Less than a month ago I decided to build an app for myself to solve a very specific problem:
“I want to be able to take notes on my phone, share some of them online, and publish a few on my personal blog — oh, an I also want an API!”
I built this is because no tool out there satisfied my needs:
- Notion had no native app so it's very slow to use on mobile. Plus is too general.
- Medium is a disaster for readers, they shouldn't be the ones paying to read. Native app is slow AF.
- Most note-taking apps were too complex and feature creep. I wanted speed + power with simplicity first. Just give me markdown.
- Apps are either online or offline, none tried to mix those two models seamlessly.
- Blogs are either static (I need to be on my laptop and code) or use CMS which are too general and complex.
I sense there’s a demand for an easy to use native note-taking app that can also serve as an online publishing platform. A place where you can use your domain and update your notes right from your phone.
Of course, this is just a theory, so I would love to see if you all find it useful. You can try it https://collectednotes.com
Features:
- Simplicity.
- Markdown with live preview.
- Custom Domains.
- No ads, no tracking, no modals, no vanity, no nonsense.
- No data lock-in. Export your notes from day one.
- Restful API, Your Notes in different formats.
- Native experience iPhone & iPad:
Share extension, Quick actions, FaceID, Quick Actions, Keychain, Keyboard shortcuts, Slide Over & Split View, Dark Mode.
I had to look around for the walkthrough video and later realized that tapping on the icon on the top left launches it. There was no indication or clue for me on mobile that the icon was a link to a video.
Honestly, sounds like micro.blog and how I use it. Most importantly, micro.blog uses Micropub, an existing W3C standard API for blogging which is why things like Drafts, iAWriter, MarsEdit etc can all support it.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a very cool project and it looks like you’ve done a great job. I would recommend looking into Micropub support though rather than role your own API. The IndieWeb group has worked hard and built up a lot of easy to use and powerful standards around this stuff.
It would be great if there was a good way to find existing projects that achieve what we seek. Usually, the biggest names are visible, and it's hard to find alternatives that achieve specific ideas.
Oddly enough, I find page 2 (and beyond) of Google results to be incredibly different than page 1 in the way that you describe. When shopping, for example, (in normal search, not the Shopping tab) I'll often have heard of every store on page 1 and almost no stores on page 2+. Using default of 10 results per page.
There is a website called alternative.to which kinda does this for most things, it’s user maintained but it works pretty well for most things, but sometimes fails for smaller projects
Interesting idea. How long is it around I wonder, it feels like it hasn't taken off yet. The bloggers there seem to perhaps come from a similar viewpoint, guardianista, I'd call it. If someone starts blogging what they might feel to be an unacceptable viewpoint, more torygraph what then, I wonder? Is it a curated timeline? Can they censor like Twitter does? What's the essential difference from a free speech point of view between this site and the existing social networks?
Yes, please do! My job involves a lot of math, so it a dealbreaker for me when notetaking software doesn't have math support. These days it's very easy to include! The easiest way is to use KaTeX [1] to render math between dollar sign tags for inline math like this $x+y=5$ and for display math like this:
$$
\int_a^b f(x) dx
$$
Many markdown parsers (like markdown-it) have plugins for math support. In the future, I would also heavily recommend looking into using ProseMirror [2] for wysiwyg Markdown editing.
(I'm currently working on adding wysiwyg math editing to ProseMirror -- see the gifs here [3] for an early proof of concept).
Awesome! FWIW I currently use a clone [1] of Andy's notes website [2], to which I've added KaTeX support. The biggest feature is the Roam-style bidirectional linking. But your system is sufficiently simpler that I think I'll give it a try, at least for some use cases.
Roam-style bidirectional linking would be cool, but I wonder if it's better to keep it simple for everyone else rather than add very specific features for the few people like me. Your call...
Anyways, cool project! You're definitely making something people want :)
Funny enough Andy’s website is one of the reasons I started this. I have bidirectional linking on the roadmap since day one, but not like Roam, I plan to do something different to keep it simple. For me simplicity is number one here :)
It replaces my LaTex with unicode symbols that often look shitty, and are usually the wrong size. Also, it sometimes never rendered my equations. Don't let this totally dissuade you, I never really looked into it (switching to mathjax was easier) but I just remember that "out-of-the-box", a lot of things were broken.
fwiw, I haven't had this experience at all. KaTeX has been extremely easy to integrate into my projects with a simple katex.render(my_math_str). Perhaps you had some string encoding issues separate from katex?
Maybe a bit late, but chiming in here to say that prosemirror in general is absolutely amazing. Used it to build my own note taking app, highly recommended.
