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Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

standardnotes.org

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Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#51

Post by buzzert »

titzer wrote: post #40
titzer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

..and a link to the source code. After the long rant about software complexity, I wanted to see their code to see if they walk the walk.

..which I googled for and found on GitHub. > We believe in building software that lasts . (emphasis theirs). So, I had a look. Their GitHub has dozens of repos, and the desktop one depends on the web one? Wait, the whole thing is written in typescript? I have absolutely nothing against typescript, but I honestly would have expected a boring language, with a simple repo, not with git submodules....and definitely not s…

I don’t know much about TS/Yarn, but is this really all the dependencies they have? https://github.com/standardnotes/desktop/blob/develop/yarn.l...

That’s pretty insane if so. Especially for a “simple” note taking app.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#52

Post by 3v1n0 »

climb_stealth wrote: post #17

I'm happy with Standard Notes. I just checked and my oldest note is from 13/04/2017 so it has been a few years. I don't use the desktop app as the web version works fine. The Android app works fine as well. Sync is great and note edit history is great. I mostly use plain text and the task editor for ticking off things. It works, it's open source, it gets out of your way and Mo and team are responsive when rare issues…

I've given the Android version a quick try, but the task editor is not supported in the free version, isn't it?

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#53

Post by ergot_vacation »

I don't mean to be snarky, but what's the purpose of apps like this? Notepad.exe is 227 KB, runs instantly and flawlessly on even ancient environments, and gives all the basics. If you need something more "Power User," Notepad++ gives some language-sensitive formatting, tabs for easy switching between files, and plugins for custom use cases.

If you need something more specific to a given language, that's an IDE, not a note taking program. If you need to write something with a bunch of rich formatting, that's a word processor, not a note taking program.

The point of a note taking program is to be as blindingly simple, fast, and reliable as possible. It's the software equivalent of grabbing a scrap of paper (or maybe a little flip notebook) and scratching something down before you forget it. All this complexity defeats the purpose. A 200MB Electron app with web integration definitely defeats the purpose.

For the curious and lazy, this is what it looks like: https://files.catbox.moe/kcelmg.PNG. Note that this was after I clicked off a large, complex dialog nagging me to create an account and sign in. Already this looks way too complex for my taste.

Why are people so endlessly fascinated with forcing everything on the cloud? I have txt and rtf documents from decades ago that have survived through backup after backup. Meanwhile, if this program's servers go down tomorrow, tough luck.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#55

Post by akst »

titzer wrote: post #40
titzer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

..and a link to the source code. After the long rant about software complexity, I wanted to see their code to see if they walk the walk.

..which I googled for and found on GitHub. > We believe in building software that lasts . (emphasis theirs). So, I had a look. Their GitHub has dozens of repos, and the desktop one depends on the web one? Wait, the whole thing is written in typescript? I have absolutely nothing against typescript, but I honestly would have expected a boring language, with a simple repo, not with git submodules....and definitely not s…

Is it really that surprising they’re using web tech?

Putting whether it’s an appropriate use of web technology or not aside, I’m not quite sure how they would be able to build a cross platform application [2] with a small team [1] without largely relying on code reuse of some kind. For better or worse, web tech has been the status quo for some time. Ironically making this the boring route for making these apps.

As much as I hate how resource intensive these apps are, it’s also not really that surprising they’re built this way, knowing the current alternatives and their barriers to entry.

Maybe one day we’ll have lighter weight alternatives, that are just as easy to use. or maybe they exist and they’re just not that well known ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But yeah their “building something that lasts” just sounds like marketing speak

[1] I’m assuming it’s a small company (since I’ve never heard of this before)

[2] the app appears to support iOS, Android, Linux, macOS, windows & the web

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#56

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

ergot_vacation wrote: post #53

I don't mean to be snarky, but what's the purpose of apps like this? Notepad.exe is 227 KB, runs instantly and flawlessly on even ancient environments, and gives all the basics. If you need something more "Power User," Notepad++ gives some language-sensitive formatting, tabs for easy switching between files, and plugins for custom use cases. If you need something more specific to a given language, that's an IDE, not…

I see comments like this from time to time and can’t help but wonder if they’re serious or just satire at this point. People have mobile devices. People have windows and Mac (and Linux!) devices. People want seamless sync and sharing, simple formatting, for it to work across platforms, and for it to be exportable into some portable format.

