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Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing

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Re: Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing

#51

Post by Cthulhu_ »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #40
aantix wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on your expectations - do you assume that the software will be maintained indefinitely with security fixes, bug fixes, features, etc?

I hate fees but you're right. In the past when a developer shipped software they could move on to other things, but these days there's always a new version to ship with some sort of upgrade or patch. That said, some apps still don't need frequent updates, and those apps should be offered as a traditional purchase.

In which case you get what you pay for; there are plenty of apps like that that don't work anymore because they are one-off purchases and the author does not want to fix issues that make the app no longer work on newer versions of your OS of choice.

Re: Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing

#52

Post by Cthulhu_ »

WaltonGoggins wrote: post #16
yosito wrote: post #3

This app looks very nice, and I love markdown. But I am not prepared to pay £8+ per month for a Markdown notes app that works on all my devices, especially if it exerts control over what I can do with my own files. I can sync my Markdown directory via Dropbox, iCloud, Nextcloud, etc and edit the files with things like Obsidian, 1Writer, VSCode or any one of hundreds of Markdown editors.

It's £6 per month if you pay yearly. Also if you are a student you can get a 50% discount. Honestly it costs a negligible amount, that's less than a single day's worth of travel on the tube.

I don't travel on the tube though, or pay for Starbucks, or whatever analogy you're trying to come up with. My current note taking solution - a folder with .md files - is free. What's the compelling argument for this app?

Granted, it's really difficult to compete with free, and the note taking space is probably one of the most saturated software markets there is.

Re: Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing

#53

Post by interleave »

caslon wrote: post #4

I'm going to get ahead of the curve and warn everyone: Yes, Electron web application. Yes, noticeable input delay. Yes, memory consumption is how you might expect it to be. They distribute on Linux with an AppImage, though, which at least isn't a Snap or Flatpak, so there's that, I guess. If you want a non-proprietary Electron application, take a look at Logseq, or Athens (YC some year that I'm too lazy to look up).…

Good idea to preempt those points, keeps the conversation focused imho.

One thing I noticed that I hadn't seen in any other Electron note-taking apps yet is that it's using Google Analytics to track usage but I didn't see any consent banner (?)

How to poke around: cd Supernotes.app/Contents/Resources/; npx asar extract app.asar ./; cd web; cat index.html

Re: Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing

#54

Post by samhw »

liampmccabe wrote: post #32
renw0rp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wanted to say that you could try a bit harder to justify the price rather than just saying it's "negligible". I think that's very subjective and I personally don't think it's a reasonable price to pay for just storing markdown files in the cloud.

"just storing markdown files" Ironically you could do the same with your replies.

Yeah, I 100% agree. It's rather tonedeaf to criticise that commenter for diminishing the cost, and then diminish in exactly the same way the work involved in creating this.

And I'm so tired of the game of "describe a successful tech product in a way that makes it sound silly". Yeah, Twitter is just storing a load of VARCHAR(240)s, and Facebook is just an undirected graph, and Jackson Pollock's paintings are just splatters, etc. I could build it myself! Except... I don't, because it's not that easy, and I know it isn't when I think about it for more than 1.7 seconds.

Re: Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing

#55

Post by cercatrova »

yosito wrote: post #3

This app looks very nice, and I love markdown. But I am not prepared to pay £8+ per month for a Markdown notes app that works on all my devices, especially if it exerts control over what I can do with my own files. I can sync my Markdown directory via Dropbox, iCloud, Nextcloud, etc and edit the files with things like Obsidian, 1Writer, VSCode or any one of hundreds of Markdown editors.

If you'd like to sync it yourself, then by all means do so. I don't necessarily understand comments like these, if the user doesn't like it, no one is forcing them to buy it, especially if there are other solutions as you've stated.

