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Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)

nino.app

101–110 of 269 posts

Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)

#101

Security & privacy are tough selling points; fewer people care about either than you may think, and the existing platforms provide a lot more than most who do care are willing to admit. Also the “too many tools” pitch sounds like an unhinged rant. There’s almost certainly a better way to phrase that, because otherwise the idea that the mere existence of a wide variety of tools bothers you doesn’t stand up to the “so…

On your first point: I think the trend is more will start to care. I agree many platforms provide a lot of security features, but few allow you to encrypt with custom keys though. On your second point: That's a good point, bad phrasing on my part. Thanks for the feedback.

Something to keep in mind about all this (and something that my wife reminds me of when I get annoyed trying to write product descriptions) is that the description and the product are separate. In that, if I struggle to write a description that is attractive to everyone, it doesn't necessarily mean that the unattracted ones won't like the product. And some that are attracted to the description will dislike the product.

This is just part of the difficulty of marketing; you can't please everyone. You have to figure out what problems the bulk of your possible user market are trying to solve that your app solves, and present that plainly and concisely. Flowery language tends to obfuscate; just plain simple "If you have problems XYZ, this will solve those", then link to greater detail about how each of X, Y, and Z, are solved.

It's hard to do this because we are so used to seeing mid level manager bullshit PR speak on every product page we look at; it seems like a requirement. I've had very refreshing experiences with product descriptions written by a technical writer who just did not give a fuck. Just wrote it up like he was sending an email about a bug report, published it, and it was fantastic.

Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)

#102

So are you competing with 18 different products at the same time? Or is this just a glorified note taking & publishing app? Either way I am getting strong https://zombo.com/ vibes from the description here and your landing page. Instead of a clear problem statement and user use cases, you have this word salad of “consolidation” (of what?), “superapp” (that does what?), “unmatched privacy” (to do privately what?) and…

The same thing as Microsoft or Google suites, which is to minimize workflow and maximize productivity by allowing apps to be interconnected.

I will say however that I agree, the page doesn’t sell me on much. The apps/“modules” themselves are not well displayed and I am not convinced even by its unique points such as its (eventual?) encryption, namely due to how opaque it all is.

I wish it was more transparent, between its file formats, its encryption standards and implementation, and how it actually works.

Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)

#104
Do not take it as a judgment of your work, it's instead a broad observation using your work as a catalyzer to state it: I have much more integration with a much older app, it's name is Emacs, in my case it feature:

- a Windows Manager, module named EXWM

- a very powerful noting tool, org-mode

- integrate to the note module there is file attachments, calendar, tasks, ...

- a mail module, notmuch in my case, fully usable inside the note tool, so I can link a single message, a thread or a search query in a note, something simple as notmuch-search:tag:unread that open all my unread messages.

- of course being a fully user programmable environment a mere link can execute code, meaning I have a clickable link to transform a note into a slide (zpresent, my favorite, but a mere zoom might suffice in most cases), a link can open a mail compose buffer and so on

- I have various nice file handling goodies like mass renaming, regex selection and so on.

This since DECADES. Now ending the joke the statement: classic desktop model feature an OS witch is a complete user-programming environment, apps are just bits of code, listings part of the OS, meaning that if you have a CAS functionality you can solve an ODE inside an email you compose, annotating it while composing and made a slide out of it. Take a look at https://youtu.be/B6jfrrwR10k for Emacs, a demo for Pharo (a modern Smalltalk, the oldest of such classic desktop systems from Xerox) https://youtu.be/Pot9GnHFOVU and so on.

The statement is simple: for COMMERCIAL REASONS we tried to subdivide and isolate software to sell it in pieces, oh, for decades people have SUFFERED without knowing the existence of alternatives such crappy model, a step at a time, with decades of time in between old features are reintroduced selling them as news while they aren't, and only when someone have found a way to made them anti-user.

Your project actually use one of such step, the modern web, witch is a limited and limiting anti-user version of classic DocUIs, since the user have essentially no practical control of them, at least not a comfy one, and rediscover the power of integration, but limited due to the limitation of today tools. Not made do mix data and code, not made for end-users programming and so on. I've no doubt it can succeed simply because it's a piece of an ancient tech we need, but the point remain: modern software is untenable and it block an enormous slice of potential innovation and computing power just to enslave users.

Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)

#105
I’d suggest making a demo video for your landing page. The concepts make sense, but to grok how they can be used, some demos (perhaps with SEO landing pages like “Nino for project management” or “Nino for documentation”) would be helpful.

Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)

#107
post #28

As no one has asked so far, I’ll have to do it, how does this differentiate itself from Lotus Notes?

I hope, for OP's sake, that it's not a bloated, corruption-prone, garbage-pile of junk. That would already differentiate it quite well from Notes.

Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)

#108
Single biggest thing you need to nail down fast: the data model. It is extremely hard to shift as things grow, and without careful thought, it’ll turn into a horrifying miasma of JSONB columns, duplicated data, orphaned rows, and garbage performance.

Customers are going to store surprisingly large items in Docs, where you’d be tempted to inline them instead of offloading to S3 et al.

Chat practically needs to be its own DB. Discord runs on Scylla, Slack runs on Vitess over MySQL. The needs of chat access are wildly different from other types of storage.

If you’re doing any kind of active-active, have a plan for how to move off of that, because it does not scale (at least, not without breath-takingly expensive hardware).

Source: DBRE at one of your competitors.

EDIT: The fact that you’re doing offline saves (which is very cool!) makes me think that you may be using something like Ditto [0], which IIRC is MyRocksDB under the hood. I have no experience with either, but I do know some super sharp folks working at Ditto.

[0]: https://ditto.live

Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)

#109

So are you competing with 18 different products at the same time? Or is this just a glorified note taking & publishing app? Either way I am getting strong https://zombo.com/ vibes from the description here and your landing page. Instead of a clear problem statement and user use cases, you have this word salad of “consolidation” (of what?), “superapp” (that does what?), “unmatched privacy” (to do privately what?) and…

The same thing as Microsoft or Google suites, which is to minimize workflow and maximize productivity by allowing apps to be interconnected. I will say however that I agree, the page doesn’t sell me on much. The apps/“modules” themselves are not well displayed and I am not convinced even by its unique points such as its (eventual?) encryption, namely due to how opaque it all is. I wish it was more transparent, betwee…

Do you have a practical example of such interconnectedness (or lack thereof?)
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