Sure, you can spend a lot of time forcing notepad and word into some sad version of a real app. Or you can pony up $5-10 a month, save your time for something valuable, and actually have a note taking app that’ll serve you well.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#57

Post by 13rac1 »

ergot_vacation wrote: post #53

I don't mean to be snarky, but what's the purpose of apps like this? Notepad.exe is 227 KB, runs instantly and flawlessly on even ancient environments, and gives all the basics. If you need something more "Power User," Notepad++ gives some language-sensitive formatting, tabs for easy switching between files, and plugins for custom use cases. If you need something more specific to a given language, that's an IDE, not…

> I don't mean to be snarky, but what's the purpose of apps like this?

1. Note organization via tags with a searchable database 2. Secure off-site backup 3. Device-to-device syncing

I'm sure there are more. I wish it wasn't written in Electron, but it wouldn't exist otherwise.

As a web application: https://app.standardnotes.org/

> Meanwhile, if this program's servers go down tomorrow, tough luck.

It is open source, you can run the server yourself: https://github.com/standardnotes/syncing-server

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#58

Post by bmarquez »

I have a love/hate relationship with Standard Notes (and with most encrypted editors in general).

Standard Notes is one of the few apps that has end-to-end encrytion AND password protection on the desktop (or Face ID on mobile devices). Joplin is E2E but refuses to encrypt locally, meaning someone who browses your computer can view your notes unless you use Joplin Portable in an encrypted container (with the added performance overhead).

However, compared to Joplin, uploading images to notes is a pain. Standard Notes has multiple text editor options and they all suck. Only the "bold" editor allows you to upload images, and using FileSafe is extremely fiddly. Personally I would rather have one really good text editor than a bunch of half-baked ones.

But Joplin is sluggish compared to both Standard Notes and Obsidian.md. Obsidian.md has the benefit of having everything as plain text files, for easy editing in other apps (there's also no need to export anything if they go out of business compared to Standard Notes/Joplin). But Obsidian's mobile app is still in development, and I'm a bit iffy about buying another subscription just for encrypted sync.

...And, if open source doesn't matter to you, there's always Microsoft OneNote.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#59

Post by 13rac1 »

legerdemain wrote: post #4

After clicking around in growing confusion, I finally found a single screenshot of the application in action in the GitHub README file. Spoiler: it looks like any other note-taking application.

I was confused too without a screenshot in the readme, but realized I could just run it: https://app.standardnotes.org/

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#60

Post by ncallaway »

buzzert wrote: post #51
titzer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

..which I googled for and found on GitHub. > We believe in building software that lasts . (emphasis theirs). So, I had a look. Their GitHub has dozens of repos, and the desktop one depends on the web one? Wait, the whole thing is written in typescript? I have absolutely nothing against typescript, but I honestly would have expected a boring language, with a simple repo, not with git submodules....and definitely not s…

I don’t know much about TS/Yarn, but is this really all the dependencies they have? https://github.com/standardnotes/desktop/blob/develop/yarn.l... That’s pretty insane if so. Especially for a “simple” note taking app.

That's the transitive closure of their dependencies, yes.

This file contains their list of direct dependencies (which is a lot smaller, but that just tells you how much of a dependency explosion you get when you use `npm` packages): https://github.com/standardnotes/desktop/blob/develop/packag...

One thing to note is the yarn.lock is probably the transitive closure of the compile-time dependencies (`devDependencies`) and run-time dependencies (`dependencies`), so it's possible that the dependencies that actually ship with the application are quite a bit smaller.

For example, `webpack` is in the devDependencies, which is the build tool. So the `yarn.lock` is listing all of the dependencies both for the runtime libraries that get used, but also the dependencies for all the build tooling as well.

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