the Mac app before that. I have a block-based editor 70% ready and want to get that shipped before working on an iOS version. Syncing will work through iCloud Drive. Since the app already saves as plain files and folders there is not a lot of work needed there (mainly conflict handling).

If you don't renew you can still use the app and open and edit all your existing notes. Good point, I need to make this more clear on the site. HTML vs. ZIP vs. power user: I'm going for the most common denominator, the average user with a browser :)

Yes, it is aimed more at academia and professionals who want/need to preserve knowledge in a structured way. Support for footnotes is planned.

Thank you! Those last 10% always seem to take just as long as the first 90! Ask me one day about that typo that a friend discovered that showed in all marketing materials so that I had to redo all screenshots and the demo video.

Pricing: yes, agreed.

One Page Summaries: I have more ideas on that front. I'd like to add a way to "save" the summary config as kind of a "smart search" so that you could have them in the outline on the left or even embedded as a block inside a note.

Another idea is a kind of command line syntax for the location bar:

. / #meetingminutes / H2:Lessons Learned | View:OnePageSummary

This would find all notes tagged "meetingminutes" in the current note and below, pull all sections with level 2 headings "Lessons Learned" and show them as summary on one page.

Agreed, you'd have to localize the description to support all currencies and then update whenever the price tiers or tax rates change. For the website: I just added the pricing in USD.

Thanks for your feedback and encouragement!

I'm not taking this personal, I appreciate the feedback and I knew beforehand that subscriptions are controversial.

I contemplated the pricing model for a very long time going back and forth between the two options in my head multiple times.

In the end, the argument that convinced me what that with a subscription my focus is on adding features for my existing users. I'm constantly thinking "How can I make the app better for my users to keep my subscribers"?

Whereas for a single purchase I have to constantly think "What can I add to attract more users"?. All my other apps use one-time payments and sometimes it really pains me to put feature requests on my backpack knowing that I will never get to implement them, because they would not increase the visibility of the app.

Mobile: I have an iOS app planned, but it will take some time because I have a number of features that I want to add to the Mac app first (block based editor, smart search folders, larger calendar view).

Thanks for your feedback and your kind words!

I considered textbundle, but went for HTML for one reason: data accessibility. Imagine in 20 years from now you'd want to access your data and do not have the app around for some reason. You would need to find another app that supports the .textbundle format. Or you would need to manually rename all .textbundle notes to .zip to extract them. Even if a normal user would know about this, it would still be a pain. With HTML you can drag a note into a browser and see the contents. Links to other notes will work as well. Images will show right away, too. Pros and cons for each format...

Thank your for part 1 and I hear you for part 2 :)

Thanks for your feedback! At what price would you consider the app for a one time purchase?

Yes, absolutely valid concerns and I've though about those.

When cancelling the subscription, all existing notes and all data remains fully accessible (read and write). It’s a knowledge base, after all. Projects with more than 50 notes will not support adding new notes, but all other features remain fully functional.

About the idea of keeping the latest version without updates: interesting, but tricky to implement in the App Store. You'd need a feature switch for everything. OS compatibility updates would still need to go through or the app would not survive in the App Store (typically this is what would get users to upgrade for apps distributed outside of the App Store).

Even if the app were to disappear, you could still access your notes with a browser and copy the data over to another app. Not as convenient as using text files, but the ability to embed images into the notes led me to go with HTML.

Happy to answer more questions!

Sorry for the confusion. The app launched only yesterday. I just added the pricing details to the website. As another commenter pointed out, the tricky part is that the App Store adjusts prices for each country, but I will figure something out.

Exactly. I just added the pricing details in USD and will figure something out.

I hear you. Trouble is, paid upgrades are tricky to implement in the MAS. About data longevity: if you cancel your subscription, you cannot add new notes, but you retain full access to all existing notes and all features remain active (you can edit existing notes, move stuff around, etc.). A knowledge base that locks you out once you cancel would be of no use...

Fixed now, thanks a lot!

Thanks for the heads-up! Fixed now. Of course it had to be that heading ;)

Awesome! Let me know how the app works out for you. One pet peeve of mine is that many notes apps make it easy to enter notes, but when it comes to retrieving content all I'm left with is full text search.

I added two additional ways, the spreadsheet view and one page summaries. The summaries are shown towards the end of the demo video. If you take lots of notes, this might be useful for you to extract knowledge from your notes.

