It looks good, and I like your pricing model more than the Standard Notes one (I don't want to drop $149 at once on a web app, but the 75% discount for doing so makes the monthly price seem way too expensive). Two things that stop me pulling the trigger:
1. I need a web app. I want to be able to call up my notes from a computer, anywhere, without installing anything.
2. A 60 day trial seems like the wrong way to test a note taking app - it makes me feel like you're going to hold my data hostage unless I migrate away within that timescale. A much smaller (5-10MB) quota with no time limit would allow me to test it properly, and it's already a part of my workflow by the time I hit the limitations of the free account, so I'm more likely to actually upgrade.
> A much smaller (5-10MB) quota with no time limit
That's interesting and I basically agree with your opinion. You will be more comfortable to try it.
But I suspect that many free riders will come eat the server resources.
This is not a startup.
I would rather like to be small.
Another point is that 10mb is a lot of text, especially for users like me who use these types of note-taking apps as todo lists. For persistent notes I already have directory I store locally w/ cloud backup, but a webapp would be nice for my running todo list.
That will hopefully never top 10mb,so a free user like me would really eat into hosting costs. Perhaps a solution to people like the OP who are concerned about data being held hostage is to make it clear that after the trial period their data can be exported, that way they don't have to feel there is risk of it being held hostage.
In my note taking "system" (vim on a text file inside a GNU screen session) for work, I think I've only hit 1MB total for the last 10 years.
If the OP is going to do a time-unlimited demo, it should be really small, like 5K or less. The point is the same: try it out for a little while, and see if it works for you.
On the other hand 10mb is not a lot of images. If I'm using a paid mobile app for note-taking, I probably want to be able to quickly snap a photo and maybe write a few bullet points or sentences.
According to https://inkdrop.app/pricing the free plan includes 1 GB storage, and the basic plan ($5/mo) includes 10 GB storage.
I agree with sibling comments that a limit based on number of notes would be preferable to losing access after a specified time. Maybe adjust the free tier storage allocation down, or limit the number of images/attachments.
I also sell my own software and I would pass along the following feedback:
1. Take breaks every now and then
2. People complaining about your software is good: that means they want to use it but something is preventing them from doing so.
3. Finally, don't do anything for free.
Certainly this model would result in a lot more people who would create accounts to test and never come back after deciding it's not for them. The answer to that is a clear dormant account policy - for example by deleting free accounts after 60 days with no login. That helps make sure that all your trial users are actively engaged in using the service, and also gives you an opportunity to follow up with dormant users at defined points to remind them that their account will expire if left unused, and giving the opportunity to upgrade to a paid account which has no such limit.
Another person mentioned that 5MB is a lot for text notes, which is quite true - following the notion.so approach and having a limit of 100 notes or so might be more sensible. I personally just don't like the idea of a time limit on a note taking app, especially when all the other options provide a free quota instead.
That said, your pricing looks just right for me, and the lack of the web app is the main thing stopping me from giving it a try. I really like the fact that you have both folders and tags, instead of just one or the other - that's really the one thing I feel is missing from both Standard Notes and Notion
I wouldn't be following their advice, I think the time limit is great and you should stick to it. 5-10MB of note data could be a lot, meaning you'd end up with users you've replied to that will never pay.
I wouldn't be listening to any feedback from someone who isn't going to buying your product anyway!
OP they replied to: it's the dev's choice to figure out the way to ship a trial of their 3 years of hard work. If you don't like that you're more than welcome to ship your own demo of your own application.
Sorry to hijack the thread, but I am so excited by this. I have always kept my developer log in vim, and I basically run my life from it, but I've always wanted inline preview, a system wide hotkey, and cross platform file sync that doesn't require giving my unencrypted data to a cloud provider. I have found a lot of markdown apps with preview and sync, but none of them support vim bindings, which is a deal breaker. I looked for so long that I decided I would have to build it myself, and then I see this! You have a new customer. :)
Edit: before anyone chimes in, yes I know you can use quake-style terminals, and rsync, and any number of vim plugins, but I need it to work seamlessly on all three desktop platforms.
Edit 2: and it has mobile support too! This literally checks every box I had in my feature list.
If youre a tinkerer it's always possible to just use plain vim and a repository. Of you want that repo end to end encrypted, keybase could be an option.
You'd lose out on mobile though and this project looks pretty neat if you're willing to pay
The language, to me, seemed very precise and inoffensive. "Free rider" isn't a word that he just made up.
"In the social sciences, the free-rider problem is a type of market failure that occurs when those who benefit from resources, public goods, or services of a communal nature do not pay for them.[1] Free riders are a problem because while not paying for the good, they may continue to access it. Thus, the good may be under-produced, overused or degraded"[0]
Actually, "free riders" is an excellent thinking model, and the likely most useful way to analyze it.
He needs to create a sustainable app/service, and does not have a lot of external VC resources to burn while doing so. Thus, it must be sustainable in real time.