Re: Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing

#57

Post by samhw »

mwcampbell wrote: post #19

I'm always curious about the tech choices in desktop applications that say they're fast, so I downloaded this one and was a bit surprised to find that it's an Electron app. I'm not here to criticize that, though. Instead, I'm curious about what Electron build toolchain the developers are using. Maybe my knowledge of Electron build tools is a bit behind, but this is the first time I've seen an Electron app where, in t…

I'm pretty sure 'fast' is referring to the runtime performance rather than the download size. (The latter does sound less than ideal, but my hunch is that most people simply do not care about download size, in this day and age.)

Re: Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing

#58

Post by ydant »

lf-non wrote: post #18
AitchEmArsey wrote: post #12

Looks great - so much so that I assumed it would be for Apple devices only, so congratulations and thanks for the Linux support. I'll try it in a bake-off with Obsidian, but the main down-side for me is "notes stored on our servers" - I'd happily sacrifice the collaboration features for a self-hosted option with my data kept as regular text files as much as possible.

I haven't used obsidian, but have been using Logseq [1] (which a lot of people have mentioned to be similar) for over a year now and super happy with it. The data is stored locally as md files, can be versioned using git which is a big plus for me. Also the workflowy-inspired zoomable bullet list is great to have for large outlines. With the built in support for tags, image pasting, tasks, journaling, templates and s…

In the past year I've been on a journey of note-taking / personal knowledgebase:

  - Trillium Notes [0]
  - Joplin [1]
  - others I can't remember
  - Obsidian [2] 
  - Emacs/org-mode
  - Logseq [3]
  - and now back to Obsidian again
Logseq was really promising in concept - pulls a lot of cool concepts in from the others and supports org files. But I found it to be incredibly slow and laggy with my existing mixed org/markdown files. Unusably so, so I ditched it quickly.

Obsidian has come a long way from where it was a year ago in terms of community plugins. There's some crazy stuff you can do with plugins like obsidian-dataview [4], obsidian-itinerary [5], quickadd [6], obsidian-Kanban [7]. It's no Emacs in terms of customizability, but it's pretty damned close. And Obsidian doesn't have the random freezes and random "oops I accidentally deleted a huge chunk of nested notes" that org-mode constantly exposed me to. I'm loving Obsidian (again). As long as you don't mind JavaScript for plugins and closed source core app, it's a super-powerful and performant option worth checking out.

The biggest thing Obsidian lacks right now that SuperNotes 2 seems to offer is good sharing / collaboration between people - for me, I just want to be able to have shared notes with my partner, but sharing with a team would be great, too. I'm not the target audience for SuperNotes 2, but it is good to continue to see competition in this space - the innovation it drives is exciting.

  - [0] https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/
  - [1] https://joplinapp.org/
  - [2] https://obsidian.md/
  - [3] https://logseq.com/
  - [4] https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview/
  - [5] https://github.com/coddingtonbear/obsidian-itinerary
  - [6] https://github.com/chhoumann/quickadd
  - [7] https://github.com/mgmeyers/obsidian-kanban

Re: Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing

#59

Post by yellowbird »

AitchEmArsey wrote: post #12

Looks great - so much so that I assumed it would be for Apple devices only, so congratulations and thanks for the Linux support. I'll try it in a bake-off with Obsidian, but the main down-side for me is "notes stored on our servers" - I'd happily sacrifice the collaboration features for a self-hosted option with my data kept as regular text files as much as possible.

Obsidian Personal is free and seems to fit your self-hosting needs better.

Re: Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing

#60

Post by renw0rp »

samhw wrote: post #54
liampmccabe wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"just storing markdown files" Ironically you could do the same with your replies.

Yeah, I 100% agree. It's rather tonedeaf to criticise that commenter for diminishing the cost, and then diminish in exactly the same way the work involved in creating this. And I'm so tired of the game of "describe a successful tech product in a way that makes it sound silly". Yeah, Twitter is just storing a load of VARCHAR(240)s, and Facebook is just an undirected graph, and Jackson Pollock's paintings are just spla…

Storing, updating and deleting varchars is what most of enterprise and startup developers do for living. It can't be that hard.
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