Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

standardnotes.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 254 posts

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#81

Post by da39a3ee »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #76

I really miss tomboy (not the new ng version). I used it for years and it was amazing. Rich text without having to use markdown. Razor fast responsiveness when searching. Instant hyperlinks just by typing the name of another note. Excellent keyboard shortcuts too. I really miss it but it was no longer maintained and falling into disrepair on newer OSes due to lacking support for DPI scaling and dark modes. I use onen…

> And they tend to be slow electron stuff

I've read this a couple of times on HN. Can someone fill me in here? Is the claim that electron apps are slow justified? If so why, technically, are they slow?

The main one I use is Slack and it is perfectly fine on my machine.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#82

Post by sillysaurusx »

thecodrr wrote: post #80

Standard Notes is a phenomenal note taking app and one of the first to bring encryption in note taking. They take security very seriously and have multiple third party audits. With that said, the bad outweigh the good. I don't mean to be a pessimist here (SN is inspirational) but: 1. Their free plan is extremely lacking. You can't even try out many of their editors. 2. Their pro plan mostly only offers editors. I am…

Well yeah they don’t offer any account recovery — that’s a sign the encryption might be trustworthy. It’s only a negative if you don’t care about that.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#83

Post by thecodrr »

da39a3ee wrote: post #81
GekkePrutser wrote: post #76

I really miss tomboy (not the new ng version). I used it for years and it was amazing. Rich text without having to use markdown. Razor fast responsiveness when searching. Instant hyperlinks just by typing the name of another note. Excellent keyboard shortcuts too. I really miss it but it was no longer maintained and falling into disrepair on newer OSes due to lacking support for DPI scaling and dark modes. I use onen…

> And they tend to be slow electron stuff I've read this a couple of times on HN. Can someone fill me in here? Is the claim that electron apps are slow justified? If so why, technically, are they slow? The main one I use is Slack and it is perfectly fine on my machine.

It's mostly hearsay. Electron is highly optimized (it's chromium after all). Making an electron app doesn't make it automatically slow and clunky. That's absurd. Sure it is a browser and it takes a little more Ram than you are used to (but most machines nowadays have 8 to 16 gigs of RAM so not a huge issue).

What does make an electron app slow is the app itself. Obviously. You have VSCode that is blazing fast even for humongous files and you also have some other not so fast apps.

Another huge issue raised is size. To be honest, 100 MB isn't abnormal for a desktop app. Look at any Qt app, it can be around 100 MB too. Same for dotnet.

Of course native is better but most developers don't have the resources for that.

Edit: I see people down voting without giving any reason. I know this is an unpopular opinion but come on. The days when you could use VSCode as an example of slow, clunky Electron app are gone. What's slow and huge is Jetbrains IntelliJ or Visual Studio; both native. VSCode proved that you can make a fast electron app; it just needs work like any other thing.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#84

Post by thecodrr »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #82
thecodrr wrote: post #80

Standard Notes is a phenomenal note taking app and one of the first to bring encryption in note taking. They take security very seriously and have multiple third party audits. With that said, the bad outweigh the good. I don't mean to be a pessimist here (SN is inspirational) but: 1. Their free plan is extremely lacking. You can't even try out many of their editors. 2. Their pro plan mostly only offers editors. I am…

Well yeah they don’t offer any account recovery — that’s a sign the encryption might be trustworthy. It’s only a negative if you don’t care about that.

I myself thought no account recovery automatically meant safety. It sounds very cool. However, in the past week alone, around 10 users of Notesnook came asking for a way to recover their account because they had forgotten their password.

I mean, why should privacy be at such a huge risk to users' data?

For the tech savy, Notesnook offers account recovery by giving the user option (actual kind of forcing) to save the encryption key someplace safe. Not ideal, of course, but better than nothing.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#85

Post by crossroadsguy »

UX is very lacking. You can’t have local text files (that you can backup on your own). The entire thing is, and feels just like, a web app in a poorly designed wrapper app.