Server loads are apparently one of his biggest expenses, so he must optimize to minimize those resources.
OTOH, allowing people to take substantial 'free rides' to test the product in their situation is an excellent way to get new paying users, and often an essential gateway to conversion. I'll hardly sign up for anything without a real test drive.
So, letting potential customers get some 'free riding' is good, but too much will sink the ship.
It looks like he has a limited time 60-day demo and also a no server unlimited time demo. Both seem like good ways to limit the resources given away for free, while providing enough 'free rides' to entice them to pay for the journey.
I'm already heading over check it out after just browsing the main page & comments.
Now, if you are trying to say that mentioning the "free rider" term in public is somehow insulting to the potential users. I don't think so. He's not calling them "freeloaders" which has a more derogatory connotation. the "free rider" term carries a connotation a little bit like I've won a free ride, but it isn't a permanet free pass. I wouldn't find "hey, you get a free ride for two months" at all insulting.
HaHa! The "eats resources" would not be the most friendly approach . . . although framed in the right context, the A/B test might come out different than we expect!
Overall I agree, if all you are saying is that the "free rider who eats resources" phrasing isn't the most customer friendly possible usage, all other things being equal
All I was saying is if he calls trial users "free riders eating resources" on a tech site which we all understand the verbiage and where this comes from.
How will he treat paying customers ? I smell double standards. That's all I am saying.
2. It's a valid and well understood term on the board you're on
3. It's a legitimate problem for those with finite resources
That leads to the conclusion that you probably don't pay for things often which is why you got your feelings hurt. There is literally no way that term should be offensive to you unless you abusively take advantage of services and then some then when it comes time to pay.
None of your comments have been relevant to the app. Your comments been complaints about specific verbiage used to describe a particular problem, common to startups, that the dev wished to avoid. We'd love to hear your points on what the app could use, however you've done nothing but insinuate that the developer doesn't appreciate his users because a particular word choice caught you wrong. I can see no other reason someone would take offense to a word choice unless they were personally offended. Please feel free to enlighten us by refuting any point of my comment. Your reply realistically doesn't do anything to respond to my summary.
I can't install software at work, so a web app would be the only to access my stuff during the work day. I also have a shared computer in my living room that I don't install personal apps or log into personal accounts on. Web apps let me quickly access something there when I need to and log out easily.
You are right.
I basically build my apps for myself who always use the same computers.
I understand there are various people with various needs - but I would like to focus on pleasing people who are similar to me.
I believe this is important to provide a good service.
I don't feel like making apps like Microsoft Office with tons of features to please everyone.
The platform you develop on isn't a feature. It's a platform - and without a doubt, a web app is the most ubiquitous kind of app that can serve anyone on practically any internet-connected device.
Internet-connected is the key term here, though. If your target audience are internet-less note takers, then a desktop app is the correct choice.
If you don’t log into personal accounts on it what difference would it make if there was a web app version of this notes thing? You wouldn’t log into it anyway.
Presumably, they mean log into personal desktop accounts (as in "at a login prompt" or "what would change the output of `whoami`") rather than into a personal account on a website within a browser session.
$10/month is at the high end of what I'd consider paying for a note app - that's more than Microsoft Office. $2.50 is a bargain, but I don't want to pay for 5 years at once (although I can certainly understand the reasoning behind that model). $4-5 (OP's app or notion.so) is right on the money for what I'd expect to pay for this kind of tool.
I agree with your suggestion, but 5 megabytes is a _LOT_ of text. I would suggest capping the trial version at something like 20 notes, which is more than enough to test it out but not enough to really use the service longterm.
There is difference with free software and proprietary software. NextCloud instance is free software and holds encrypted information. Maybe there could be ways to intercept password by the ISP.
This application is proprietary software, and you don't know nothing what is going on in background. Just as majority of Service as a Software Substitute, or SaaSS steal people's data.
Running a project for three years alone on the side takes a lot of discipline. So often we become 'passionate' about some projects and quickly abandon them once the initial excitement wears off. Congratulations to the author!
Eerily, I have also been building a Markdown note-taking app alone for 2 years [0]. It is also e2e encrypted, but compared to Inkdrop, needs more work on the UI. But it works perfectly as a CLI.
> Running a project for three years alone on the side takes a lot of discipline.
My congratulations!
I could not agree more! I also worked on a Markdown editor for many years (in my case 5). But, the unique perspective I take at this was requiring that much time. In my case, it is really an editor for developers that know their Web stack... Stylo[0] supports styling the Markdown using CSS, live. It allows to do things such as highlighting tagged text parts that we want to concentrate on among other things. Only for Mac though as I also am an independent developer and want to concentrate on features that actually matters for producing texts.
It took me every bit of discipline I had, and it continues...
It helps to be working on something you want to exist and use every day. You've already validated your product/market fit at that point, even if your market only consists of 1 person.
