"A fresh take on documents" that's limited to Apple devices seems like a problem. People usually make documents to share. I suppose there are embubbled Apple users who don't even know anyone who uses something else and who they'd want to share or collaborate with. But that must be an exception.
Love the word embubbled. Never seen that. Nice. Weirdly I would have gone with enbubbled. I'm not sure why. I know Jebediah Springfield would have preferred the em- to en-. But for some weird, unknowable linguistic reason I would go with the en-. Anyway (and apologies for the offtopicallity), I reckon we should now include embubbled as a key factor in startupland. We have Inadequacy Analysis, Exploitability Analysis and Low Hanging Fruit Analysis. I think it's time for Embubblability Analysis. Phew - whole lotta red underlines in that!
I spent a few years on iOS and the number of notetaking apps that only use iCloud or Dropbox was infuriating. There was very rarely a WebDav or NextCloud option.
This is something I've seen an awful lot on iOS. Clearly having Apple give you an SDK is convenient as a developer, but for a huge segment of the market, storing randomly on "someone else's computer" just isn't an option - professionals and others that Apple tends to target.
With the storage framework in recent iOS versions, maybe we'll see more apps support it? It surely can't be too much effort, but I guess the demand is limited.
Do you have any insight into that segment being huge? I’d think it wouldn’t be a very big segment. Some subreddits and HN discuss things in a way almost no one else does. Like privacy and security.
"Huge" is a tough one to quantify, but in speaking to a lot of the regulated sectors like legal, this is a big area, and one that people are waking up to.
One part of the issue is most aren't even aware they're breaking the law (or their regulatory obligations). You're right, there's certainly an online "bubble" around privacy/security, but equally, from the other perspective if you speak to people outside of the "startup tech" industry, they'd say the notion of randomly using third party services with unmanaged storage on personal accounts (a la iCloud) simply isn't an option for them.
I guess when you add it up - regulated financial services, legal, anyone falling under GDPR who needs to show systematic measures in place, any serious business that needs to have processes that out-live any individual staff member, systems based around "convenient personal cloud" suddenly start to become the minority.
Most serious companies won't allow company IP/data to be stored on "personal" systems (which would encompass iCloud and similar).
This is why I require any app to be able to use a hierarchical folder of markdown documents as its store, even if the app is single platform. Currently using Obsidian on the desktop and MWeb on my iPhone, but the docs are just such a collection of markdown so easy to share and no lock-in.
The "cross platform app" ecosystem seems fractured in a way that you must either add 2x to 5x the effort to achieve it, or sacrifice performance and UX.
Software development technology is getting close. A couple few more years maybe and that problem will start to go away fairly rapidly [relatively speaking], like possible 30-40% cross platform by the end of maybe 5 years-ish. 12 year android dev here seeing the light at the end of the tunnel with some newer performant (dev wise and user wise) frameworks and architectural patterns. Of course this all depends on Apple not saying FU to the entire industry in a dramatic, squashing those frameworks with their iron fist sorta way.
Something along the lines barring the compilation of iOS apps with 3rd party tools or some such in TOS or blocking apps made with them from the App Store outright. Not saying the would, but if they had reason to fear they are losing control of something in their ecosystem, no telling what they would do. Just would not give a zero chance of something crazy as such happening.
Also "Frictionless sharing and collaboration" seems not valid at all when it exists in the closed ecosystem that is Apple. Probably the decision is to follow with Android and web [windows+linux].
The sharing links send people to a website where they can see a read-only view of the notes which seems pretty good for an app which isn’t cross platform. If you want to collaborate with people in an office then it is likely that either no one has macs or most people have access to them. If you want to collaborate with people outside of an office then there can be similar problems (what if your collaborator doesn’t have MS office?), or I guess you could use LATEX with git or google docs, but they come with their own issues.
I've played with Craft a bit and it's been a joy to use so far.
Conceptually it sits between Apple Notes and Notion. You get native apps that work offline, support fast capture, and are satisfying to use. You also get the wiki-style support and block-level editing of Notion, along with lots of other nice Notion visual flourishes (page-level icons, cover images, etc.)
One area Craft really shines, is the way that it supports interactive, sharable documents. If I have text, images, files, and want to combine them all into a single page/starting point, Craft makes this super simple.
Here are some examples (which you could design on your own):
Evernote has a flat list of notes, usually ordered by time. I find related notes by searching. Craft lets me build a tree of nested documents. I imagine that the tree structure would encourage more thought upfront in placing new content into relevant context. It looks like Craft is probably less buggy than the latest Evernote apps.
