6 ms·

Transpose: A structured alternative to Evernote

55 points by porker 11y ago

zaargy 11y ago
Website isn't great. It wants me to signup just so I can see what it does. It talks about templates but I can't see a link to what a template is and what it looks like anywhere. I don't want to watch a video to get a product tour. It could honestly be the best thing ever but I'd never know!
charlieegan3 11y ago
"Windows & Mac - Transpose works on all kinds of desktops." Are there native clients? The screenshots appear to show a web interface. Evernote's clients are a selling point for me personally.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  All kinds being two? Or is there a Linux version as well?
- scrumper 11y ago
  Agreed. Lack of native client is a hard deal breaker for me. (There isn't a native client; it talks about 'made with mobile in mind' as well as the comment you called out above. Screenshots are web-ish as well. Otherwise the idea is good. I mean, Lotus built a big business on top of the same idea.
philtar 11y ago
You're out of your mind if you think anyone will be paying $15 a month for a note taking application.
- simonb 11y ago
  I see this more as a lightweight MS Access replacement.
  - porker 11y ago
    Yes, something I feel there's a great need for. Perhaps I'm unusual, but most of my notes in Evernote I wish could contain structured data, so I can make better use of their contents, both in my life and cross-referenced in other notes. E.g. I record foods I like, places I've eaten (my private TripAdvisor) and structuring that data would be really useful for plotting on a map, making lists and the rest.
- crystaln 11y ago
  I'd happily pay $15 a month for a note taking application as powerful as Evernote, that was also more usable. Unfortunately, this does not address the core usability issues with Evernote.
  - revolly 11y ago
    And what do you see as core usability issues in Evernote?
    - ishansharma 11y ago
      Here are two issues that I generally face with Evernote: - Sync: many times, it takes too long to sync. I want something on my phone, so I will save it on Mac and then get ready to leave but it will take 10-15 minutes to sync to phone. (Even after forcing sync on both devices multiples times) - Editor: The editor has been stagnant for too long and has lots of issues. Undo does not work reliably if you paste something from other apps, there's no Markdown support. Also, iOS app is too bloated and generally slow. I have resorted to using Drafts as my note taking app and then saving to EN.
      - ghshephard 11y ago
        Your experience regarding sync is odd - the model I use Evernote in, is I take notes on my laptop, and then, just before slapping it closed, I CMD+S, wait for the sync Icon to stop spinning (usually about 10 seconds) - and then slap my laptop closed. Then, while I'm walking, or in a cab, or otherwise not connected to my laptop, I bring up my iPhone, Click on the sync button there - and after a few seconds, I'm up to date. I've been using Evernote pretty consistently like this for the last year+, and I'm struggling to remember if I've ever had a sync issue. You mention that you have taken notes on the IOS app - I've never done that, so that might be one difference between us. I do have a paid membership though, and I recently downgraded from Premium to the new $2.70/month "Plus" category. It will be interesting to see if there is any impact to sync speed.
        11y ago
- nkohari 11y ago
  What you really mean is that you wouldn't be willing to pay $15/month. That's reasonable, but another thing entirely.
- superfx 11y ago
  I pay for workflowy.
ngrilly 11y ago
It looks more like an alternative to Trello than Evernote.
ngrilly 11y ago
No way to archive a "note"?
fsiefken 11y ago
Is there an open source server implementation or equivalent for people to host it on their own server, similar to the Gitlab CE vs EE SaaS solutions?
k2enemy 11y ago
It looks kind of like a user friendly database app a la File Maker. Interesting that it is marketed as a note taking app. On a mac though, I still haven't found anything better for notes than VoodooPad. Too bad it seems to be languishing with few updates.
- porker 11y ago
  > It looks kind of like a user friendly database app a la File Maker Cross-commenting as the other's right at the bottom of the page, but yes, a user friendly database with easy custom schemas is something I feel there's a great need for. Perhaps I work differently, but 50+% of my notes in Evernote would be better as structured data, so I can make better use of their contents, both in my life and cross-referenced in other notes. E.g. I record foods I like, places I've eaten (my private TripAdvisor) and structuring that data would be really useful for plotting on a map, making lists and the rest.
HolyHaddock 11y ago
The "See what it does" slideshow's totally broken for me - what does it actually do?
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
This looks more like a report generator than a note taking app. Yeah, I get they mentioned "structured", but I can't see this as an Evernote replacement.
mrmondo 11y ago
The website is too broken for me to load properly but this doesn't look anything like a replacement for Evernote but more an online ticket / GTD application?
- favadi 11y ago
  Same here, I read for a while and still don't know what it is.
27182818284 11y ago
Echoing the other posts, I have no idea what this product does. Did someone throw this together overnight after the threads about Evernote were on the front page? Sadly I know the price of the Prime membership before I know what the free tier or Prime membership even get me productwise. If this isn't vaporware, I hope the founders see this comment and the others in this thread and re-work the copy.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
lcall 11y ago