Congratulations on the launch! Great to see end-to-end encryption made the cut. It seems hard to put the burden on users never to lose their login password though — they lose all their data when they do.
Have you looked at the Tanker SDK? It’s an open-source, cross-platform SDK for end-to-end encryption (with a zero-knowledge key distribution service), that’s very user friendly when it comes to recovery.
I've been a happy user of this product for about half of its lifetime (in the middle of my 2nd yearly subscription).
If I were to build one, it would be quite similar: intuitive design, some GTD support, Markdown support. It has all the features that I need, and the developer is easy to reach when there's a problem (I've been mentioned in a few changelogs). I appreciate the openness of the developer about the features he's gonna build next. I'd prefer it to be open source, but I understand that financing an open source project wouldn't be as easy from the business perspective. $50/year (IIRC) is really, really worth it for me.
Should I be as impressed as I am that one guy has an app that works on 5 different operating systems even if he is using a cross platform framework or has cross platform front end development become that easy?
Whichever it is, great job! I don’t need something like this right now, but I am favoriting it just in case I do later.
The only thing I disagree with is the lack of a web client.
It just seems like you could save a ton of work by starting with the web client, then create desktop versions via something like todesktop.com.
Then you're spending less time on updates - it's just one desktop version, and the iOS + Android versions are just consuming data from your API anyway.
I just switched to the Joplin markdown note app (from DS Note, and Evernote before that). It’s free, works on desktop and mobile, etc etc. Frankly I love it and wish I switched earlier.
Joplin is really great. I use it since a few month. Unfortunately, I have some problems with the Windows version that I have to use at work: After a few days it eats my memory (2GiB+) or hangs completely (I have to kill it with the task manager).
Otherwise it's great. The UI could use a little polishing, especially regarding the tagging system.
Quiver recently added one as well, works decently and actually fetches images to store locally unlike Evernote web clipper
Some javascript-heavy segmented pages don't clip correctly, but firing up the browsers reader-mode usually clears all the js crap and allows page content to be cleanly clipped
Improving the mobile text editor is high priority (and has been tried a few times already), but currently there's no good React Native or web mobile code editor that can be used. CodeMirror for mobile is being developed so maybe we can use that once it's stable. I've actually already tried to integrate the beta in Joplin, which worked but it's not stable yet.
Basically all the comments here are just critiques. My 2 cents: excellent work, its extremely hard to stick with something for 3 years, especially with people's constant criticism and worries it isn't "big enough". The attitude of the developer seems quite wise and seasoned. Hearing things like "I'm making tools I use" and "I'd rather be small and opinionated" or "I'll take paying customers over droves of free users" makes my heart warm. Congratulations and good work -- ignore haters and people with "suggestions" after their cursory 30-second glance at your work you've been eating / breathing for 3 straight years. My go-to response to such things has become "wow in X years I didn't think to google 'note taking app', thanks for that amazing suggestion!" :P (end salty solo-dev rant)
Critiquing is a skill. The onus is as much on the critiquer to formulate their critique in a constructive, actionable way as it is on the critiquee to take the critique in stride.
That said, good crit skills are very hard to develop, and environments where effective critique sessions can be carried out very hard to build (because it’s fundamentally about trust). And it’s skill that is just not taught in engineering; people familiar with critique will be mostly people who went to art school, and even then many art schools do a pretty bad job at teaching it (I had a design teacher who, during critiques, would make students... vote on their favorite /facepalm).
Sure. However, to get feedback for a new project you probably need all you can get. Getting any at all can be surprisingly difficult.
Therefore one rarely can throw out the negative comments. Perhaps copy them to a file of notes and edit them to their core essence to minimize the sting.
Feedback from total strangers is overrated. You have no clue where their feedback comes from (are they a prospective user? Some grumpy programmer who just wants to rant about your choice of framework? A product designer used to operating in a certain environment that just doesn’t apply to you? etc). Separating the wheat from the chaff from anonymous posters is tricky business.
Thinking of it as good feedback vs bad feedback based on the feedback itself is also not the right way to go in my experience. Good feedback is anything that observes the way a particular problem was solved, and proposes an alternative way of solving it, or reframes the problem altogether (identifying a problem that was not solved can be valuable too, although the line is blurrier). Bad feedback tends to be, well, anything that is not that.
This definitely looks great. But I feel like 5 USD a month is a bit much for _"just a note taking app"_. Like I pay 5 USD a month for Spotify and the value it gives is substantially higher than a note-taking app, and I do not mean to offend you with that. Maybe I'm saying this because I'm still studying, maybe it will different coming September when I'm working and got an income. I don't know.
The notes are markdown and in the FAQs he mentions the location of the local data cache. I imagine you can simply copy all your notes from the cache, clean up any incompatible metadata, and import them to your next note app.
Don't let paying for software stop you if you can afford it. This looks like quality software and we should support it, if able. If you're looking for free note software that's tied to a company, Firefox has a note taking app that syncs between phones/web browser (it's a bit buggy and logs out at times), and Google has Keep that also has apps and available on the web.