There were few more glaring issues the last time I was comparing note apps to replace notion + nv (+ Dyrii) setup. I’ve decided to give FSNotes a try. Hope I like it and it doesn’t go Electron or subscription later.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#86

Post by smichel17 »

fhrow4484 wrote: post #35
duxup wrote: post #15

Screen shots guys... you gotta have screen shots! Even folks who love the philosophy want screenshots.

+1, I knew some stores require screenshots to be part of the app listing, so I clicked on the iOS and Android links to see those. The app store preview shows iPad form factor so that's pretty useful. But for desktop, I clicked on windows expecting a Microsoft store link, but instead it starts an immediate 101MB binary download, so beware.

It's okay, my browser prompts me before downloading a file, so it's far from "immediate".

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#87

Post by mkl »

thecodrr wrote: post #84
sillysaurusx wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yeah they don’t offer any account recovery — that’s a sign the encryption might be trustworthy. It’s only a negative if you don’t care about that.

I myself thought no account recovery automatically meant safety. It sounds very cool. However, in the past week alone, around 10 users of Notesnook came asking for a way to recover their account because they had forgotten their password. I mean, why should privacy be at such a huge risk to users' data? For the tech savy, Notesnook offers account recovery by giving the user option (actual kind of forcing) to save the…

So they download the encryption key (unprotected so no password needed) as a file, and they keep the file safe? That's the kind of thing I've been thinking about for an idea of mine. What did those 10 users ask about? How to use the encryption key file?

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#88

Post by dsissitka »

thecodrr wrote: post #83
da39a3ee wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And they tend to be slow electron stuff I've read this a couple of times on HN. Can someone fill me in here? Is the claim that electron apps are slow justified? If so why, technically, are they slow? The main one I use is Slack and it is perfectly fine on my machine.

It's mostly hearsay. Electron is highly optimized (it's chromium after all). Making an electron app doesn't make it automatically slow and clunky. That's absurd. Sure it is a browser and it takes a little more Ram than you are used to (but most machines nowadays have 8 to 16 gigs of RAM so not a huge issue). What does make an electron app slow is the app itself. Obviously. You have VSCode that is blazing fast even fo…

> I see people down voting without any reason.

What makes you think they didn't have a reason? I didn't downvote you but you've made a few divisive assertions. For example, your "blazing fast" is my "performs acceptably".

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#89

Post by julianlam »

smichel17 wrote: post #86
fhrow4484 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1, I knew some stores require screenshots to be part of the app listing, so I clicked on the iOS and Android links to see those. The app store preview shows iPad form factor so that's pretty useful. But for desktop, I clicked on windows expecting a Microsoft store link, but instead it starts an immediate 101MB binary download, so beware.

It's okay, my browser prompts me before downloading a file, so it's far from "immediate".

In my experience, some browsers will start the download before you've given the go-ahead, so the download completes faster.

Re: Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

#90

Post by thekyle »

da39a3ee wrote: post #81
GekkePrutser wrote: post #76

I really miss tomboy (not the new ng version). I used it for years and it was amazing. Rich text without having to use markdown. Razor fast responsiveness when searching. Instant hyperlinks just by typing the name of another note. Excellent keyboard shortcuts too. I really miss it but it was no longer maintained and falling into disrepair on newer OSes due to lacking support for DPI scaling and dark modes. I use onen…

> And they tend to be slow electron stuff I've read this a couple of times on HN. Can someone fill me in here? Is the claim that electron apps are slow justified? If so why, technically, are they slow? The main one I use is Slack and it is perfectly fine on my machine.

I do consider the Slack desktop app to be a resource hog. Even on my brand-new M1 MacBook Air it sometimes takes a few seconds for channels to load. On my older Windows computer it's borderline unusable with how bad the text inputs lag. Sometimes I will have typed out an entire message and hit send before any of the text appears in the input box.

In fact, this morning a colleague of mine was showing me on Zoom that their Slack desktop app never finishes loading instead just displaying a white screen, so they need to use the website instead. Although I guess that's more of a comment on software quality than bloat.

I don't mean to say that all Electron apps are slow and clunky. VS Code for example is very impressive for an Electron app.

Post reply on HN