Thanks for making Notebag, I just tried it out and love how straightforward it is! I hope you'll consider adding math support in the future! Feel free to use my math plugin [1] as a starting point, it's MIT licensed. (still under development, but it's solid enough to use already)
Very minor bug report (which I don’t mind at all): during the signup process on mobile, I clicked “premium subscription” and then pressed the back button. The form was wiped, so I had to re-enter my info.
I imagine many people might give up after that, so I just wanted to mention it.
Another minor bug: when toggling private to public on mobile, the drop down menu doesn’t go away after you press public. It also blocks the save button, so it’s not entirely clear how to save. (I eventually figured it out.)
My only hesitation is that it doesn’t feel like “my” notes. They’re my notes on your platform. And I don’t know whether your platform will die tomorrow. But I try to resist such concerns.
Is there a way to export all my data somehow? Also, some way of adding google analytics?
Ah good catch, mobile experience is very MVP, I only focused on the web for desktop use. For mobile iOS native is the way to go I went crazy on the native features :)
The reason is that [@theshawwn](https://twitter.com/theshawwn) didn't convert into HTML for some reason. I assume the @ character threw it off, and I didn't want to drop what I was doing to figure out why. But there are a million small things like that.
Great work. UI tip: When reading on mobile browser and rotating the phone the text doesn’t expand to occupy more space like it can. I find myself doing this a lot to read code on my phone so when a site doesn’t adapt to allow me to read it without odd line breaks I usually leave the site.
Hey, I'm really interested in trying your app. However I am unable to sign in via iPhone SE. The small screen means I that cannot tap to sign in with email address - I prefer this over Apple/Google login.
Otherwise so it looks great, I look forward to giving it a go.
Sorry about that, didn't test enough on smaller screens. Will be definitely fixed on the next update. In the meantime you can try the web desktop version!
One thing you might want to consider is having one domain for a website about collectednotes (collectednotes.com) and another for hosting user's blogs (collectednotes.blog for example) because it is currently not clear what urls are official and made by you and which are just blogs made by anyone.
There was a story here a couple of weeks ago or something with a post mortem from someone who got their websites taken offline and access to their mail suspended or taken offline because some automated system at a giant corporation decided so.
It stayed offline for hours because there was no competent humans available with authority to override the clearly (AFAIK) stupid decision made by the system.
Personally a key takeaway from that (except not depending on said company) was to make sure one has at least two domains, preferably with two registrars, and make sure user generated content is not available on the one you depend on for email etc.
Great tip - got a link for the story, by any chance? Or do you remember who the company was, so I can search for it myself?
EDIT: I couldn't find anything directly on point, but I did find this related horror story about a company whose ICANN email contact information no longer worked because the company's contact person had left the company. An ICANN email to the contact person bounced back. ICANN took the entire domain offline. The company's Web person had a lot of trouble getting through to a human at ICANN to straighten things out — and even then: "To make a long story short, my client was required to submit articles of incorporation, bank statements and other documents in order to get the domain working again." [0]
EDIT 2: Thanks to Chris Morgan, who provided a link to a GitBook horror story. [1]
I added both stories to my "Startup Law 101" page [2], with a hat tip to both Erik and Chris.
Cool idea, but I'm never going to keep notes in a proprietary app, even if I can export them. It's just too much of a headache, and the risk at hand is a lot more work on my part should this not be a profitable venture on your part. Notes last for years, and even decades, and the last thing I want to do is reorganize, reindex and republish old notes.
I LOVE this. Such a great and simple service.
Perfect example of excellent yet simple execution.
I’m very impressed with all the existing features and your roadmap.
Ive joined as a paying customer!
Looking forward to seeing the minor improvements, but so far very impressed with the 95% quality!
Nice work mate!
I think this is a great idea; makes you think why blogging isn't as easy as taking notes on Apple Notes.
Between the recent launch of Obsidian and this, I'm probably going to go with Obsidian particularly because: I know how to set up websites and I always trust offline more than online (I've lost multiple drafts on Substack which has taught me always to either use GDocs/Dropbox Paper/Offline text).
“Isn’t as easy as taking notes on Apple Note” YES that’s exactly why I built it. I love Apple notes but I can’t share them online or update my blog :)
Obsidian looks really nice, I think it’s similar to Roam. I wanted to make something simpler.
I do want to add local storage of notes for offline more.
PS: You can export all notes easily from the site at any time :)
Neatly done, feel like the lack of a simple, but focused native experience is what has stopped me from using other web / cross platform alternatives – they all fail to corner one group's narrow use case
Since there's an API I know at least two people that are working on it :)
I plan to ship one once the features are stabilized and iteration is not so aggressive!