I'm all for supporting the things that are good. But at what point do we say "enough!"? All of these subscription services start to add up, going from free to 5 USD a month is a bigger jump than I'm willing to take. Why aren't there any services out there that offer 1 USD/EUR plans?
I like these apps because I’ve been trying note taking for 30 years and have had many false starts of solo projects over the years. So when someone releases it makes me a little happy.
I like markdown because the interoperability is high. I’d like a command line way to just create a new note in one line that gets stuck somewhere that can be added on or moved around later (eg, “note Inkdrop should be investigated and forked later on #notes #hn #app”).
My problem is that phones are just too slow for me to fire up and start a note so I tend to wait and forget before I can write down. I’ve seen a lot of approaches to digital zettelkasten [0], but the UX requires a lot of familiarity that lead me back to eventually (not) writing my own.
> I’d like a command line way to just create a new note in one line that gets stuck somewhere
5 min hackjob that saves my day every day:
# `note foobar` opens vim on a timestamped foobar file within a folder
# `note` just opens the same folder in netrw
# also, using tpope/vim-vinegar and liberal use of `-` to go back and forth
function note() (
local title="$1"
local timestamp="$(date +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z)"
local dir="${HOME}/Dropbox/Notes"
mkdir -p "${dir}"
cd "${dir}"
if [[ -n $1 ]]; then
exec vim "$timestamp-$title.md"
else
exec vim .
fi
)
Good point and easy enough to add, although it does not fit my use case: I want the files to be readable on mobile, plus I only put non-confidential, to-be-public, or already public data in there.
> My problem is that phones are just too slow for me to fire up and start a note
How so? Is your phone really old and slow or something?
On my iPhone X it takes two touches from the home screen to get into the notes app (first touch) and start a new note (second touch), and this takes about two seconds (I measured the time). Not counting the touches or time taken to unlock the phone and to get to the home screen but that time is short too.
This is a dumb question but have you tried, like, putting your chosen Note App somewhere prominent in your phone? Like, on the first page of the home screen, or in the dock if you’d on iOS?
But whatever works, if you prefer to lose an idea because it’s “faster” to wait until you’re at a keyboard, it’s your life.
Or just keep a physical notebook of some kind with you. That’s faster than any digital method for just capturing an idea.
> I’d like a command line way to just create a new note in one line that gets stuck somewhere that can be added on or moved around later
On the Mac, I wrote an Alfred workflow that lets me type "c this is a note" in Alfred, hit <enter> and the line is appended to a file called "cap.txt". I then go through that file at the end of the day.
On iOS, I just use Reminders app's quick launch action to create a new Reminder and go through them at the end of the day.
This is kind of what I do. But I would like a better way to sync Notes. It’s nice to go back through every once in a while to transfer to something more permanent but that takes work and messes up the date stamps for figuring out log and timeline.
> Electron Markdown editor with monthly subscription to boot.
Beautiful as it is, you're competing with Bear using the sub model, and my common sense to use buy-once native apps (like Sublime Text). This is a non-starter for me.
Yeah, but Bear has this huge following around it already and is OSX native, although it is missing e2e encryption support so Inkdrop has this going for it.
As for me I'm just using sublime text with a bunch of plugins and Markor on my phone. Resilio to sync between the devices.
I also use Bear and really like it, but I don't think the fact that something already has a huge following around it should be an argument. By that rationale we'd never switch to anything new.
Bear has a development team and it's $1.49 monthly, even cheaper if you buy annually (I know that that it leverages iCloud, but even then - you can spend 1$ and get 50 gigs of storage to use for anything you want).
Not to even mention that there are so many alternatives. Markdown editor is the new todo app. Everybody is doing one, just look at this thread.
I really like the project but I struggle with the fact that almost all Markdown editors, even note-taking applications, only offer you a rendered view separately from the file you edit. When I am taking notes, they should be rendered where I type them down in order to be easily digestible. Even later on, I will probably make a few smaller edits, so I can't solely rely on the rendered review.
So far, I've only discovered Typora, which is an application unfortunately plagued with performance and interopability issues - and I even had some data loss bugs. So, are there any alternative, "rich" (i.e. pictures, tables, math, code) WYSIWYM note-taking applications?
What are the "interoperability" issues you're referring to? I'm a very happy user of Typora and I've, thankfully, not experienced any data losses. The only thing that keeps me from using it more is that it's not the most smooth experience. When I take notes in Notepad++, for example, it's instantaneous. Which makes for a much more enjoyable experience.
Agreed on the lack of a smooth experience. Re interopabiltiy: This mainly relates to the usual fact of markdown flavors/extensions and there, for example, being no mobile app with the same exact flavor of markdown
I use NotePlan on my phone for WYSIWYM notes and calendar entries, with GTD support. It used the same (Dropbox) directory as my Kiwi app, which is a personal wiki with WYSIWYM.