I am not familiar with this product, but based on the brief blurb, I'm working on a Free version: http://www.onemodel.org http://www.onemodel.org. The web site is really outdated but the code works as the best personal organizer I've ever used. Very efficient, unfortunately I haven't posted the .jar to download yet so you have to compile it, and configure postgres, but I hope to get the web site updated with a free .jar, in a couple of weeks. At the moment it's keyboard-driven, desktop-only. But everything you need to know is on the screen, and it is very efficient for note-taking, brainstorming, making lists of lists, everything interlinkable, and lets you store either lists of blurbs or as mapped to reality: ie, entities that have attributes like an object model built on the fly by virtue of just using the system. There's a mailing list ready for use. Again, I meant to have the web site better updated with the current status, but the INSTALLING in github is accurate, the tools works well and has good data integrity and high efficiency. I use it for everything now. And I'll try to post a jar within a couple of weeks. I'm just really slow right now. I think the possibilities with the concepts are very big, and it's a working foundation.
- delluminatus 11y ago
  That looks like a fun project. I like the idea of looking toward an improbable future goal for the sake of better understanding simple problems facing us today (like how to represent and compute semantics). I think the really difficult problems for that project will probably be importing data into the model (i.e. semantic analysis of content) and scaling the model to a great enough extent for the real benefits of using a semantic structure to appear. The problem of defining a networked object model is arguably already solved, but I don't think there are any solutions that could scale to the extreme number of concepts and connections that such a system would require. I also have to say, that site really made me want to use Smalltalk as a PIM for some reason.
  - lcall 11y ago
    Thanks. I'm hoping we can see concrete progress, or learn well, by being able to efficiently put our own notes in a system that lets those notes naturally become an object model, then share it with others and collaborate in the data. So at least that much data is computable, or structured enough to grow well together. I'm hoping the network effect can get us going enough to take us to the next level or learn how to move forward from there. I.e., if several people start putting our notes in a structured, computable model, and we collaborate, then we have all our notes in a possibly single place. That could become a community of practice. That's a step toward having all useful info on that topic, in a single, extremely useful model. Etc. (At a minimum, I get to use it. :) If there are other effective Free systems for this, I've missed them but am interested.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
transpose 11y ago
Hi everyone, I'm Hussein, the CEO of Transpose. Thanks for the feedback, positive and negative. The idea behind Transpose is the lack of options between something as simple and ubiquitous as note taking apps like Evernote and fully fledged database solutions like FileMaker and Access. What we found out from our research is the a lot of use cases and critical applications should have been built on a database if it was feasible, affordable, cloud based and anyone can build without the need of hiring a software house or even dedicating an enterprise IT department to build something from scratch. People have been tracking orders, leads, assets and even critical project planning on various apps including even Evernote which is not designed for those use cases. With Transpose we are also tackling the growing epidemic of having a dozen of different apps all stitched together somehow duplicating the data across and demanding the team to learn and use each one of them just to visualize information differently; like Trello on boards, spreadsheets in table form, notes just for ease and cross platform functionality. We shooting high aiming to disrupt and fix that as well. If the data is structured and we extract all this extra metadata on top of that automatically so why not utilize your data and get as much value out of it? Here is a quick intro video on Transpose https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfKeTljl5ro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfKeTljl5ro We have all sort of amazing technology working seamlessly behind the scene. Text Analytics, Entity Extraction, Voice Transcription, OCR on images, Filtering by fields, sorting syncing online and offline with a native iOS app and a new Android app coming out next week. You can see your data in multiple views, plot it on Calendar, see it as an editable spreadsheet, or even on an interactive Kanban board. There are more than 20 patents in many areas technological and UI its all BY DESIGN blends in to be invisible. I do agree though, its really hard to put what we are doing and describe it in one sentence. I love Peter Theil's talk at the Launch where he articulated EXACTLY the situation we are in now.. what category shout that FIT in? what is that like? who direct competition do we have? You can see that segment https://youtu.be/ryFB6mvy4uE?t=34m49s https://youtu.be/ryFB6mvy4uE?t=34m49s and Claire from our team just wrote a piece on Huffington Post about our "Peter Thiel Problem". We grew from 0 to 100,000 users viraly with ZERO dollars in Marketing. Awesome Makers create templates to solve every single problem you can think of and then they share that template with their followers to clone a copy and they also invite collaborators (typically co-workers) to work on a shared template data set feeding new data and manipulating it. Would love your feedback and thanks again everyone! You can also feel free to reach me directly by email (hussein@transpose.com) would love to hear from y'all! P.S. We are re-working the homepage completely to be 100% visual to SHOW what we offer instead of just trying to ramble and try to explain it in words...

