It's really neat to see that the backend is built with RethinkDB and Common Lisp. I am looking forward to setting up my own instance from source and playing around with it. Great project.
Show HN: Turtl – A secure, encrypted Evernote alternative
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Re: Show HN: Turtl – A secure, encrypted Evernote alternative
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
TL;DR for parent comment: "It's not as mature as Evernote, and it has a bigger footprint." Therefore your comment is unfair: if provides a less complex evernote function that many could use. Neither of these is unfixable over time, as the product develops, and some may be a function of the increased security implementation. None of these criticisms stops the app being usable, as far as I can see.
> Neither of these is unfixable over time JS on desktop is never going to perform well.
maybe not well, but possibly well enough.
Re: Show HN: Turtl – A secure, encrypted Evernote alternative
#23Does it run on my own server, encrypting data with keys the server never sees?
Yes.
Re: Show HN: Turtl – A secure, encrypted Evernote alternative
#24Is something wrong with the CSS on the site? Everything looks kind of overly large in my browser (Desktop Linux Chrome).
Re: Show HN: Turtl – A secure, encrypted Evernote alternative
#25I'm sorry but I don't think you should call this an Evernote alternative. - No iOS client (Although the site does say coming soon) - No Firefox webclipper - No Web interface - Large / heavy application - No Drawing / Diagram support - The app is not native, it's seems it's a web frame It's interface doesn't feel very snappy, it feels like it's built with in a Javascript framework perhaps? Evernote has been around for…
Thanks for the honest feedback! The app IS a web frame, both on desktop an mobile. TBH it's pretty much the only way I can maintain it on 4 (and soon 5) different platforms efficiently.
I will say this: Turtl will queue encryption/decryption in background threads so it does utilize cores while doing heavy processing. As far as how it utilizes cores in the main UI, that's really up to the underlying javascript engine, which most likely will be single-threaded unless instructed otherwise.
> I'm really sorry to be quite harsh
Not harsh at all. Turtl is a start, a goal. Evernote has so many features and so many use-cases for so many people. I agree saying it's a viable alternative right now isn't entirely true, but for those who value privacy over features, Turtl is worth a look.
Re: Show HN: Turtl – A secure, encrypted Evernote alternative
#26I'm sorry but I don't think you should call this an Evernote alternative. - No iOS client (Although the site does say coming soon) - No Firefox webclipper - No Web interface - Large / heavy application - No Drawing / Diagram support - The app is not native, it's seems it's a web frame It's interface doesn't feel very snappy, it feels like it's built with in a Javascript framework perhaps? Evernote has been around for…
Thanks for the honest feedback! The app IS a web frame, both on desktop an mobile. TBH it's pretty much the only way I can maintain it on 4 (and soon 5) different platforms efficiently. I will say this: Turtl will queue encryption/decryption in background threads so it does utilize cores while doing heavy processing. As far as how it utilizes cores in the main UI, that's really up to the underlying javascript engine,…
Great response, thanks for taking the time to read it, I always feel really quite guilty when someone puts a lot of hard work and passion into something they care about and I feel I need to point out problems - I am constantly conflicted between not saying anything and speaking up, in this case I spoke up because I absolutely agree with the need for Evernote-like products.
Regardless of my technical opinions congratulations on launching your app publicly and I'm sure you learnt a lot along the way.
*Edit: Typos
Re: Show HN: Turtl – A secure, encrypted Evernote alternative
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm seeing about 80% less power on a mid-2012 Macbook Air with a 2GHz Core i7 for Evernote vs. Turtl. I'm guessing more parallelization is even more beneficial on lower speed multi-core processors.
If it is a JS app of some kind that would make sense, I've been ranting a lot about JS apps recently so I won't go into it here - needless to say they're anything but efficient in my experience. Edit: Also, I should note that I have many hundreds of notes in Evernote, where I created 15-20 in this app, I would have expected Evernote to need more resources to search such a large number of notes. ~/Library/Application…
Turtl stores all notes in what amounts to Chrome's IndexedDB engine (encrypted...no plaintext data is stored on disk). So it really comes down to the efficiency of IndexedDB's storage engine when translating notes to disk space.
We do utilize multiple core when encrypting/decrypting, but things like indexing and searching all take place on the same thread the app runs on.
This is something that could be improved in the future.
Re: Show HN: Turtl – A secure, encrypted Evernote alternative
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Neither of these is unfixable over time JS on desktop is never going to perform well.
maybe not well, but possibly well enough.
Not from what I've seen, after hosting a bunch of NodeJS based web-apps I can tell you it doesn't perform well on the server-side or on the desktop. It's a decent rapid prototyping language / tool - but it's taking what should (or perhaps shouldn't) be in a web browser, wrapping it up and hosting it somewhere that the designers of products often don't know much about the landscape.
Re: Show HN: Turtl – A secure, encrypted Evernote alternative
#29I saw the "pricing" link at the top and was about to shit all over this for a privacy oriented app being closed source, until I scrolled to the very bottom and saw the innocuous open source note. May want to emphasize that more.
This app has been a balance between advertising the fact that it's open source and just presenting itself as a "privacy app" without shoving it in people's faces. Maybe it should be a bit more prominent (and thanks for reading to the bottom)!
To be clear, the pricing section only applies if you connect Turtl to our hosted service. If you run your own server, the only pricing that applies is the price you pay for the server you run it on.
Re: Show HN: Turtl – A secure, encrypted Evernote alternative
#30Evernote made the mistake of going multiplatform really aggressively and too much scope creep. I'm glad to see they're scaling back a lot of their scope creep. Goo on you for trying to do this. Be ambitious and swing for the fences. Evernote's product crashes frequently.
On which platform? I use Evernote a lot on Windows and Android, and a bit on iOS, and haven't seen a crash in a very long time.
OSX: lots of crashes, sync errors, etc.