Standard Notes – A notes app with a focus on longevity, portability, and privacy (standardnotes.org)

I like Google Keep as well, but I can only really use it for "simple" notes that I take while mobile. The lack of any kind of formatting system is a detriment I think.

Also, the UI on desktop is pretty poor. A native mac app would be a huge boost.

I love Google Keep but I wonder when they will kill it. When Google Apps aren't directly monetized it makes me worry (Wave, Reader, etc).

I want to use Google Keep but it's a lot slower (on a mac) as compared to using markdown notes saved locally and accessed using nvalt or atom

I use Google Keep. But I plan to move off of it after I accidentaly removed part of the note and noticed then that there is no undo at all. Even notepad.exe has 3 step undo, so that is totally unacceptable.

I found Google Keep much too basic. Now I'm using Google Docs and I'm fairly happy.

Some of the features I like about it:

  Searchable
  Formatting support
  Edit history
  Android App
  Good web interface
  Syncs perfectly between platforms with simultaneous editing
  Google is unlikely to disappear with my data anytime soon, and has been good about letting you take your data with Google Takeout

And some things I don't like:

  My own Cloud/NSA paranoia
  no end-to-end encryption AFAIK
  Android app sometimes slow to open a note for editing

There are standards for calendar. iCal/CalDAV. Here is a free server [1]. Nextcloud can be hosted via HTTPS, too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_and_Contacts_Server

Wow that texts.io looks really cool!

Doesn't look like it supports tagging/searching and organising notes though (correct me if I'm wrong)

I will comment my hackable note-taking app (which has image upload paste) in case anyone is interested:

https://github.com/divbit/grimoire

currently supports image paste -> embedding (this was a crucial feature for me as well) and notes in markdown, latex, html, inline javascript (so you can do a note with some d3 or whatever).

I decided to not do live markdown preview because the save feature is fairly quick, and it gives more space on the page for editing on my small screen.

What I'm hoping for is self-previewing Markdown -- where you use the equivalent of syntax highlighting to approximate how the Markdown will be rendered. Lines starting with # are bigger, links are links, and so on. Bullets don't even need to be changed, except possibly in color.

The split-pane approach, with one Markdown pane and one WYSIWYG pane, is such a waste of screen space, when self-previewing Markdown is all you need if you're not trying to create a published document.

A former Show HN project, bluedocs.io, offered this by default. But now it's defunct (and my notes are lost with it).

Note that you can export a single Paper doc, or all the Paper docs you've created:

https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/9212

I started using Dropbox for notes too, except I ended up just creating a folder structure of Markdown files in Sublime. I figured Sublime was a good way to go because it is already always open for work stuff and it's got decent searching capability.

For mobile (more for reading, not creating), I use MarkdownX (free) which integrates nicely with the Android Dropbox app.

For clipping links into my notes on desktop, I use a Chrome extension called "Copy as Markdown" which creates a nicely formatted link for my notes.

Dropbox Paper has a decent web UI but its iOS app was 116 MB. By comparison, the actual Dropbox iOS client is at 88 MB.

It would be nice (and I'm looking for somewhere to move all my Flickr photos), but it massively increases the resources required at the back end. Storing a lifetime's worth of typed text is maybe tens or hundreds of megabytes. Many people will generate that much data as photos in an afternoon.

I'm also yet to find the perfect photos app. It needs to have:

- self hosted front end with a simple management interface for organising photos into albums, uploading, setting permissions - simple security so you can share only with the people you want to share with, especially simple for older relatives - backend storage should be any cloud hosting system such as on AWS S3, but the data shouldn't be accessible to any one publicly, except via the application, and ideally encrypted at rest.

Camlistore - https://camlistore.org

Same here. I'd love a self-hosted Flickr. All the ones I've tried don't even come close. I like Smugmug as far as layout/features and use it too, just wish I could self host it.

I really like Google Photos for it's excellent search capabilities. Being able to search for photos with my dog or from a time or specific places is fantastic.

GNU MediaGoblin - http://mediagoblin.org/

Does this do reminders?

Bear App (http://www.bear-writer.com) is pretty neat too - it has Markdown support and uses iCloud Sync, which is probably the best part of Apple's Notes app.

Found myself in a similar situation with Wunderlist slowing down over the past year. Found Taskcade (http://www.taskcade.com) to be a good alternative, but it is web only right now.

After being a heavy SimpleNote user I finally migrated to Onenote. Simplenote is excellent for basic notetaking but having used Onenote I'm spoiled by it's ability to search within images. This is a lifesaver if you have to quickly search for a scanned receipt or a screenshot.

You can access the app without sign up here: https://app.standardnotes.org.

Reminds me of camlistore

Interesting is one word for that, given the main thesis that venture capital is universally to blame for the failure of centralized things we rely upon (with zero evidence to support this assertion), and that building another centralized service with less functionality is somehow the better answer. Speaking personally, I completely rely upon PDFs and images and things accompanying my notes because of the nature of the work I do (I have about 4,700 pages of research and almost a gigabyte of imagery all tied together in a Scrivener project for a single piece of work, for example), and the frozen feature set so proudly advertised smacks of "people need to take notes exactly the way I do," which is an immediate turn-off for me. That it's taken further and somewhat arrogantly called "standard" notes really chills me on liking this product at all, given that it completely and intentionally omits useful things to a lot of people -- including me. Then there are extensions, of course, pushing out all the useful features to extensions which will work even less over time.