On my desktop I have Sublime text with a (free) markdown plug-in for WYSIWYM note creation, and I keep the open “project” my NotePlan/Kiwi folder.
The result is a sprawling set of notes, documents, calendar data, etc inside a single wiki, editable from anywhere, and no one owns my data because at the end of the day it’s really just a bunch of text documents sitting in a Dropbox folder on my PC.
It has replaced all of my calendar, to-do, and notekeeping tools. Frankly, if NotePlan devs wanted to, they could probably subsume “personal wiki” too - the core functionality is already there, I just find the kiwi UI a little more suited to it.
This seems like an intrinsic part of the nature of Markdown editors. Typora lets you input in Markdown, but seems to immediately hide Markdown markup in favor of a WYSIWYG-like view, making it arguably not a Markdown editor at all.
For most people, and I think I include myself in this group, the point of Markdown is that the raw source is readable even without being rendered.
Ignore the people muttering about the subscription. If your tool scratches an itch, the price and how you pay is irrelevant.
One thing, the email sent to verify my account got marked as spam by google. Not sure why, SPF and DKIM both marked as PASS. Maybe they just hate Amazon SES.
The author here. Thanks!
Yeah this app is basically for professional use.
I'm providing it to only those who got more productivity with it and who would think that is worth more than the price.
I don't know why emails got marked as spam.
The author here.
I think so. I don't like ads, too.
People started visiting my webpage after I started talking about my stories, instead of pitching my product.
a) Joplin is free and seems to do the exact same thing? (+actual working todo-lists)
b) Having md-notes and a dual view seems redundant... In general I either work with the notes, then the "nice view" helps nothing and on the rare occasion, I print/share it, I'm more than fine with an export button. Inline math would be great though
c) all of these apps seem to think that you'r really needing yet another sh*y webapp on your desktop. Why not store files on your android-sd-card in a flat file structure, which you can easily sync (syncthing, termux...) and edit with your texteditor of choice on the desktop.
I agree 100% and like the way you think. I'm under the impression that a lot of these additional services are just trying to skim a few dollars for people that are too naive to do a quick Google Search, or that just search in the iTunes App Store. I wouldn't be surprised to find a bunch of Joplin or Laverna source code in this app.
I would love, love, love if I could self-host this and would happily pay a fee if it meant I got the source for the backend and could do that. Product looks great, but I will hold off until I find such an option.
I have been looking for years for a viable self-hosted Evernote/OneNote replacement I can sync between devices.
Takuya; You can differentiate from your competitors on business model!
If I may make a suggestion: I develop Joplin [0] a similar note-taking app, and it can sync with Nextcloud or WebDAV (some have made it works with the Nginx WebDAV module for instance), allowing you to control all your data.
It may or may not have all the features of Takuya's app though.
Why would you use CouchDB when flat files already maintain revision history in a Git repo? That is the advantage of Markdown and you've somehow made it more complicated than it should ever be. Google Drive also retains file revisions for you.
You could have a look at Standard Notes. It has a self-hosted version, Markdown support through a plugin, end to end encryption, and it syncs across devices. I use the "regular" service that syncs over their servers, but the self-hosted version should work, too.
I'm of the "organize everything in random .md files spread throughout my filesystem" type, but my friends would find this handy, and the design is beautiful.
I think people are underestimating the value of design in this space.
This is competing with every single idiosyncratic note taking activity that we all go through, and find probably at least marginally functional. Lots of people were taking notes before this app, it's not like this is opening a new door into how to live. What it's doing is taking the pains the half-solutions of the past were providing, and trying to offer a "better way".
I dunno if it actually is a "better way" yet, but for $0 bucks over 60 days, I'm willing to find out!
Sure, I get that, totally. When you are in the Markdown view. But when you need to view the rendered rich text form, isn't it much more efficient and far more user-friendly to show just that, and allow it to be edited?
In other words, Inkdrop's two views could be Markdown and WYSIWYG (both editable), rather than Markdown and Side-by-side.
The market for markdown editors and note-takers is already saturated. Joplin appears to have all the features yours does and probably more, plus it is open source. There are a handful of other open source Markdown editors as well for note-taking that have most (if not more) of the features you are including. I don't know why anyone would pick a subscription service when they can get the same thing for free and have access to the source code to help implement their own features. Plus syncing with Joplin can be accomplished on multiple providers like Google Drive.
If it is saturated (and by inference, unwanted), why do note taking apps consistently front-page? I can think of two possible reasons. One, there is no clear winner, and nobody has made the note taking app everyone _really_ wants. Or two, note apps are a bit like IDE's, where people use them all the time and subtle preferences mean a variety of apps doing the same thing is preferred.
It really comes down to the subscription-based model being profitable for people that think paying for something means they'll get a better product. People will find an open source solution and rebrand it for a $5 or $10/mo and have it sync to a server somewhere, and then move on to rebranding another solution. You can find a ton of apps in the app store where they do this.
