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Ask HN: Why are there no good note taking apps

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Re: Ask HN: Why are there no good note taking apps

#11

Post by throwmea »

PaulHoule wrote: post #9

(1) Sometimes good notetaking apps get ruined over time. I was a fan of Microsoft's OneNote for a while until they stopped saving notes in a well-documented XML format and kept all the data in the cloud. Microsoft also worked hard to kill OneNote by shoving it up every orifice of the Windows 8 user: print something? the default it is to save the printout to one note? Look for an application on the taskbar? Microsoft…

I can really agree on the first point but know too little about the second one. It is indeed a problem but i think in most cases keywords or tags should be enough to implement. Im not sure but even full text search should not take that long for plaintext/md notes.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no good note taking apps

#12

Post by PaulHoule »

throwmea wrote: post #11
PaulHoule wrote: post #9

(1) Sometimes good notetaking apps get ruined over time. I was a fan of Microsoft's OneNote for a while until they stopped saving notes in a well-documented XML format and kept all the data in the cloud. Microsoft also worked hard to kill OneNote by shoving it up every orifice of the Windows 8 user: print something? the default it is to save the printout to one note? Look for an application on the taskbar? Microsoft…

I can really agree on the first point but know too little about the second one. It is indeed a problem but i think in most cases keywords or tags should be enough to implement. Im not sure but even full text search should not take that long for plaintext/md notes.

It's not a problem in terms of speed or CPU consumption, it's a problem in terms of relevance. It's when the relevant document you are looking for is result #34 or when the relevant document doesn't appear at all.

People will say "just use Lucene, bro" but often Lucene's search ranking is awful. (I used to laugh at "just use Solr, bro" because Solr's search scales about as well as Bitcoin when you add more shards.)

As for tags that depends on people putting accurate tags on. People hate to hear it, but tags need to have an ontology behind them to be really effective. For instance there is an anime imageboard that has tags like "purple hair", "green eyes" and these are close to useless for an image that has two people in it.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no good note taking apps

#13

Post by throwmea »

PaulHoule wrote: post #12
throwmea wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can really agree on the first point but know too little about the second one. It is indeed a problem but i think in most cases keywords or tags should be enough to implement. Im not sure but even full text search should not take that long for plaintext/md notes.

It's not a problem in terms of speed or CPU consumption, it's a problem in terms of relevance. It's when the relevant document you are looking for is result #34 or when the relevant document doesn't appear at all. People will say "just use Lucene, bro" but often Lucene's search ranking is awful. (I used to laugh at "just use Solr, bro" because Solr's search scales about as well as Bitcoin when you add more shards.) A…

fair point i agree with that thanks for explaining

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no good note taking apps

#14

Post by eternityforest »

I've never seen any really great notetaking app, other than Obsidian.

I don't know why the open source community can't match it yet, but it probably will eventually.

I suspect it's because notetaking is essentially 100% UI and features, There are not many new algorithms involved, and but you need a good markdown edit component.

Also, cross platform is hard, until Flutter game along most of the ways to do it right involved tons of duplicated effort.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no good note taking apps

#18

Post by throwmea »

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #16

The logical answer seems to be that the feature set you are looking for is not important to most people. If, as you say, making the app is not hard and you think these features will be popular, then there is a great opportunity for you to make the app yourself.

fair point, currently im not good enough though

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no good note taking apps

#19

Post by blablabla123 »

> Offer a Web Editor with proper account and user management

> Let me share notes online. Let me generate a Link that i can send others ...

> Also i dont care about a fancy looking UI that uses 8GB of RAM and takes 10 Seconds to load, just make it work.

Well, this is pretty much Google Docs or any Open Source clone like Nextcloud or LibreOffice Online I guess. It's surely possible though to write something like that with a very lean UI.

I think many Web developers go by default for something more complex though because it's not necessarily more effort. And well, there are already a bizillion similar apps.

> Also i dont care about a fancy looking UI that uses 8GB of RAM and takes 10 Seconds to load, just make it work.

But this one might be relatively close to what you're looking for: https://github.com/DanielDe/org-web (At least if you self-host, the web server of org-web.org doesn't seem very fast :))

Re: Ask HN: Why are there no good note taking apps

#20

Post by throwmea »

blablabla123 wrote: post #19

> Offer a Web Editor with proper account and user management > Let me share notes online. Let me generate a Link that i can send others ... > Also i dont care about a fancy looking UI that uses 8GB of RAM and takes 10 Seconds to load, just make it work. Well, this is pretty much Google Docs or any Open Source clone like Nextcloud or LibreOffice Online I guess. It's surely possible though to write something like that…

thanks i will check it out that looks interesting
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