Thanks for your feedback! I was looking for a voice over that does not sound as polished as a radio ad. Sounds like I went a bit overboard with that :)

Awesome, thanks for your feedback! Yes, I plan to provide continued updates. I have lots of more ideas (block based editor, large calendar view, smart search folders, …). I considered a one-time paid with paid upgrades model, but decided to use a subscription.

What would be your use case and is there something in particular that leaves you undecided between Joplin and StandardNotes?

Thanks for your feedback! The spreadsheet view works in combination with metadata fields.

Let's say you have a number of notes for your contacts. You tag each note with #contact and add a few fields like "Name", "Department", "Diet".

Type #contact into the location bar to find all contacts and switch from there to the spreadsheet view.

You'll get a list of your contacts and you can quickly tell who is a vegetarian, for example. Great for planning a party (once in person meetings are a thing again).

Another neat thing:

Add a new note and add the tag #contact. The right sidebar will now suggest fields and headings that you used in other contact notes. This way you can use the same fields to keep your notes consistent.

Hi HN,

I spent the past 3 years working on a personal notes app that focuses on data longevity. Everything is saved as simple files and folders. In fact, you can open any folder as notebook. External documents/files/PDFs can live alongside notes (the app shows a preview).

Files are saved as HTML to ensure that even in 20 years form now you can still access your notes with a browser even if the app should not be around.

Tags, bi-directional links, rich text, images are supported. I also added a few neat features to extract knowledge from notes like a spreadsheet view and one page summaries.

For example, let’s say you keep monthly project review notes, each with a section “Lessons Learned”. You can generate a page with all “Lessons Learned” sections from all notes tagged #postmortem to see them all on a single page.

I’m very happy that the app finally went live. Many of you will know that the last 20% of actually getting a project out of the door seem to take just as much work as the first 80% (hat tip to Vilfredo).

Looking forward to your feedback!

Thanks for the details. I'll take a closer look. The documents of my app can get quite large, up to 300 to 400 MB (lots of small images). I was thinking to use SQLite as an alternative to the ZIP based format that I'm using at the moment, hoping to avoid the working copy route that I use today, but looks like that would be tricky.

Well, I'm thinking of an app that lets the user edit some kind of document. At some point the changes have to be saved.

Could this happen to the "live" file or would the workaround be to keep a temporary copy somewhere away from the user and copy that back and forth?

Is SQLite a good choice for a user facing file format?

I.e. were the user can access the database file in Finder/Explorer and make a copy at any point in time to share, backup, etc. Would that copy be consistent?

Is there a way to get the drive SMART status without having to install 3rd party tools that run as root (or another safe way, e.g. through a VM or rolling back an APFS snapshot afterwards, etc.)?

I wouldn't mind writing a bit of code either to get these stats. I have a 2020 Intel Mac Mini and an old MacBook Pro with a Samsung Evo 840.

So an iPad Pro running Big Sur? Combined with the Magic Keyboard, interesting... although I'd say an M1 Mac with a touch display is more likely. We'll see.

I'm not too fond of the extra spacing and padding on Big Sur either. It reduces information density.

All in preparation for a MacBook Touch?

Love the metaphor:

"It’s thanks to well-designed user interfaces that we enjoy driving a classic car, or shooting with a 50-year-old film camera, or listening to vinyl records on a 40-year-old record-player and hi-fi stereo."

Anyone still remember Apple Remote?

It used to come free with your MacBook and is to this day one of my favorite features of my mid 2012 MBP that I will miss terribly once I have to upgrade (no Big Sur support...).

A data point: 11 years of note taking → 1,860 notes.

I've been keeping notes for work in a structured way for quite some time.

I log everything that I might want to recall later (project/app ideas, active projects, meeting minutes, phone call logs, people/companies I interacted with).

Typically I use two methods for retrieval:

(1) full text search: I simply search for a keyword; most common access

(2) via backlinks: mostly for people when I need to figure out when I last talked to a person and what we agreed upon. I link the person in each meeting minute so that I get a list for links on the person's page.

Frequency of access:

- For active projects, pretty much each (work) day

- For older notes, infrequently, maybe once a month. The older a note becomes, the less likely it is that I will have to access it.

I started out with Circus Ponies Notebook, migrated to Scrivener, and two years ago started working on my own app, Life Notes[0] (I really wanted links and backlinks and the ability to keep regular files/PDFs next to my notes).

[0]: http://kitestack.com/lifenotes