That doesn't explain that they also get a lot of discussion (relative to other posts). To me the story is a bit different. I've talked to a lot of people that take notes daily, and the only consistent theme I've found is that none of them are satisfied with their experience thus far. Until that changes, I'd expect every reasonably good notes application to front-page.
well, the basic gold standard for note taking are GUI apps like evernote and onenote (their GUI works well). I guess upvoters are the people on HN using plain-text, expecting a real nice GUI for their plain-text-markup-files, only to find yet another text-editor based on electron and it's own sync-thing...
Just signed up for a Standard Notes subscription today. How does this compare? Seems they are both e2e encrypted with Markdown and code highlighting. Standard notes also has rich text and todo list plugins.
I’m a happy StandardNotes user and IMO it looks like it’s very similar but StandardNotes is more mature and has more functionality. If anything this might be slightly prettier.
I tried Standard Notes for a while but got frustrated by the fact that the Markdown editor is basically unusable. For some reason there's 5 or more different editors available and not a single one of them produces readable text.
If you're targeting your service to developers, you shouldn't set irritating password requirements like "alphanumerics and symbols". Whatever that means, because my password is still being rejected even though it satisfies both requirements (it has both letters and symbols).
Yet, you allow 4 character passwords ("4-100 characters"). What's the logic in that?
Edit: it looks like the password requirement is actually "any characters except whitespace". You should fix the error message.
Nice to see a product using CouchDB. From a quick glance, the revision utility seems to use CouchDB's revisions. Just a note to the dev: The _rev is not intended as a revision tool in CouchDB. Data will eventually be erased. See: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28354346/couchdb-view-th...
Great work man, this is one of the few tools/use cases where I think mark down is really the right choice. Limited set of keywords means you don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about formatting. In the end it's easy enough to convert to HTML/PDF as an export to share.
On top of that, the tool looks slick af.
I don't think I want the cloud sync feature, have you considered an option to license the software with out that for a prorated cost?
Maybe a dumb question - but how did you create apps on so many different platforms? Did you have to separately code everything? Or did you use some framework?
Definitely not a dumb question, I was wondering that too. My first guess for cross-platform desktop apps these days is Electron, and Inkdrop's UI looks a little Electron-y. But it would be really interesting to hear if it's something else.
For the mobile apps, afaik React Native is the most capable cross-platform mobile framework right now. Again, would be really interesting if it's something else (or hardcore if they're both native apps).
I worked on a markdown flash card app briefly because so many accounting terms referenced other terms in their definitions. By linking flash cards together I could quickly jump between flashcards to review unfamiliar terms.
Rather than wikipedia where everything about a subject is recorded, flash cards were meant to be a distilled set of facts for a single term from a single course or textbook you were studying.
I overhauled my models when I realized that the same field or subject (which I organized into Decks) used the same term in two different contexts to mean different things. That also meant I could not reference cards simply by name in the markdown. So I updated all links to reference by id rather than name. So I had to build some UI to select cards by name and generate links.
Then I hit a wall when I realized I would need a good way to encode and render math formulas and that's when my hobby project died.
Also, in the end, I found that having such quick linked access to knowledge I was studying made me less likely to remember the material, not more. I relied too heavily on the cards and the ability to just click on a term I didn't remember.
So I think this is a really cool idea, some feedback:
1. would love to be able to toggle whether the markdown syntax is shown vs a polished/rendered view of the markdown without the # symbols showing etc. For me the whole point of writing markdown is that moment when you get to see it rendered all nicely on github, and this hybrid mode doesn't quite do it for me
2. tags are cool, but a folder hierarchy would be more appropriate for notes imo. I immediately wanted to right click on the side bar and create folders, but that's not a thing.
3. Accessibility via web browser, as other people have mentioned, would be nice
4. ability to export any note to PDF or a single HTML file with inline styling
5. option to use github's exact markdown stylesheet
6. The whole note "status" thing I think is a bit niche. I wouldn't use it at all as I have project management software for that sort of thing. I would use this for storing random bits of knowledge, how-to-type stuff, research/project ideas, that sort of thing. It's a cool feature, I just wish it was optional and there were more options for how to organize the notes.
I get the sentiment against Electron, there are horribly bloated applications out there which are a direct consequence of how (badly) Electron was built and designed.
However, this particular application appears to work exactly as intended and uses all of 150MB of RAM and 0.1% CPU on my (admittedly quite beefy) laptop. Maybe, just maybe, this is actually a pretty well-built application? I understand if someone won't use this program because it doesn't scratch their particular itch. But, not using something solely because of the techniques used to build it, seems a bit elitist to me.
Your comment snapped me out of the RAM-obliviousness in which I usually live and work. I know memory is plentiful on modern PCs, but 150 MB of RAM for a note-taking app!?
