11 ms·

Show HN: Turtl – A secure, encrypted Evernote alternative

236 points by orthecreedence 11y ago

oadam 11y ago
On macbookpro 13", safari, header background takes 50% of webpage area. Chrome and FF looks good.
colordrops 11y ago
I saw the "pricing" link at the top and was about to shit all over this for a privacy oriented app being closed source, until I scrolled to the very bottom and saw the innocuous open source note. May want to emphasize that more.
- orthecreedence 11y ago
  This app has been a balance between advertising the fact that it's open source and just presenting itself as a "privacy app" without shoving it in people's faces. Maybe it should be a bit more prominent (and thanks for reading to the bottom)! To be clear, the pricing section only applies if you connect Turtl to our hosted service. If you run your own server, the only pricing that applies is the price you pay for the server you run it on.
  - NoGravitas 11y ago
    I actually love this business model: web/api server and clients are all Free Software, and the developer or company behind it runs the "canonical" hosted service. I hope it works out for you.
s_q_b 11y ago
Evernote is so good that I just can't see myself transitioning. I wish the best services would offer strong encryption as a default.
- afro88 11y ago
  This is the game these companies play - they provide a service so slick that people will use it regardless of the privacy concerns. And of course I am one of those people... I use Evernote because I can take notes anywhere very easily (in my browser, my OS, my phone) and then have access to them always in sync very easily, online and offline. Couple that with nested tags and saved search queries and I unfortunately see no competition, regardless of privacy measures. I don't care if my data is encrypted properly if I don't have easy access to it.
  - s_q_b 11y ago
    I'm in the same boat. I know the risks, but I've essentially entrusted my entire online presence to third-party services. Why? Simply because they are better. Ugh, this isn't acceptable.
    - mrmondo 11y ago
      Out of interest, do you think they are mostly better or easier? I guess it comes down to weighing the cost of your time / effort into researching / using alternatives vs the risk of trusting random people from the internet - of course there's no one answer or solution so it's probably case by case depending on the data being transferred or stored IMO.
  - mrmondo 11y ago
    Like almost all 'cloud' services, I treat all data in Evernote as non-confidential and thus don't keep private information within it and I take regular backups. Do I trust a hobby / standard web-dev project as any more secure just because they day it is and might have an extra layer of encryption - no.
    - orthecreedence 11y ago
      This is important: there's a trust barrier to entry here. Why trust some random guy on the internet? You wouldn't. Nor would I expect anyone to actually pour through the source code to determine if the crypto is sound. Sometime soon I'm hoping to get enough cash rounded up for a security audit and get a few thumbs up from the security community so at least you won't be taking my word for it. Not only that, I'd love to make the product rock-solid. As much crypto as I've studied in the past few years, nothing beats an expert looking things over.
smcleod 11y ago
I'm sorry but I don't think you should call this an Evernote alternative. - No iOS client (Although the site does say coming soon) - No Firefox webclipper - No Web interface - Large / heavy application - No Drawing / Diagram support - The app is not native, it's seems it's a web frame It's interface doesn't feel very snappy, it feels like it's built with in a Javascript framework perhaps? Evernote has been around for a long time and has grown to 110MB uncompressed / installed, this app is 100MB and it's only in its early stages and has hardly any features implemented yet - that's worrying to me. Looking at OSX's power utilisation Turtle appears to often utilise one CPU core heavily under load where Evernote seems to thread processes more efficient and ends up using around 60% less power on my 2015 Macbook in the use I put it through which was common activities such as adding and removing notes, copy / pasting text, launching and closing the app etc... What I do really like is that it uses Markdown, that's something sorely missed in Evernote. I'm really sorry to be quite harsh, I really do love when people try to improve software by creating their own alternative and that's something that's sorely needed in the land of Evernote like apps, however I don't think this comes close to a possible alternative.
- s_q_b 11y ago