Maybe some people will like this, but the motivations and decisions just seem ill thought out so far, particularly when it's "VC is going to kill Evernote, so you should rely upon a hostname I personally administer instead and you get exactly what I give you" as the main call to action when I go to the page.

  - [..]
  - exporting all data as a human readable file
  - [..]

Great read. Nothing new but it's important to put the spotlight in the cause of the rot of this industry.

I don't agree with the author much. Ok, Windows Evernote client is a bit bloated, I agree, but I can still immediately enter new note and immediately search notes via a shortcut. And there is a normal windows listview where I can see a lot of notes at once.

On the contrary, this is like a web application optimized for tablet converted to a windows app. Frankly the list of notes looks horrible on desktop.

Anyway, I look forward to this project, and it could be successful in the end, similar way the Visual Studio Code is. Good luck.

Hey, you should go to https://app.standardnotes.org. Those servers are not meant to be visited. You plug those in into the app.

Edit: I should really set up redirects for those.

Purely out of curiosity - what do you find remarkably bad about Apple Notes?

For context, I use Apple Notes frequently but not regularly (~100 notes over four years) and suspect my use is not heavy enough to uncover limitations.

What's the best format to distribute Linux apps?

I am very happily settled on taskwarrior, vimwiki & taskwiki now.

I've gone back and forth between Quiver and Ulysses. Quiver doesn't have an iOS app and Ulysses handles images and code awkwardly.

Cycled through many, came back to keeping the old fashioned Google Docs (Word) file. Just have a bookmarked link in the Chrome's toolbar. I envy those who've been using Word file to collect information for many years, well, since the beginning.

Not closed.

https://github.com/ttscoff/nv

nvALT is open-source! It's a fork of Notational Velocity, on the developer's GitHub: https://github.com/ttscoff/nv

That being said, I don't think it's updated too regularly. Brett is working on a complete rewrite of the app (which will be a paid version): http://brettterpstra.com/2015/09/14/an-nvalt-and-more-status...

Yes, nvalt is Mac only.

If you are on Windows, I highly recommend ResophNotes. It isn't open source, but it's excellent software very much in the spirit of nvalt. I've combined ResophNotes with Autohotkey and Merlin Mann's notes taxonomy and it's a killer combination for me.

Terminal Velocity is cross platform and open source and awesome. https://github.com/vhp/terminal_velocity

A made a simple clone (https://github.com/wincent/corpus) of nvALT in JavaScript because it was easier for me to make an app from the ground up in Electron than it was to hack on a foreign Objective-C codebase (a little out of practice). I wouldn't recommend that anybody actually use it though because it is far from complete, albeit good enough for me to use it every day.

nvALT has always been open source. It has to be -- it's based off of Notational Velocity, which is GPLv3.

Gotcha, easy fix, will get that out asap. We did this as a way to push out changes quicker since we were still making major improvements often.

    encryptText(text, key) {
        var keyData = CryptoJS.enc.Hex.parse(key);
        var ivData  = CryptoJS.enc.Hex.parse("");
        var encrypted = CryptoJS.AES.encrypt(text, keyData, { iv: ivData,  mode: CryptoJS.mode.CBC [...]

I'm just getting started with Electron, so forgive me if this is a stupid question, but how is that different from the updates endpoint getting compromised (for apps with auto update enabled)?

Subresource Integrity can also help prevent damage from compromised external hosts. It's a good defense against CDNs turning malicious.

Is education the only way around this? Sounds disastrous enough to warrant active policing.

We want to do something like this through extensions. The goal of this app is to last really long, so it has to stay simple, otherwise bloat, debt, and inevitable abandon ensues.

Extensions are pretty powerful and can handle collaboration. You can build things like revision control as well. Right now Dropbox sync is available as an extension: https://standardnotes.org/extensions

Laverna does exactly the same, it even looks the same :)

Yes, totally possible. Right now extensions are data based. But there is another breed of extensions we're building towards, which is "previewers" or "renderers", which allow you to parse the text and display it in any which way. This will be coming pretty soon, and will replace the current built-in Markdown editor with an extension. Trying to remove as much built in dependencies as possible.

I tried to take latex notes for a while in my machine learning class, but found pencil and paper to be much, much more ergonomic. I was spending time thinking about the latex syntax, distracting me from thinking about the actual content.

Also, spatial arrangement of elements is an important part of mathematical notation for understanding the relationships between entities, which can get lost looking at unrendered latex content.

There are multiple ways you can do this already:

- Typora. Markdown format. Equations rendered on return key.

- RStudio. Markdown format. However equations don't get rendered immediately. Requires a knit HTML or PDF action. Still, it's my preferred tool.

- Jupyter notebook. ipynb format - can be exported to HTML or PDF. Equations get rendered somewhat immediately (after a shift return keypress).

- Libreoffice Writer. ODT format, can be exported to HTML or PDF. Uses its own equation editor (which is quite good if you like GUIs). Rendered immediately while equation is being typed. Used this for my first ML class - no trouble at all.

Just that you can toggle between a Markdown preview. I see how it can be ambiguous. Markdown though is going to be decoupled from the main app and served as an extension instead.