Wow awesome! I really like the simplicity of it and I am impressed you shipped this in 3 weeks! Supporting custom domains and certificates for them was more annoying than I had expected when I tried it.
This is exactly what an MVP should be, excellent job. This kind of startup has serious chance to become a "lifestyle" business. Maybe not the next billion dollar unicorn, but definitely 7-figure revenue capable.
Very nice product! I'm curious, what kind of and how many servers do you have to support thousands of users already? And which language/framework? Thanks!
Good idea, I just wanted it to be less noisy or pushy. The terms and Policies I got from a friend’s website (with his permission) that’s very similar. Anything odd that you spot?
I hope you don't take this as a criticism, just feedback, because your product looks quite nice and if I weren't such a worry-wart, I'd probably subscribe.
My issue with all notetaking applications is that all of my notes are "very sensitive data" to me. I treat my notes repository like a combination diary, scratchpad (where I plop things like temporary passwords and API keys), and memory dump. I know it's probably unreasonable--you seem trustworthy at first glance--but I have this pretty big fear of my notes store accidentally leaking or even just an admin trawling where they shouldn't and reading stuff I've noted down.
Like you, I'm still on the hunt for "the perfect notetaking system" but my A-number-1-highest-priority feature requirement is self-hosting on my own hardware. If you offered that, even for a fee, I'd probably buy it because it looks quite nice.
I think a version where it’s stored on-device would be nice. I think your concern is correct and I agree :), it currently serves a different use case which is private non-sensitive notes and public ones.
Honestly even if it was the most secure app/web in the world, having a one tap to publish to my website is terrifying :)
> My issue with all notetaking applications is that all of my notes are "very sensitive data" to me. I treat my notes repository like a combination diary, scratchpad [...]
Same here. I'm currently using Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/) for note taking, which syncs my notes via WebDAV to a server under my control. Supports markdown, but if I want to publish certain notes, I have to manually transfer them to the website.
Have you heard of Wik? https://wik.netlify.app/#Home
I just discovered it a couple of months ago and have been using it every day since. It stores everything in your web browser’s LocalStorage. The downside is that every web browser you use has independent data. This also means that backing up your data is entirely on you. However, it is fairly simple to download the entire database and back it up some place. I keep meaning to write a script to merge different instances, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Congrats on the launch, and you have an outstanding MVP here. I think it is priced well, considering that I would normally run something similar on a $5/month server for file syncing.
I'm a compulsive note-taker and frequent writer, so this is something I will personally be taking advantage of. The blogging feature is interesting, but I'm actually going to experiment with using it to replace my current use of Notes on iOS/Mac and Typora.
I'm curious if your development path includes Desktop. I've been between Ulysses and Typora for years now. Neither covers the entirety of my file syncing, desire to access from a browser or cross platform needs.
I really think you're on to something here. Best of luck!
Thank you so much! I planned to ship a macOS app together with the iOS apps but can’t do everything in three weeks and two kids :)
It’s definitely something I want to myself. For now the web version works fine for the occasional long form posting.
Let me know how it goes!
I wish you had created this a couple of years ago! I wasted a lot of time then trying different note-taking apps for a personal writing project. I ended up doing it all in a text editor, as every app I tried failed in one way or another. Collected Notes would have been perfect.
Would love if it allowed comments, as I want to put ideas out there and see discussion. I understand if it’s not the experience that you’re going for though - a lot of the time comments aren’t simple/easy/minimalist/etc. Great product, love it!
Hello!, yeah I don’t want to add comments not only for the complexity but also because they can be a little too toxic, and I want to create a great experience for the person reading, but also for the one writing. If I do comments, I would like to do it right, so might take some time.
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I think you should work on eliminating the perception of a publish step.
Everyone else is working how to best publish things and you stumbled on the solution: there is no publish.
The copy url option screen after publishing reminded me there is a publish. I think transparently use a Share option to share the url and have a share option under the notebook title.
Great concept.
The sample note is private, I did not realise this until my second session. I’d set it to public to illustrate the point above.
Really well done, especially for such a shorty turn around.
I'm not sure I buy your reasoning though. I could be wrong, but I believe Notion does have native apps now. Also, despite not being dedicated to note-taking, it doesn't keep you from publishing simple, complexity-free, notes to the web.
Notion does not have native apps and during an AMA on reddit they also said there were no real plans on doing them. Even on Mac notion unfortunately does not allow offline usage.
I was thinking of making something similar, along with E2E encryption. Could you add it?
Basic principle is you encrypt the DB or the individual notes with an AES synchronous key with a password that you put through a KDF and then apply your sync method to the individual notes.