  I'm seeing about 80% less power on a mid-2012 Macbook Air with a 2GHz Core i7 for Evernote vs. Turtl. I'm guessing more parallelization is even more beneficial on lower speed multi-core processors.
  - mrmondo 11y ago
    If it is a JS app of some kind that would make sense, I've been ranting a lot about JS apps recently so I won't go into it here - needless to say they're anything but efficient in my experience. Edit: Also, I should note that I have many hundreds of notes in Evernote, where I created 15-20 in this app, I would have expected Evernote to need more resources to search such a large number of notes. ~/Library/Application Support/com.evernote.Evernote % du -sh . 608M .
    - orthecreedence 11y ago
kumarski 11y ago
Evernote made the mistake of going multiplatform really aggressively and too much scope creep. I'm glad to see they're scaling back a lot of their scope creep. Goo on you for trying to do this. Be ambitious and swing for the fences. Evernote's product crashes frequently.
- mrmondo 11y ago
  Honestly, one of the main reasons I use Evernote is because it's Mac and iOS clients are so damn good, other than a few performance issues on websites with a lot of elements that have been clipped (and hey even Firefox struggles with those), I honestly can't remember the last time Evernote has crashed on either platform.
- julianz 11y ago
  On which platform? I use Evernote a lot on Windows and Android, and a bit on iOS, and haven't seen a crash in a very long time.
  - djhn 11y ago
    OSX: lots of crashes, sync errors, etc.
  - V-2 11y ago
    Out of my experience it's stable on Windows, although lacking in other departments (eg. no dark theme)
- jimktrains2 11y ago
  One of their strength _is_ multiplatform support. There was and is tons of scope creep. Hopefully they can turn that around and start improving core functionality again.
phillc73 11y ago
I was going to rail against another app I could be interested in which forces an Android installation through Google's Play Store. Then I noticed the link to sources on GitHub and the ability to build the APK oneself.[0] I will certainly try this. Thank you for the option. [0] https://github.com/turtl/mobile https://github.com/turtl/mobile
natch 11y ago
Does it run on my own server, encrypting data with keys the server never sees?
- orthecreedence 11y ago
  Yes.
triplesec 11y ago
I'm glad of an alternative, mostly because Evernote being the last bad option to date, has terrible UX. And the search is substandard. I use it because I can use it on mobile and desktop, and back it up frequently to multiple formats in case Evernote dies, or wipes my data in error. (Please everybody who uses note apps, back them up now to external files!)
ommunist 11y ago
Why on Earth people are not using git? on iOS it is Working Copy app. any good client for Android?
- orthecreedence 11y ago
  I think the Android client is good, but I am biased. iOS coming soon.
segphault 11y ago
It's really neat to see that the backend is built with RethinkDB and Common Lisp. I am looking forward to setting up my own instance from source and playing around with it. Great project.
polm23 11y ago
Is something wrong with the CSS on the site? Everything looks kind of overly large in my browser (Desktop Linux Chrome).
- Seven_Hong 11y ago
  Same here on my linux machine
- mrmondo 11y ago
  Proportions wise it all looks on Firefox 44 and the CSS seems to be valid, the image of the phone is however 360KB but that's the kind of large you're talking about.
- phlyingpenguin 11y ago
  Just to add in a screenshot, here's what it looks like on my copy of Chrome on Linux: http://i.imgur.com/6YPbAg6.png http://i.imgur.com/6YPbAg6.png
orthecreedence 11y ago
Hi everyone, creator of Turtl here. It's getting late here (2:15 am) so if you ask a question or have feedback, I'll be able to get back to you in a few hours. Thanks for checking out my project!
- satai 11y ago
  Hi May I have two recommendations? - put more screenshots on the web page to apetize us - if you provide server... provide it as an Docker image too, so it's easy to test Looks good anyway, I am going give it a try.
  - orthecreedence 11y ago
    Thanks! Lots of people are requesting docker images, so this sounds like the way to go. I'll look into it.
V-2 11y ago
