Live data from Hacker News

Joplin is an open source note-taking app

joplinapp.org

21–30 of 110 posts

Re: Joplin is an open source note-taking app

#21
post #6

My problem with Joplin is that on my M1 Macbook pro it really shows how much of an Electron app it really is, in the worst ways. Extreme memory use and UI lag for an application which displays text. That said, aside from performance it's quite satisfying to use. It's very simple and does its job well. I recently migrated to Obsidian and although the learning curve is steeper, I'm quite happy with the results.

That’s exactly why I’m building a note-taking app in Qt C++ and QML that is vastly more performant than other note-taking apps[1].

This degradation of software by web apps shows in the lack of optimal resource utilization of even one of the most powerful chips of recent times.

[1] https://www.get-plume.com/

Re: Joplin is an open source note-taking app

#22
post #6

My problem with Joplin is that on my M1 Macbook pro it really shows how much of an Electron app it really is, in the worst ways. Extreme memory use and UI lag for an application which displays text. That said, aside from performance it's quite satisfying to use. It's very simple and does its job well. I recently migrated to Obsidian and although the learning curve is steeper, I'm quite happy with the results.

That’s exactly why I’m building a note-taking app in Qt C++ and QML that is vastly more performant than other note-taking apps[1]. This degradation of software by web apps shows in the lack of optimal resource utilization of even one of the most powerful chips of recent times. [1] https://www.get-plume.com/

Plume looks neat!

What is the pricing model you have in mind?

Re: Joplin is an open source note-taking app

#23
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s exactly why I’m building a note-taking app in Qt C++ and QML that is vastly more performant than other note-taking apps[1]. This degradation of software by web apps shows in the lack of optimal resource utilization of even one of the most powerful chips of recent times. [1] https://www.get-plume.com/

Plume looks neat! What is the pricing model you have in mind?

Thanks!

It will be a subscription model. $25 paid yearly or $3 monthly (that’s the idea for now).

Re: Joplin is an open source note-taking app

#24

My only concerns about using Joplin were security-related, when handling sensitive notes (financial data, logins, etc). The interface looked awesome. Have Joplin plugins been secured/sandboxed yet, or are they still able to exfiltrate data? That's one reason I never used it for very secure notes, same with Obsidian. Joplin also used to store notes unencrypted locally, not sure if that's still the case. Of course most…

It absolutely boggles my mind that anyone releases a plug-in system without sandboxing nowadays.

Re: Joplin is an open source note-taking app

#26
post #24

My only concerns about using Joplin were security-related, when handling sensitive notes (financial data, logins, etc). The interface looked awesome. Have Joplin plugins been secured/sandboxed yet, or are they still able to exfiltrate data? That's one reason I never used it for very secure notes, same with Obsidian. Joplin also used to store notes unencrypted locally, not sure if that's still the case. Of course most…

It absolutely boggles my mind that anyone releases a plug-in system without sandboxing nowadays.

Engineering effort

Re: Joplin is an open source note-taking app

#27
post #6

My problem with Joplin is that on my M1 Macbook pro it really shows how much of an Electron app it really is, in the worst ways. Extreme memory use and UI lag for an application which displays text. That said, aside from performance it's quite satisfying to use. It's very simple and does its job well. I recently migrated to Obsidian and although the learning curve is steeper, I'm quite happy with the results.

Does Obsidian feature a way to seamlessly sync between devices that doesn't rely on a propreitary service or external tool (Syncthing)?

Re: Joplin is an open source note-taking app

#28
post #6

My problem with Joplin is that on my M1 Macbook pro it really shows how much of an Electron app it really is, in the worst ways. Extreme memory use and UI lag for an application which displays text. That said, aside from performance it's quite satisfying to use. It's very simple and does its job well. I recently migrated to Obsidian and although the learning curve is steeper, I'm quite happy with the results.

I went from Notion to Joplin for note taking: I drop 1000s of images in a note and annotate them and publish them. Notion crashed all the time; so badly that support apologised and had to delete things for me. Joplin has 0 issues with it; it scrolls super fast, is a pleasure to work with. Also on a m1. I cannot say I noticed any bad behaviour compared to others, included Obsidian.

I went from Notion and Joplin to Obsidian mostly because Obsidian stores stuff as regular files on my filesystem and I can easily interact with them with external programs and scripts.

Joplin, while being open source itself, has a "proprietary"[1] storage format I can't be arsed to figure out how to interact with.

[1] Meaning non-standard in this case, Joplin is the only software using Joplin's storage method

Re: Joplin is an open source note-taking app

#29
post #6

My problem with Joplin is that on my M1 Macbook pro it really shows how much of an Electron app it really is, in the worst ways. Extreme memory use and UI lag for an application which displays text. That said, aside from performance it's quite satisfying to use. It's very simple and does its job well. I recently migrated to Obsidian and although the learning curve is steeper, I'm quite happy with the results.

That’s exactly why I’m building a note-taking app in Qt C++ and QML that is vastly more performant than other note-taking apps[1]. This degradation of software by web apps shows in the lack of optimal resource utilization of even one of the most powerful chips of recent times. [1] https://www.get-plume.com/

Plume looks very interesting! One place I personally find many apps in this category fall down is their ability to handle pdf’s embedded or attached within notes gracefully. This applies to desktop and mobile apps.

This may be a slightly weird use case but I accumulate tons of pdf’s that are often relevant to my notes and want them easily embedded and viewable in a first class way. Obsidian is a great example of how not to handle a pdf locking it to a small portion of the window and not allowing it to be full screened.

Forcing the user to dump all of their pdf’s into something like google drive locked away from the rest of their notes is a crappy experience and h fortunately keeps me using apps like evernote purely for this functionality.

Re: Joplin is an open source note-taking app

#30
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely boggles my mind that anyone releases a plug-in system without sandboxing nowadays.

Engineering effort

Which should be left at zero unless you can get over the "you actually do have a responsibility to take basic safety measures for your users" hurdle.

Instead we routinely get zero security at all and also heavily encouraging people to install entirely unchecked stuff in a built-in and implicitly-trusted first party UI.

Post reply on HN