I use a git repo, markdown documents, and one daemon on each device, to sync and share notes across all my devices.
I have yet to find something that beats this in portability, flexibility, note quality (from markdown to interactive jupyter notebooks), file support (all files), math support (latex formulas for markdown), graph support (mermaid), presentation support (reveal.js),...
Maybe Craft is a little different than a directory tree, since the directories are external to documents, where Craft documents nest internally.
I agree that markdown in a git repo has quite a bit of flexibility. We use git+markdown for my software team's documentation. I prefer Evernote for my personal notes because of less friction when pasting in embedded images and because of better support for editing and offline access from mobile devices (also because of inertia).
I've been trying to switch to Notion from Evernote, and I'm having a hard time. I really liked that Evernote could be a shoebox where I put all my random PDFs, receipts, user manuals, etc, alongside a smaller number of evergreen notes.
I haven't found that same shoebox aspect to Notion, which I think is by design, because people believe it to be an antipattern. But every time I want to save something, it needs to be need in some kind of database or as a subdocument to another document, and that's just not how I think of those things.
I actually came across Craft in the Evernote subreddit. Compared to the latest Evernote client (v10), speed of the clients would be biggest difference. Both support note taking and sharing, but the polish of Craft is definitely noticeable.
The app seems really amazing so far after trying it out on my iPhone. Everything that I have tried so far works like a charm, ez searching, indentation, nice styling, intuitive controls.
But the one thing that is missing for me to use it, is a web app. It doesn't need to be as flashy as the native apps, or it does not need feature parity. But I don't like the idea that all my notes are trapped inside my Apple devices, and that I have no way to even look through them when I am on my pc.
It looks lovely, but charging a subscription for spell check, in-document search, and printing -- table stakes for a text editor -- is surely going to rub people the wrong way.[1]
While much of the blame still falls on Apple for pushing developers toward subscriptions in the absence of a straightforward paid-upgrade mechanism, requiring a subscription for an app with no cloud dependencies remains an instant disqualification for me.
It's buying into a promise that your monthly payments are going toward continuous improvement of the product – a promise that might be kept, or might not – and even if it is, for how long? If updates stall out after awhile, or if the new features don't solve anything for you, it's not like you can choose to skip an upgrade. And the more you use the product, the higher the barrier to switching away. I agree, Craft looks lovely, but there's no way I'm locking myself into its business model.
I say this every time, but this is a solved problem. Developers of software like Sketch and Bitwig Studio have the right kind of subscription model, where you subscribe to updates, not access. If you don't care for the latest version, you can let your subscription lapse and keep using the last version you're licensed for. Apple has all the pieces necessary to simply gate App Store updates via subscription, but they apparently have no motivation to do so.
Related, but the push to subscriptions coupled with my reaction has devalued my phone substantially.
I just do not subscribe to many things. I don't like assigning myself future financial tasks, and I don't like dealing with recurring payments[1].
As a result, I've stopped using a bunch of things that went sub-only. There are more I'll be dropping.
And this has moved a lot of things I did on my phone elsewhere. This, combined with the fact that the Iphone X (I have no need to upgrade it) is a bit too big, and the Screentime thing tells me I use it an average of 17 minutes a day, which is going to mainly be 2FA and texting with family.
I mean, I kinda welcome this - I don't like phone dependency. And I expect I'm not the median case. But Apple's strategy has backfired with me.
[1] I realize this is not strictly rational, and I have paid more for one-time-purchase software that I used once than a sub would have been. It doesn't matter.
with 17 minutes a day you definitely are not the median case. i think you're more of an outlier these days (probably outside 3 sigma that people actually care about). I can see why you wouldn't want any subscription services.
TBH I think it's fine to prevent access to updates that update the app to work with the updated OS. That is work and I think it's fair to charge for it.
The App Store already does exactly this, though. The only difference is that the gating is by OS version rather than payment.
An Xcode deploy target can require a minimum OS version, and when an app's minimum version increases with an update, the update is not available to users who haven't updated their device. If the device doesn't support the new OS version, the user is stuck with the last version supported on the old OS, and will not receive any future patches.
The problem with web-based software subscriptions like this is that you don't really have any option to fall back to a perpetual license with the version you're at. It's ok for shorter term use cases like specific projects, but it's hard to commit for longer-lived documentation or personal documents you want to maintain over years. Your usage may ebb and flow. Aside from that, the company may go out of business or just change its priorities.