I feel the UI (of the desktop version) is a bit lacking. Within one minute from installing it, the following happened. I added a note: a text note, fine. So a side bar opens... Why is it only ever a side bar? I have a 1920px wide monitor - not really unusual - but you're forcing me to edit my notes in a fixed 700px sidebar, the rest of the screen estate just darkened out. Evernote lets me use all my screen. But I've typed some stuff in. So, I'm clicking on "Add text note", the first most obvious call-to-action that catches my eye. A dialog pops up: "The note has unsaved changes. Really leave?". Well, I just clicked on "Add text note", what do you mean? Only after a while I realized that I'm not supposed to click on the most prominent (white on black) caption bar at the top, but on the greenish "Add" in bottom right corner. Even though the title does say "Add text note", which is as explicit as it gets. Okay, time to edit my note. It opens in preview mode by default, I still have to click on a floating button to make it editable - another little mental bump, but okay. I can click on an eye icon to get a preview of the note. Once I do that, the eye icon vanishes, and I'm left with an uneditable note. That's quite weird, normally the "eye" icon would just be replaced with a symbol indicating return to edit mode, allowing to switch back and forth with no fuss. Makes sense, especially sice it's easy to anticipate that the preview function would often be used just to quickly catch a glimpse of whether our work (markup, etc.) looks fine, and further we go, it's not a Rembrandt painting : ) Not here, though - I click on the eye, but in order to resume editing I have to move mouse cursor to the left now, and tap on the "<-" back button. Or, as it turns out, anywhere outside of the magical 700px wide (36% of my screen) get-things-done area. I guess I'm sort of a power user (I'm a software dev for starters), so these confusions don't stop me for more than 5 seconds each. It is frustrating nevertheless, because being computer-savvy, I'm not used to that. And when my mum clicks "Add text note" only to be asked if she really wants to cancel all changes, I can tell you she'll look like a deer in headlights rather than mumble "what's this bs" as I did ; ) I understand you're an indie dev, but hallway usability testing doesn't require hiring focus groups etc., all it takes is have a few people sit in front of the monitor and watch them go at it
claudius 11y ago
http://i.imgur.com/sDzAMjg.png http://i.imgur.com/sDzAMjg.png That’s a rather large font size.
- orthecreedence 11y ago
  Well yeah, we need a callout or customers won't know where to look. In all seriousness though, it seems the site has linux/chrome issues. I am looking into it. Thanks for the screenshot =]
  - Gracana 11y ago
    It has IE11 issues also. http://i.imgur.com/flVRw9M.jpg http://i.imgur.com/flVRw9M.jpg
oliv__ 11y ago
Just a heads up: I'm being shown the Windows x64 button and I'm using a Mac (OS X 10.10) and Firefox. There is only one button on the front page but you seem to support multiple platforms so I'm assuming this is a bug?
- Kadin 11y ago
  Same thing happened to me. If I hadn't dug around a little I would have assumed it's a Windows-only app and moved on.
osoti 11y ago
From 7 cases to 4 million: America at high Alert from Zika Virus :WHO http://goo.gl/1MZ68q http://goo.gl/1MZ68q
dutchbrit 11y ago
Are you using truecrypt? Isn't that a dead project with security issues?
- Kadin 11y ago
  It's a forked project with leadership-drama issues, but several ongoing audits haven't turned up any serious security issues. The original anonymous maintainers apparently tried to kill it, for reasons that aren't clear, by saying that it's insecure. It seems to have been a red herring, and their suggestions of alternatives were comically bad. Lots of people are still using the last Truecrypt release, or one of the several forks that have sprung up that have attempted to improve upon it in various ways (sometimes in incompatible ways, though). Hopefully the situation will stabilize with one clear winner in the future.
- sarciszewski 11y ago
  No, they are not using truecrypt. They're using SJCL for AES-GCM and OpenPGP for public-key encryption.
philodendron 11y ago
I really like the idea of a secure Evernote alternative. For me, however, the by far most important feature is decentralization. Until someone builds this I'm stuck using org-mode and a git repo...
- r3bl 11y ago
  It is decentralized: https://turtl.it/docs/server/ https://turtl.it/docs/server/ You only use their servers if you want to.
formichunter 11y ago
Is it possible, or maybe I should offer, to encapsulate this in docker using docker-compose? I find it easier and cleaner to try new things out running docker-compose up.
- orthecreedence 11y ago
  By all means, if you want to take on this project I'd gladly advise and link to it from the server page. I don't know enough about Docker to be useful for that portion, but I can certainly help in getting the server set up properly.
  - formichunter 11y ago