55 points by porker 11y ago

Website isn't great. It wants me to signup just so I can see what it does. It talks about templates but I can't see a link to what a template is and what it looks like anywhere. I don't want to watch a video to get a product tour. It could honestly be the best thing ever but I'd never know!

charlieegan3 11y ago

"Windows & Mac - Transpose works on all kinds of desktops." Are there native clients? The screenshots appear to show a web interface. Evernote's clients are a selling point for me personally.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago
All kinds being two? Or is there a Linux version as well?
scrumper 11y ago
Agreed. Lack of native client is a hard deal breaker for me. (There isn't a native client; it talks about 'made with mobile in mind' as well as the comment you called out above. Screenshots are web-ish as well. Otherwise the idea is good. I mean, Lotus built a big business on top of the same idea.

philtar 11y ago

You're out of your mind if you think anyone will be paying $15 a month for a note taking application.

simonb 11y ago
I see this more as a lightweight MS Access replacement.
- porker 11y ago
  Yes, something I feel there's a great need for. Perhaps I'm unusual, but most of my notes in Evernote I wish could contain structured data, so I can make better use of their contents, both in my life and cross-referenced in other notes. E.g. I record foods I like, places I've eaten (my private TripAdvisor) and structuring that data would be really useful for plotting on a map, making lists and the rest.
crystaln 11y ago
I'd happily pay $15 a month for a note taking application as powerful as Evernote, that was also more usable. Unfortunately, this does not address the core usability issues with Evernote.
- revolly 11y ago
  And what do you see as core usability issues in Evernote?
  - ishansharma 11y ago
    Here are two issues that I generally face with Evernote: - Sync: many times, it takes too long to sync. I want something on my phone, so I will save it on Mac and then get ready to leave but it will take 10-15 minutes to sync to phone. (Even after forcing sync on both devices multiples times) - Editor: The editor has been stagnant for too long and has lots of issues. Undo does not work reliably if you paste something from other apps, there's no Markdown support. Also, iOS app is too bloated and generally slow. I have resorted to using Drafts as my note taking app and then saving to EN.
    - ghshephard 11y ago
      Your experience regarding sync is odd - the model I use Evernote in, is I take notes on my laptop, and then, just before slapping it closed, I CMD+S, wait for the sync Icon to stop spinning (usually about 10 seconds) - and then slap my laptop closed. Then, while I'm walking, or in a cab, or otherwise not connected to my laptop, I bring up my iPhone, Click on the sync button there - and after a few seconds, I'm up to date. I've been using Evernote pretty consistently like this for the last year+, and I'm struggling to remember if I've ever had a sync issue. You mention that you have taken notes on the IOS app - I've never done that, so that might be one difference between us. I do have a paid membership though, and I recently downgraded from Premium to the new $2.70/month "Plus" category. It will be interesting to see if there is any impact to sync speed.
      - 11y ago
nkohari 11y ago
What you really mean is that you wouldn't be willing to pay $15/month. That's reasonable, but another thing entirely.
superfx 11y ago
I pay for workflowy.

ngrilly 11y ago

It looks more like an alternative to Trello than Evernote.

ngrilly 11y ago

No way to archive a "note"?

fsiefken 11y ago

Is there an open source server implementation or equivalent for people to host it on their own server, similar to the Gitlab CE vs EE SaaS solutions?

k2enemy 11y ago

It looks kind of like a user friendly database app a la File Maker. Interesting that it is marketed as a note taking app. On a mac though, I still haven't found anything better for notes than VoodooPad. Too bad it seems to be languishing with few updates.

porker 11y ago
> It looks kind of like a user friendly database app a la File Maker Cross-commenting as the other's right at the bottom of the page, but yes, a user friendly database with easy custom schemas is something I feel there's a great need for. Perhaps I work differently, but 50+% of my notes in Evernote would be better as structured data, so I can make better use of their contents, both in my life and cross-referenced in other notes. E.g. I record foods I like, places I've eaten (my private TripAdvisor) and structuring that data would be really useful for plotting on a map, making lists and the rest.

HolyHaddock 11y ago

The "See what it does" slideshow's totally broken for me - what does it actually do?

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

This looks more like a report generator than a note taking app. Yeah, I get they mentioned "structured", but I can't see this as an Evernote replacement.

mrmondo 11y ago

The website is too broken for me to load properly but this doesn't look anything like a replacement for Evernote but more an online ticket / GTD application?

favadi 11y ago
Same here, I read for a while and still don't know what it is.