Its a note taking app that renders HTML. Arguably, this is an ideal case for an electron app. 150 MB for a internet connected, syncing, HTML rendering note app doesn't seem unreasonable to me
Markdown generates extremely basic HTML. Browsers twenty years old render Markdown output satisfactorily. This sort of application is the ideal place to use a webview provided by the host operating system.
Anyone can be an armchair quarterback, but this solo developer has made seemingly a great product that people really like.
I don't think it matters very much what underlying frameworks are being used, especially to the end user.
If it's so easy to implement this natively on five platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android), please send us your link to your native cloud-syncing markdown note taking app, I'd really like to see it.
> I don't think it matters very much what underlying frameworks are being used, especially to the end user.
Every Electron text editing app I've used has noticeable input latency and hitching compared to native on my system.
> If it's so easy...
It's practically part of the human experience to have opinions about technology you haven't personally developed. The author can build their software however they want. I just won't use it.
If you have no plans to try this product I wonder why you claim it has performance issues or should have been architected in a different way, and why you're wasting all of our time by vocalising assumptions about an application based on its underlying technology.
I haven't been able to find any other five-platform markdown based note taking app with plugin support and cloud sync, so I'm still awaiting your link to a superior native alternative. It seems like Electron itself specifically enabled this application to exist.
If you can detect the input lag in Visual Studio Code I should commend your superior reflexes and genetic makeup.
> I wonder why you claim it has performance issues
It's true, I haven't tried it. Perhaps this solo dev has succeeded where large teams with more resources have failed.
> I'm still awaiting your link to a superior native alternative
Sorry; I thought you wanted one that I'd written. I've used SimpleNote for years. It's got dozens of clients, many of them native; I use NValt, Resoph Notes, and the official iOS client. It supports markdown. It doesn't support plugins, but you didn't want that until just now.
> If you can detect the input lag in Visual Studio Code
I use VSCode extensively for a large Angular project on a Macbook Pro with a 4K screen. I get trivially reproducible hitching, often when autocomplete kicks in. It doesn't require superhuman senses to see. The console is also easy see lag on; just use it to edit a commit message with vim during a rebase. Character input speed is easier to notice if you've been using Sublime or Vim immediately beforehand. It's not a deal-breaker; VSC is unparalleled for Angular development. I wish it was snappier, though.
> simplenote-electron is the official Simplenote desktop app for Windows and Linux.
I'm only being annoying and flame-war-ish to you about this because I'm somewhat tired of "framework hate." Case in point, you still use VSCode because no better alternative exists for Angular development. So, I still criticize your initial comment where you chose to proclaim that this app that you haven't tried should be written differently, even though it's written the same way as an application you rely on.
It might be interesting to read one Electron developer's take on the issue:
I made a new default Mac application in Xcode just now and ran it. It settled in at 17.1 MB, according to Activity Monitor's Memory tab. It's not "a note taking app". It's every app. Welcome to 2019.
Can we stop this kind of non-constructive criticism? Nobody here would ever choose to voluntarily go back to Windows 98 or anything similar from that era.
Using this same logic we'd be demanding that Netflix run over a 56K modem. It's a completely not realistic.
I would very much like to see your cloud syncing solo-developed markdown note taking app with HTML rendering available for Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS that uses under 16 MB of RAM. Or maybe you could point me to something of the sort that existed in 1998.
I'm sure you've got a quick link to that so I'm looking forward to trying it out.
"At that time, I was new to develop apps on top of Electron and ReactJS. As Inkdrop grew, I have learned a lot of good practices from it. I found that it can be improved much better in terms of implementation."
As a user of just slightly less than a year now - thank you! Ever since I gave up Evernote, I had been on the hunt for a clean note taking replacement and Inkdrop has been that for me. The new v4 looks great and works great!
Honnestly, my congratulations! I am in the same boat as you and 3 years is a long time especially when doing big/risky refactoring. I did my refactoring mainly to manage my application state, I really thought I would never gonna make it (and I was working in Swift, in Javascript it would have been nearly impossible to do the same thing...). But it was worth every second I spent on it: code is the main value of independant developers, so we should take great care of it!
I wish you good luck with your project and hope it will work.
I love markdown. It’s been my primary way of taking notes for many years.
A key benefit of the format to me is that text files will never be deprecated and are infinitely portable.
I saw mentioned a local cache. Would you add a pitch or squeeze page on this topic to help convince users like me? I want to love your product. The scrolling alone; beautiful.
Example user stories:
* can always see all notes as simple, well named, plainly organized, easy to read text files.
* Can output/sync certain folders of notes to plain text files. (To, for example, a Dropbox folder target)
Do you or do you plan to add any kind of sharing/collaborative editing to notes at all? Is the plugin system versatile enough to allow e.g. syncing notes to Jekyll blog posts?
Can anybody comment on the vim-keybindings plugin for Inkdrop. I've tried Notion, but I would really love a markdown/note-taking app with good vi-keybindings.