I’ve been thinking about adding encryption, and I might in the near future. But honestly, I think for really secured notes I still prefer to keep them on device. Even with E2E.
234 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] thread“I want to be able to take notes on my phone, share some of them online, and publish a few on my personal blog — oh, an I also want an API!”
I built this is because no tool out there satisfied my needs: - Notion had no native app so it's very slow to use on mobile. Plus is too general. - Medium is a disaster for readers, they shouldn't be the ones paying to read. Native app is slow AF. - Most note-taking apps were too complex and feature creep. I wanted speed + power with simplicity first. Just give me markdown. - Apps are either online or offline, none tried to mix those two models seamlessly. - Blogs are either static (I need to be on my laptop and code) or use CMS which are too general and complex.
I sense there’s a demand for an easy to use native note-taking app that can also serve as an online publishing platform. A place where you can use your domain and update your notes right from your phone.
Of course, this is just a theory, so I would love to see if you all find it useful. You can try it https://collectednotes.com
Features:
- Simplicity. - Markdown with live preview. - Custom Domains. - No ads, no tracking, no modals, no vanity, no nonsense. - No data lock-in. Export your notes from day one. - Restful API, Your Notes in different formats. - Native experience iPhone & iPad: Share extension, Quick actions, FaceID, Quick Actions, Keychain, Keyboard shortcuts, Slide Over & Split View, Dark Mode.
Sample note: https://collectednotes.com/blog/api, Would love to hear what you all think
Your video walkthrough is good.
Can I edit my notes / blog from a desktop?
Don’t get me wrong, this is a very cool project and it looks like you’ve done a great job. I would recommend looking into Micropub support though rather than role your own API. The IndieWeb group has worked hard and built up a lot of easy to use and powerful standards around this stuff.
Currently google tends to highlight the big sites/authoritative sources etc, and not the smaller blogs/forums/etc as much.
We basically need some filter against the winners that take all. Block off the top 10-20% sites and only show the long tail.
(I'm currently working on adding wysiwyg math editing to ProseMirror -- see the gifs here [3] for an early proof of concept).
[1] https://katex.org/ [2] https://prosemirror.net/ [3] https://github.com/benrbray/prosemirror-math
Roam-style bidirectional linking would be cool, but I wonder if it's better to keep it simple for everyone else rather than add very specific features for the few people like me. Your call...
Anyways, cool project! You're definitely making something people want :)
[1] https://github.com/aravindballa/gatsby-theme-andy/
[2] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes
Godspeed!
[1] https://github.com/benrbray/prosemirror-math
I imagine many people might give up after that, so I just wanted to mention it.
Another minor bug: when toggling private to public on mobile, the drop down menu doesn’t go away after you press public. It also blocks the save button, so it’s not entirely clear how to save. (I eventually figured it out.)
iPhone 8 on safari, if it helps.
This is impressive work. I was up and running in about two minutes, and I’m thinking about upgrading. https://collectednotes.com/shawwn/sample-note
My only hesitation is that it doesn’t feel like “my” notes. They’re my notes on your platform. And I don’t know whether your platform will die tomorrow. But I try to resist such concerns.
Is there a way to export all my data somehow? Also, some way of adding google analytics?
Thank you so much!
Google Analytics I won’t add. In fact I don’t even use it for the site. I don’t want to track people. But views counts will come soon.
Maybe as a premium feature under my domain?
site: https://www.shawwn.com/thanks
markdown: https://www.shawwn.com/thanks.page
If you "view source" on the markdown page, you'll see:
The reason is that [@theshawwn](https://twitter.com/theshawwn) didn't convert into HTML for some reason. I assume the @ character threw it off, and I didn't want to drop what I was doing to figure out why. But there are a million small things like that.For https://collectednotes.com/shawwn/sample-note, I would put GA into my notes.
See markdown: https://collectednotes.com/blog/twitter-usernames.md
The main reason to let users inject HTML is that they can add features you don't have. GA is one; mathjax is another.
Other really minor bug. In dark mode the [heart] in "Made with [heart] by Alejandro Crosa" isn't visible. (FF Preview)
edit: ah I see from the comments it is https://www.rotato.xyz/
Otherwise so it looks great, I look forward to giving it a go.
One thing you might want to consider is having one domain for a website about collectednotes (collectednotes.com) and another for hosting user's blogs (collectednotes.blog for example) because it is currently not clear what urls are official and made by you and which are just blogs made by anyone.
For example, https://collectednotes.com/accounts/ is genuine and made by you whilst https://collectednotes.com/account/ is a blog I just created. To me there seems a very real risk of users being mislead.