    I'll work on this tonight, EST, but if someone beats me to it please don't hesitate to link to them first. Thanks for the reply.
sarciszewski 11y ago
https://github.com/turtl/js/blob/2ca59900d71284795e278e75585787ca767e9766/library/tcrypt.js#L192-L195 https://github.com/turtl/js/blob/2ca59900d71284795e278e75585... Nothing says secure like PBKDF2-SHA1 with 50 rounds. https://github.com/turtl/js/blob/2ca59900d71284795e278e75585787ca767e9766/library/tcrypt.js#L577 https://github.com/turtl/js/blob/2ca59900d71284795e278e75585... ...or timing attacks on MAC validation. (Yeah, you switched to GCM, but a downgrade attack could potentially be used to find a valid MAC for a chosen ciphertext without the attacker knowing the key...)
- mrmondo 11y ago
  "When the standard was written in 2000, the recommended minimum number of iterations was 1000, but the parameter is intended to be increased over time as CPU speeds increase. As of 2005 a Kerberos standard recommended 4096 iterations,[2] Apple iOS 3 used 2000, iOS 4 used 10000,[3] while in 2011 LastPass used 5000 iterations for JavaScript clients and 100000 iterations for server-side hashing" source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBKDF2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBKDF2 *Edit: Oh.. it's PBKDF1....
  - sarciszewski 11y ago
    Nope, PBKDF1 was a typo.
  - logicallee 11y ago
    how can anyone take anything seriously that requires 1000 iterations. if iterations had an exponential function then the difference between 1000 iterations and 10,000 is ridiculous, like the difference between 16 bit encryption (no such thing, this would be a joke) and 160 bit encryption. But if it's not exponential, then adding thousands of iterations doesn't do much. Maybe instead of 1 day to break it, now it takes 1000 days, or instead of spending $4,000 on CPU time now you need to spend $4M to crack it. Big deal - it's just as broken. So can anyone explain the math here? How can they seriously suggest linearly increasing the number of iterations over time?
    - 11y ago
magicmu 11y ago
I've been looking for alternatives to Evernote for a long time now, but haven't found a viable one. Thanks for making this, I'll definitely check it out!
steaminghacker 11y ago
See also http://lexiy.com http://lexiy.com secure notes, but not documents.
yazriel 11y ago
Nice app. Please please add any sort of import capability (You can look at simplenote export/import csv/json format)
jaybuff 11y ago
Apple notes (in iOS 9 and El Capitan) is also a secure, encrypted Evernote alternative: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
kusuriya 11y ago
This is pretty sweet but the UI does leave some to be desired. It would be awesome to have a UI similarish to onenote or a few others where on the left side you have a list of your boards, then either on the left or right side (users pick) you have a list of items in the board, then the rest of the screen is whatever the item is. It is a really nice start and has a lot of potential but without a web version it just wont replace anything I use right now since you dont seem to support any of the BSDs and I do a lot of switching between Windows Linux and OpenBSD
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
design55 11y ago
Coming from an academic/artistic background, very very far away from the TECH industry, I've found turtl really helpful for cataloging research for upcoming projects. I think it has really great potential for people working in project based industries who need confidential platform to store large amounts of research. Although many people do not have a need for privacy in their bookmarking, it is definitely a major consideration in many other professions outside of TECH. Although it may not be as smooth running as Evernote right now, I think that privacy for my research is a trade off worth noting.
hirokiky 11y ago
I tried it. I like this app, especially this tile interface. And it won't scramble all of things into notes like evernote. bookmarks, files, notes are separated. seems nice. cons: - You need to take certifications for OSX app - it's scare to install un-certificated apps - Uploading file and images should be merged - I don't want to care whether it's image or not, App should detect, isn't it cool? - The note editor, it's too poor to use. and default height of textarea is too thin. expand it to users want to write something.
ipixny1004 11y ago
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/02/prweb13198898.htm http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/02/prweb13198898.htm Centrallo 2.0 Global Productivity App Adds Evernote Import Wizard to Its List-Making Features and Adds Former Evernote Executive Heather Wilde to Its Team