27182818284 11y ago

Echoing the other posts, I have no idea what this product does. Did someone throw this together overnight after the threads about Evernote were on the front page? Sadly I know the price of the Prime membership before I know what the free tier or Prime membership even get me productwise. If this isn't vaporware, I hope the founders see this comment and the others in this thread and re-work the copy.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

lcall 11y ago

I am not familiar with this product, but based on the brief blurb, I'm working on a Free version: http://www.onemodel.org http://www.onemodel.org. The web site is really outdated but the code works as the best personal organizer I've ever used. Very efficient, unfortunately I haven't posted the .jar to download yet so you have to compile it, and configure postgres, but I hope to get the web site updated with a free .jar, in a couple of weeks. At the moment it's keyboard-driven, desktop-only. But everything you need to know is on the screen, and it is very efficient for note-taking, brainstorming, making lists of lists, everything interlinkable, and lets you store either lists of blurbs or as mapped to reality: ie, entities that have attributes like an object model built on the fly by virtue of just using the system. There's a mailing list ready for use. Again, I meant to have the web site better updated with the current status, but the INSTALLING in github is accurate, the tools works well and has good data integrity and high efficiency. I use it for everything now. And I'll try to post a jar within a couple of weeks. I'm just really slow right now. I think the possibilities with the concepts are very big, and it's a working foundation.

delluminatus 11y ago
That looks like a fun project. I like the idea of looking toward an improbable future goal for the sake of better understanding simple problems facing us today (like how to represent and compute semantics). I think the really difficult problems for that project will probably be importing data into the model (i.e. semantic analysis of content) and scaling the model to a great enough extent for the real benefits of using a semantic structure to appear. The problem of defining a networked object model is arguably already solved, but I don't think there are any solutions that could scale to the extreme number of concepts and connections that such a system would require. I also have to say, that site really made me want to use Smalltalk as a PIM for some reason.
- lcall 11y ago
  Thanks. I'm hoping we can see concrete progress, or learn well, by being able to efficiently put our own notes in a system that lets those notes naturally become an object model, then share it with others and collaborate in the data. So at least that much data is computable, or structured enough to grow well together. I'm hoping the network effect can get us going enough to take us to the next level or learn how to move forward from there. I.e., if several people start putting our notes in a structured, computable model, and we collaborate, then we have all our notes in a possibly single place. That could become a community of practice. That's a step toward having all useful info on that topic, in a single, extremely useful model. Etc. (At a minimum, I get to use it. :) If there are other effective Free systems for this, I've missed them but am interested.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

transpose 11y ago

Hi everyone, I'm Hussein, the CEO of Transpose. Thanks for the feedback, positive and negative. The idea behind Transpose is the lack of options between something as simple and ubiquitous as note taking apps like Evernote and fully fledged database solutions like FileMaker and Access. What we found out from our research is the a lot of use cases and critical applications should have been built on a database if it was feasible, affordable, cloud based and anyone can build without the need of hiring a software house or even dedicating an enterprise IT department to build something from scratch. People have been tracking orders, leads, assets and even critical project planning on various apps including even Evernote which is not designed for those use cases. With Transpose we are also tackling the growing epidemic of having a dozen of different apps all stitched together somehow duplicating the data across and demanding the team to learn and use each one of them just to visualize information differently; like Trello on boards, spreadsheets in table form, notes just for ease and cross platform functionality. We shooting high aiming to disrupt and fix that as well. If the data is structured and we extract all this extra metadata on top of that automatically so why not utilize your data and get as much value out of it? Here is a quick intro video on Transpose https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfKeTljl5ro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfKeTljl5ro We have all sort of amazing technology working seamlessly behind the scene. Text Analytics, Entity Extraction, Voice Transcription, OCR on images, Filtering by fields, sorting syncing online and offline with a native iOS app and a new Android app coming out next week. You can see your data in multiple views, plot it on Calendar, see it as an editable spreadsheet, or even on an interactive Kanban board. There are more than 20 patents in many areas technological and UI its all BY DESIGN blends in to be invisible. I do agree though, its really hard to put what we are doing and describe it in one sentence. I love Peter Theil's talk at the Launch where he articulated EXACTLY the situation we are in now.. what category shout that FIT in? what is that like? who direct competition do we have? You can see that segment https://youtu.be/ryFB6mvy4uE?t=34m49s https://youtu.be/ryFB6mvy4uE?t=34m49s and Claire from our team just wrote a piece on Huffington Post about our "Peter Thiel Problem". We grew from 0 to 100,000 users viraly with ZERO dollars in Marketing. Awesome Makers create templates to solve every single problem you can think of and then they share that template with their followers to clone a copy and they also invite collaborators (typically co-workers) to work on a shared template data set feeding new data and manipulating it. Would love your feedback and thanks again everyone! You can also feel free to reach me directly by email (hussein@transpose.com) would love to hear from y'all! P.S. We are re-working the homepage completely to be 100% visual to SHOW what we offer instead of just trying to ramble and try to explain it in words...