I hear what you’re saying, and even agree with it in principle.
To provide a counter example, I subscribe to Ulysses. They embody “subscription for access done right” (at least so far). I liked the app enough that I bought into that promise, and so far, the developer had delivered with excellent updates over time.
What I dislike is that there’s no guarantee this will be the case.
But to be fair, this is how reputations will be built: both good and bad. Developers who build a bad reputation will not succeed in the long run. It sucks that someone had to be the guinea pig though...
So while there’s risk in buying the promise, it can pay off.
I’d still prefer the “subscribe to updates” approach.
As software development works today, the subscription model is the only logical business model. Unless it's like a single player game where you only play through or use once. Software today is an continuous process. When a software product ships it's far from finished. The subscription model is good for both users and developers, as it allows releasing a software product early, without a huge marketing and advertising budget. The incentive is not to make you buy it once, the incentive is to make you keep using it, by improving it, or keeping it good, take good care of customers, etc.
> The incentive is not to make you buy it once, the incentive is to make you keep using it, by improving it, or keeping it good, take good care of customers, etc.
The problem is that this isn’t the only incentive, or rather, not a well-defined version of the incentive at play.
The incentive is to simply keep the customer as a customer, over time. Multiple strategies will work, which includes being nice to the customer, but also includes lock-in strategies like data availability (proprietary format, no export), logic availability (custom proprietary language, stdlib, etc), etc
That is, Jetbrains and Oracle both run on subscription models, with very different interpretations of how to process those incentives.
I don't think it's good for -consumers- in the majority of cases and is only for those selling the software. I think anything else is rationalization in the mind of the developer. New versions should sell themselves as they provide security and feature upgrades if it's a good product.
Not everything has to have a business model. Some people write code because they want to, and then give it away for free. If you plant a seed in the earth, it will give you food for free, too.
Also, we’re starting to reach the point where money is an ineffective incentive.
That's a bigger problem than not being able to send my file to printer. Looking at what Craft does, a paper version is going to be very "lossy", it's what Clay Shirky calls a "shearing" layer.
I don't believe printing is table stakes for an editor any more. Quality export to a printable format, yes. Directly sending an application document to the system print queue via some printing language (PostScript, PCL, DVI, PDF..), though, I don't see that as being a big thing anymore.
I'm not saying the paperless office is here, but with everyone WFH and no access to the office color laser printer, who is generating much paper any more?
I think they confuse things by calling it a “writing app”. It can be used for that, but it’s more of a note taking app. It competes with Notion and Roam, not iA Writer really.
Honestly, I find this kind of comment not useful at all. Considering how internet / tech / security savvy the HN crowd is, I'm sure we don't give our personal / work email addresses willy nilly.
There are a huge number of anonymous email services available. I came across this list from a basic search [0].
In fact, recently, there was submission for https://33mail.com on ShowHN also.
So, my question is, why don't we do this and add comments about the application itself.
I agree there are many ways to persist data even without a login. But that in turn means wasting a huge amount of resources for anonymous users with hardly any return at all. Why should developers do that?
In my opinion, what I find worse, is this expectation of getting something for nothing. Facebook, Google and others have grown to this size because of this sense of enlightenment. And we complain about them all the time.
So, in short, my suggestion is - if you don't find use of a service without submitting an anonymous email, don't use it. There's really no point in adding a comment which does nothing towards the understanding or increasing our knowledge.
I don’t get your comment. First you agree we don’t like to share our email and then you suggest going to a 4th party as a workaround. If requiring an email was ok, you wouldn’t having to use workarounds.
A comment like OP has 2 purposes: saves me from ever trying the app; suggests to the author that they made an unpopular choice.
You can sign in with Apple and avoid sharing your email with exactly 2 taps. This "workaround" is available to everyone to whom this app is available in the first place, and it is literally less work than actually typing in your email, and it doesn't involve a 4th party. So not trying the app because of that is completely pointless, and the same goes for complaining about requiring email.
FWIW, I wish I had such a thing for the comment above that one :/. One of the only (arguably "the only"!) remaining decentralized platform protocols we have on the Internet is e-mail, and using it for authentication is so much better for everyone than virtually every single alternative (absolutely including even a bespoke username). That tech people, of all people, hate on email so much that they refuse to give it out or use systems built on it--seemingly preferring worlds with walled gardens of centralized moderation and push notifications with permissioned / gated sign-in systems--makes the world universally worse for everyone. Being so uptight about "spam" in general is a big reason why we are falling into the surveillance capitalism dystopia that even end users are finally waking up to hate. (For the record, my email address is saurik@saurik.com.)