Long time Notion and vim user here. Just set up Inkdrop and tried the vim-plugin and all basic features work great. For things like switching files or navigation in general it seems like you'll need to use the software's standard bindings. But it looks like you can edit them.
If you plan to switch from Notion I recommend using the paste-as-markdown plugin. With this you can just copy a whole document from Notion and paste it into Inkdrop. Works flawlessly!
I like the design of this app a lot, but as with others like this, it feels like it wants me to double-pay for sync/storage I already have with iCloud or Dropbox.
Yea I would like it if the author offered a one-time purchase for the app without sync functionality at say $60.
I mean if you are having trouble with server space for hosting text files, then maybe you shouldn't be building your own cloud storage service.
There are lots of existing sync solutions without server space limitations, and you can still have end-to-end encryption by just saving the encrypted text file to local storage and decrypting it only in memory.
Dang it I was hoping this would be like a Sublime Text style individual license and no cloud stuff. I can't upload work documents outside our network and I hate monthly fees for software.
If I was working anywhere else though I would totally consider this, even though $5 a month is pretty steep for a markdown application with cloud sync. I would probably spring for their yearly pricing of $49.90.
I've been using Typora which is a similar or even a better tool and it's free for now. I hope typora doesn't go the subscription/saas route. Everything is a subscription these days and you probably would be better off going with a different revenue model since the competition is heavy in the note taking market.
I love this idea. I am more than a little jealous as I have wanted to build something like this since college. I just save my .md note files to a cloud drive and load them as a project w/ sublime text. It's not as beautiful as this but it works.
I use writer plus[1] which is a free Android app and writes to .md files that I sync to my computer via syncthing. Then you can use any markdown application on the desktop (there are several open source ones on Linux).
Nope, because I don't like file-based sync. It's slow, unstable and hard to implement. People will say "how about Google Drive/OneDrive/Box support?" Hell awaits you.
From a developer point of view, maybe. From a user point of view it’s a quite reliable and well known mechanism to sync between platforms. Dropbox is already what I personally use to manage my documents between all my devices, it’s part of my various workflows. I personally don’t want to add other syncing mechanisms if I can avoid as that forces me to create/manage an additional account and give my trust to an additional platform.
Of course I may be an outlier but I don’t think that’s the case, Dropbox is well established. Inkdrop looks really, really nice and I might be a user of such a tool, but only for the editing and categorizing part but if I cannot disable the syncing using your backend that’s a blocker for me.
Anyway, congrats for the work that you’ve done, I hope you will change your mind at some point :)
If this is aimed at developers, why would they want to use it over their existing editor? I use VSCode and I write markdown in it all the time. A lot of other common editors also have support for it. Why would I want to use a seperate tool?
Good question. My answer is I see this tool as a note taking app that uses Markdown. Not a general Markdown editing tool, though it may also handle that functionality. Does that make sense?
I write code all day in VSCode/Intellij, yet I write all my notes in the Apple Notes app. While not perfect (I would prefer to write them in MD), it currently has the fewest trade offs for me. The most important feature being that I can easily view/write notes anywhere on any of my devices.
Imho, notetaking Apps are solving problems that shouldn‘t be solved by them. Encryption / sync should be done by the system via git, Nextcloud, Dropbox, ...
Most of the rest is provided by a decent text editor.
Not really. There must be a small(big?) subset of people who don't want to setup git,nextcloud,dropbox etc. to get encryption/sync working. As a hacker it might offend your sensibilities of "one thing well" but not everyone is a hacker :-)
This is a markdown notes app though, who realistically is the target market besides hackers? The only people I have met who like markdown are programmers.
I loved reading this line in Takuya's post. It felt a lot more real than all of those "made with " and "we open source" taglines that other projects throw around.
Thanks for posting this as I was looking for the exact same info as I will be designing-developing a productivity suite based on my ADHD experience of using productivity structure to control my ADHD.
I love this! I've been using Notion for notes because I don't like Evernote, OneNote, or Google Keep. This may replace Notion for me. I'll give it a try!
ehm, sorry, isn't markdown in itself editable with any text editor and thus no further "application" is necessary. The point of markdown is that every text editor can edit it.
i am the only one that keeps using sticky notes on windows and google keep? do people take that many notes that they need to invest in such a fancy tool?
You can write a blog in Markdown and generate your own static website with it, you could write a diary in Markdown, which I do, or you could take notes of code implementation, which could require LaTEX for nice mathematics and code fences to organize small chunks of code.
I was one of your volunteer beta testers years ago and provided some feedback. I still get a little salty when I see this app since you still terminated my account and made me pay :) hope you've been well
1. I need a web app. I want to be able to call up my notes from a computer, anywhere, without installing anything.
2. A 60 day trial seems like the wrong way to test a note taking app - it makes me feel like you're going to hold my data hostage unless I migrate away within that timescale. A much smaller (5-10MB) quota with no time limit would allow me to test it properly, and it's already a part of my workflow by the time I hit the limitations of the free account, so I'm more likely to actually upgrade.