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Show HN: I made a Note-Taking app for people who keep texting themselves

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Re: Show HN: I made a Note-Taking app for people who keep texting themselves

#51

Post by entropyie »

My number one problem with notes apps is that they all take too long to open a new note, and try to sync themselves when opened, often slowing everything down. Especially if you have a slow / choppy connection (fully offline is usually ok, but barely online is the worst).

I have a literal supercomputer in my pocket, yet not one app let's me open and start writing a critical note in less than 500ms.

To this day I still use plaintext editors on my desktop to dump short strings or notes into, because they load faster than any other app. And don't try to be clever with smart quotes, fonts and butchering my code snippets.

Re: Show HN: I made a Note-Taking app for people who keep texting themselves

#52

Post by J_cst »

dougdimmadome wrote: post #39

I've been look for exactly this! (or planning to build it) I abuse the telegram "Saved" channel to send myself thoughts, notes, reminders, pics, etc as if I'm chatting to the me who's back at his desk. I wanted to get away from that and not rely on telegram. Unfortunately I'm an android user so I'll probably have to keep using Telegram for the time being. Is there an android client in the works?

Self messaging is also available in WhatsApp

Re: Show HN: I made a Note-Taking app for people who keep texting themselves

#54

Post by eguchi1904 »

msravi wrote: post #28

A couple of questions. The notes seem to be markdown, which is good. But where are they stored? Are they just markdown files stored in an accessible folder? How easy is it to "export" the notes? I use "self-texting" on WhatsApp for temp notes that I know I won't need beyond a couple of days and don't mind losing and Obsidian for others.

The notes are stored in a SQLite database. You can export your notes from the macOS app by going to the menu bar and selecting File > Export. This allows you to export the notes in JSON format, which includes various metadata and markdown representations.

I also definitely plan to extend the export functionality to support markdown in the future.

Re: Show HN: I made a Note-Taking app for people who keep texting themselves

#55

Post by napbree »

I like the format, an idea to take unstructured data and try to turn it into a plan (could be a paid extra?) would be for a language model to take a stab of taking the data and turning it into a live contextualised overview per notes.

That's then taking the pain away from trying to organise the unstructured thoughts

Re: Show HN: I made a Note-Taking app for people who keep texting themselves

#56

Post by toastercat »

dewey wrote: post #11

This somehow seems to be a solution in search of a problem. The reason people use self texting is that they _don't_ want to use another app. Not because the existing apps are somehow missing features. > I often defaulted to dumping notes into chat apps like Slack or iMessage What makes you think people think differently about this app? If people wanted all these features they would already all be covered by Apple Not…

[flagged]

Re: Show HN: I made a Note-Taking app for people who keep texting themselves

#57

Post by eguchi1904 »

Dwolb wrote: post #43
eguchi1904 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your point. For me, though, existing apps like Slack or iMessage were insufficient because, at the end of the day, they aren’t “note-taking apps.” By creating a dedicated note app combined with a chat-style timeline-focused UI, I feel that the speed and quality of note-taking have improved. However, I understand that it might not be for everyone, and I appreciate your feedback!

Honestly I love the direction and I do this all the time. If you could 1) integrate directly with iMessage so I'm literally just texting and 2) have your interface provide me some sort of LLM summary tool/weekly digest/remind me of things smartly (I dunno it's up to you to figure out), I'd probably do this.

Thank you! 2) is an interesting idea. I plan to add functionalities that can smartly suggest and categorize notes in the future. Thanks for the suggestion!

Re: Show HN: I made a Note-Taking app for people who keep texting themselves

#58

Post by JohnFen »

eguchi1904 wrote: post #35
dewey wrote: post #11

This somehow seems to be a solution in search of a problem. The reason people use self texting is that they _don't_ want to use another app. Not because the existing apps are somehow missing features. > I often defaulted to dumping notes into chat apps like Slack or iMessage What makes you think people think differently about this app? If people wanted all these features they would already all be covered by Apple Not…

I understand your point. For me, though, existing apps like Slack or iMessage were insufficient because, at the end of the day, they aren’t “note-taking apps.” By creating a dedicated note app combined with a chat-style timeline-focused UI, I feel that the speed and quality of note-taking have improved. However, I understand that it might not be for everyone, and I appreciate your feedback!

It is really interesting how different people are in their preferred solutions. The thing that I've learned makes an application good for note-taking is a lack of features. Simplicity is key for this use case for me. Even on the desktop, my "note-taking" app is just notepad on Windows, kwrite in KDE, and a very bare-bones text editor on my phone.

None of this is even remotely a criticism of your effort. I was just pondering how different people can be in their needs.

Re: Show HN: I made a Note-Taking app for people who keep texting themselves

#60

Post by eguchi1904 »

bayesianbot wrote: post #42
Tiberium wrote: post #14

Telegram's Saved Messages (essentially self-texting) is also commonly used for saving info, somewhat recently they even added tagging and the ability to view messages that you forwarded into there per chat (so you can see all messages that you ever saved from some group you're in). Of course it all lives on their cloud and is not local.

Though tagging is only available for the (kinda pricey) Premium subscription.

Tagging is actually available for free, so just wanted to correct that.
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