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

supernotes.app

11–20 of 173 posts

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

#11
post #9

What major competitors aren’t amazing and aren’t beautiful?

I agree that there are a lot of great looking apps in the space these days, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder and we have a lot of users that have come over from other apps in large part because they like how we present things visually!

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

#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.

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

#13
post #8
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).…

Just curious, do you really notice an input delay? Is there a way of measuring this? Because I tried to compare Supernotes to BBEdit and couldn’t tell the difference

I do, personally, but that might just be because I'm used to xedit, and have a monitor with a reasonably high refresh rate, a keyboard I purchased largely to lower input latency (which I find annoying), and a typing speed that's decent (120wpm).

You can measure input latency relatively easily, but it's not as useful without a frame of reference. Here are a couple internet posts on doing exactly that:

https://danluu.com/term-latency/

http://renderingpipeline.com/2013/09/measuring-input-latency...

If you're not wanting to go out of your way to measure it, though, there's a pretty straightforward way you can get a feel for it: Pay attention to when the glyph appears on the screen, versus when the click of the keypress happens. For example, in xedit, I press 't', and the appearance of the glyph occurs almost simultaneously with the click. The click and the appearance happen much more noticeably asynchronously with Electron applications, including this one.

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

#14
Looks good, but not being able to access the raw files means tools like foam won’t work https://github.com/foambubble/foam . There’s a whole community using foam that would appreciate an app like this.

To be fair you mention you have your own knowledge map utilities built in so maybe that’s good enough to use directly. I just didn’t notice that looking at your website.

Price seems a little high, it’s higher than Evernote which does have some minimal markdown support now and offline editing. This would need more features to justify the cost but that’s just imo.

> As soon as you are disconnected from the internet Supernotes will enter a 'read-only' mode. You will still be able to browse, read and search your notes, like so:

Is this the same with the app? If I’m out some place with no signal can I write/update a note? It would be frustrating having to wait for your phone to connect first.

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

#15
post #7

This looks nice if you need to use its features however for me Notable [1] is the perfectly minimal & Free Markdown Notes App that does everything I need from a Notes/TODOs App: has a quick UI to manage a static directory of Markdown files, with search, tags & pinned notes. No vendor lock-in since it maintains its features requiring metadata in frontmatter in simple .md files that's easy to open with VS Code, backup…

Not related to featureset/usability of the app, but this is super weird: https://github.com/notable/notable/blob/32b8e969e9a3f49f8352...

If the app is not open-source why would I ever care about what language its written in.

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

#16
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.

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

#17

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 is great, and if you're looking for affordable, preferably self-hosted, highly customizable Markdown note-taking it is almost certainly the better option.

We're trying to be a slightly different kind of app though, where syncing isn't something our users ever have to think about and where collaborating and sharing is as accessible and seamless as possible (among many other goals!)

And yes, that means we're probably (on the whole) a worse match for the highly technical/conscientious HN crowd, where the aforementioned selling points of an app like Obsidian are in higher demand. Also a shoutout to Logseq (as mentioned by others in this thread) which is also a great option if you're looking for that kind of app.

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

#18

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 static site publishing it just ticked every box I had out of the box, and I am yet to even start exploring its rich plugin ecosystem.

Oh, and its completely open source.

[1] https://logseq.com/

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

#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 the Windows version at least, both the x64 and ARM64 versions are packaged in the same installer (inevitably doubling the download size), and the installation is done using NSIS. It looks like there's some kind of updater, but it's not Squirrel. So I'm just curious about whether an open-source tool was used to put all of this together.

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

#20
post #7

This looks nice if you need to use its features however for me Notable [1] is the perfectly minimal & Free Markdown Notes App that does everything I need from a Notes/TODOs App: has a quick UI to manage a static directory of Markdown files, with search, tags & pinned notes. No vendor lock-in since it maintains its features requiring metadata in frontmatter in simple .md files that's easy to open with VS Code, backup…

I could not find pricing for Noteable on its page. At least, not on mobile. Is it free? If so, what kind of free?
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