Uh no. If you want to test your spam filters go ahead. All they really need is a name and login for me to try their product, if it works well for me I'll be happy to pony up my email and payment information. Otherwise, I'll move along and they won't have an email to bug me with.
> e-mail, and using it for authentication is so much better for everyone than virtually every single alternative (absolutely including even a bespoke username)
No I found it useful. I don't install "free" trials either if they want my email. Assign me a random/unique ID to track me for a bit. I found the comment quite useful. I'm currently doing ok without their software, and I appreciate the comment personally. I don't want to encourage the behavior and I don't want to use anonymous emails, I think that's an antipattern that I don't want to get used to
When you use Apple’s email proxy, is there an easy way to shut off email from a particular sign-up? (Kind of like the benefit users derive from Apple managing subscriptions — you know there’s one place where you can turn it off with no hassle.)
It’s fascinating to me how block-based editors have been gaining traction recently. It’s a great balance between modeling semantics the computer can understand and offering a WYSIWYG UI for users. I built an in-browser editor for a client project that worked this way back in 2014, and open-sourced the core[1]. It worked really well. However, at the time our users (professors) had difficulty understanding what was going on when it didn’t work identically to MS Word. Specifically, to them, Word was “correct” and anything that worked differently was “wrong.”
I quit using that model in future projects as I just assumed that block-based editing would always be too “programmery” for users trained on and anchored to Word. I guess I was wrong :)
Considering it's possible to generate a web link with this, I would love to see an 'export to HTML' feature so that I could use Craft to write a personal website/blog.
My first thought as well. Increasingly I dont want a Web App, Blog, CMS, or whatever it is. I think all of that should just live on my computer as a simple App. Upload the HTML and we are good to go.
Craft seems to be build with Catalyst. Apple only introduced it in 10.15. It is technically impossible to support anything below 10.15. Now, it would be possible to write two Craft apps (one iOS and one macOS) instead of a shared one, but that’s much more work and only adds a minority of users (those still below 10.15), so it is understandable they chose not to support it.
Typically being 3 or 4 major versions behind the current version is under %0.5 of the market, it's really not worth it to maintain compatibility that low unless your already old app doesn't need to stop supporting old versions.
I'm estimating because the app is newer, is the reason why they didnt' put special effort in support very old versions like that.
I guess the block-based document editor field is heating up. With this tool's native iOS and macOS apps, I hope they either unseat Notion, or launch Notion into making native tools. Their web-based UI has extremely poor performance.
I had the same thought. Bear is in this category too. The only differentiator vs. Notion right now seems to be a native app, however. I'm going to give it a try and see if I like it though.
One significant difference is automatic back linking (bi-directional linking). Craft looks a bit like Notion but it has some of the functionality of Roam and Obsidian. Plus, decent native apps, which Notion and the others lack.
You know what is ridiculous? That in 2020 we don't have an electronic document format which has modern animation support:
- WTF happened to .mhtml/.eml ?!?
- .odt : the least bad I guess, but is still a bit heavy, clunky, and uses discrete pages without reflow by default. Also, the underlying language isn't designed to be tinkered with, which is a critical shortcoming in many situations.
Looks great, I love the UI and the whole native approach. I wish there was an option to use iCloud for storage or even full offline mode. I would also prefer the one-time payment, even if it is high (like https://culturedcode.com/things/ does). Also please copy "Daily Notes" from Roam :-)
I don't have an Apple device, so I can not try Craft, but I suggest OrgPad (at https://orgpad.com) is more suited for note taking than Craft since there is also focus on the Big Picture? What do you think?
> You data is stored in the cloud (AWS), it's encrypted during transfer (TLS) and also at rest (default RDS encryption for document content and personal data, and SSE-S3 encryption for uploaded binary content). However at this point we do not provide end-to-end encryption of your data.
Though it is not syncing over iCloud, so Apple doesn't see the data unless it is also backed up to iCloud (for instance, in your phone backup).
Stored during transfer and stored at rest is not end-to-end encrypted. Amazon, as well as the app provider, can read all of your data stored in this app.
The native apps are nice, but the way this is set up to require a single email and name at a time for everything is extremely unfriendly to people who might want to use this in professional contexts.
Another of those subscription apps? That’s ridiculous when people build simple weather, calendar app or a text editor and expect users to pay dozens of euro every year for them.
