Launch HN: Clover (YC S20) – Notes, whiteboarding, and daily planner in one tool

Delighted to see this. Nearly a decade ago I made a sort of virtual desk blotter which let you put notes or drawings anywhere. It was during paternity leave after my first child was born and I was in that weird head space of free association caused by extreme sleep deprivation. I've since discovered One Note which has that as a core UX device, but I still think mine was nicer, though I never really finished it.

Clover's Surface seems like a grown-up, slick version of what I was trying to achieve on my own. So I'm really pleased you're making a business out of it. And it's a desktop app!

I wish Apple hadn't ditched the whole OpenDoc thing - it'd be so good to draw a frame and have that frame be, say, an Affinity Designer document that you could edit directly in the Surface. (A bit like OLE with an Excel sheet in a Word doc in the old days on Windows.) This feels like such an amazing organizational model for complex, multi-tool, project-based work. At least, that's how I'll use it. But this is only 2 minutes into my use of the product...

Congrats, it's great. And the price is attractive too - this is one I really hope I end up subscribing to as I go through the trial.

Wonderful take on what's missing in current notetaking. Agree that text editors are not good for thinking (forcing the constraint of linearity "Great ideas don't flow out of us with a beginning, a middle and an end"

I use only native apps for thinking. Latency kills my train of thought. And web apps have plenty! Both typing latency (typometer, a java app, shows 45ms in best case scenario!) and creation/navigation latency (going back to a previous page, creating a new one). But I know my requirements are pretty unique, I'm not representative of the general public. Best of luck!

Loving it so far, and all I've explored is the Daily Notes. My intention is to try it long-term.

The major missing feature that jumps out at me is the "create link" UX - I'd love to be able to highlight some text and paste a url from my clipboard to create a link. This is how Notion, Slack and GitHub work, and it's fast becoming a must-have!

It's weasel words. "Personal information" is not strictly "personally identifiable"; it doesn't matter that you can trivially de-anonymize people with even a modest amount of data.