There was a story here a couple of weeks ago or something with a post mortem from someone who got their websites taken offline and access to their mail suspended or taken offline because some automated system at a giant corporation decided so.
It stayed offline for hours because there was no competent humans available with authority to override the clearly (AFAIK) stupid decision made by the system.
Personally a key takeaway from that (except not depending on said company) was to make sure one has at least two domains, preferably with two registrars, and make sure user generated content is not available on the one you depend on for email etc.
EDIT: I couldn't find anything directly on point, but I did find this related horror story about a company whose ICANN email contact information no longer worked because the company's contact person had left the company. An ICANN email to the contact person bounced back. ICANN took the entire domain offline. The company's Web person had a lot of trouble getting through to a human at ICANN to straighten things out — and even then: "To make a long story short, my client was required to submit articles of incorporation, bank statements and other documents in order to get the domain working again." [0]
EDIT 2: Thanks to Chris Morgan, who provided a link to a GitBook horror story. [1]
I added both stories to my "Startup Law 101" page [2], with a hat tip to both Erik and Chris.
[0] https://www.skyhoundinternet.com/2017/05/17/website-email-ge...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23516675
[2] https://www.oncontracts.com/startup-law/#Use_a_separate_Web_...
Note that in that case the user content was on a separate domain—the registrar blocked the entire account.
(Although I think there might have been some comments about user generated content on the main domain.)
Your "export from day one" sparked this thought:
Allow access to your gdrive and make a collected notes folder.
two UX: 1. anytime a post is made to collected notes, a backup copy appears in Gdrive/Dropbox/Gist/whatever....
2. Post a thing to the collected docs folder in GDrive and have it slurped and presented in CollectedNotes.MYBLOG.DATE whatever...
Between the recent launch of Obsidian and this, I'm probably going to go with Obsidian particularly because: I know how to set up websites and I always trust offline more than online (I've lost multiple drafts on Substack which has taught me always to either use GDocs/Dropbox Paper/Offline text).
Obsidian looks really nice, I think it’s similar to Roam. I wanted to make something simpler. I do want to add local storage of notes for offline more.
PS: You can export all notes easily from the site at any time :)
Do you plan to make an Android version of it?
Good luck with the launch and traction!
Delivering this in three weeks is very impressive.
Mind sharing how you made the walkthrough video?
I wanted to do something similar and yours really catches the eye.
Also, Im kinda curious on how you got your Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy, and Cookie Policy
I know it’s probably too late for this, and I’m probably in the minority wanting this, but markdown is too complicated for my note-taking.
As an aside, I wonder if apps and startups "Made with love" do better than apps and startups "Made with coffee".
I hope you don't take this as a criticism, just feedback, because your product looks quite nice and if I weren't such a worry-wart, I'd probably subscribe.
My issue with all notetaking applications is that all of my notes are "very sensitive data" to me. I treat my notes repository like a combination diary, scratchpad (where I plop things like temporary passwords and API keys), and memory dump. I know it's probably unreasonable--you seem trustworthy at first glance--but I have this pretty big fear of my notes store accidentally leaking or even just an admin trawling where they shouldn't and reading stuff I've noted down.
Like you, I'm still on the hunt for "the perfect notetaking system" but my A-number-1-highest-priority feature requirement is self-hosting on my own hardware. If you offered that, even for a fee, I'd probably buy it because it looks quite nice.
Same here. I'm currently using Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/) for note taking, which syncs my notes via WebDAV to a server under my control. Supports markdown, but if I want to publish certain notes, I have to manually transfer them to the website.
I'm a compulsive note-taker and frequent writer, so this is something I will personally be taking advantage of. The blogging feature is interesting, but I'm actually going to experiment with using it to replace my current use of Notes on iOS/Mac and Typora.
I'm curious if your development path includes Desktop. I've been between Ulysses and Typora for years now. Neither covers the entirety of my file syncing, desire to access from a browser or cross platform needs.
I really think you're on to something here. Best of luck!
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Everyone else is working how to best publish things and you stumbled on the solution: there is no publish.
The copy url option screen after publishing reminded me there is a publish. I think transparently use a Share option to share the url and have a share option under the notebook title.
Great concept.
The sample note is private, I did not realise this until my second session. I’d set it to public to illustrate the point above.
I'm not sure I buy your reasoning though. I could be wrong, but I believe Notion does have native apps now. Also, despite not being dedicated to note-taking, it doesn't keep you from publishing simple, complexity-free, notes to the web.
Another reason is a lot of features like continuity, slide over, share extension, etc etc. Are not available on web apps.
Basic principle is you encrypt the DB or the individual notes with an AES synchronous key with a password that you put through a KDF and then apply your sync method to the individual notes.