236 points by orthecreedence 11y ago

oadam 11y ago

On macbookpro 13", safari, header background takes 50% of webpage area. Chrome and FF looks good.

I saw the "pricing" link at the top and was about to shit all over this for a privacy oriented app being closed source, until I scrolled to the very bottom and saw the innocuous open source note. May want to emphasize that more.

orthecreedence 11y ago
This app has been a balance between advertising the fact that it's open source and just presenting itself as a "privacy app" without shoving it in people's faces. Maybe it should be a bit more prominent (and thanks for reading to the bottom)! To be clear, the pricing section only applies if you connect Turtl to our hosted service. If you run your own server, the only pricing that applies is the price you pay for the server you run it on.
- NoGravitas 11y ago
  I actually love this business model: web/api server and clients are all Free Software, and the developer or company behind it runs the "canonical" hosted service. I hope it works out for you.

s_q_b 11y ago

Evernote is so good that I just can't see myself transitioning. I wish the best services would offer strong encryption as a default.

afro88 11y ago
This is the game these companies play - they provide a service so slick that people will use it regardless of the privacy concerns. And of course I am one of those people... I use Evernote because I can take notes anywhere very easily (in my browser, my OS, my phone) and then have access to them always in sync very easily, online and offline. Couple that with nested tags and saved search queries and I unfortunately see no competition, regardless of privacy measures. I don't care if my data is encrypted properly if I don't have easy access to it.
- s_q_b 11y ago
  I'm in the same boat. I know the risks, but I've essentially entrusted my entire online presence to third-party services. Why? Simply because they are better. Ugh, this isn't acceptable.
  - mrmondo 11y ago
    Out of interest, do you think they are mostly better or easier? I guess it comes down to weighing the cost of your time / effort into researching / using alternatives vs the risk of trusting random people from the internet - of course there's no one answer or solution so it's probably case by case depending on the data being transferred or stored IMO.
- mrmondo 11y ago
  Like almost all 'cloud' services, I treat all data in Evernote as non-confidential and thus don't keep private information within it and I take regular backups. Do I trust a hobby / standard web-dev project as any more secure just because they day it is and might have an extra layer of encryption - no.
  - orthecreedence 11y ago
    This is important: there's a trust barrier to entry here. Why trust some random guy on the internet? You wouldn't. Nor would I expect anyone to actually pour through the source code to determine if the crypto is sound. Sometime soon I'm hoping to get enough cash rounded up for a security audit and get a few thumbs up from the security community so at least you won't be taking my word for it. Not only that, I'd love to make the product rock-solid. As much crypto as I've studied in the past few years, nothing beats an expert looking things over.

smcleod 11y ago

I'm sorry but I don't think you should call this an Evernote alternative. - No iOS client (Although the site does say coming soon) - No Firefox webclipper - No Web interface - Large / heavy application - No Drawing / Diagram support - The app is not native, it's seems it's a web frame It's interface doesn't feel very snappy, it feels like it's built with in a Javascript framework perhaps? Evernote has been around for a long time and has grown to 110MB uncompressed / installed, this app is 100MB and it's only in its early stages and has hardly any features implemented yet - that's worrying to me. Looking at OSX's power utilisation Turtle appears to often utilise one CPU core heavily under load where Evernote seems to thread processes more efficient and ends up using around 60% less power on my 2015 Macbook in the use I put it through which was common activities such as adding and removing notes, copy / pasting text, launching and closing the app etc... What I do really like is that it uses Markdown, that's something sorely missed in Evernote. I'm really sorry to be quite harsh, I really do love when people try to improve software by creating their own alternative and that's something that's sorely needed in the land of Evernote like apps, however I don't think this comes close to a possible alternative.

s_q_b 11y ago
I'm seeing about 80% less power on a mid-2012 Macbook Air with a 2GHz Core i7 for Evernote vs. Turtl. I'm guessing more parallelization is even more beneficial on lower speed multi-core processors.
- mrmondo 11y ago
  If it is a JS app of some kind that would make sense, I've been ranting a lot about JS apps recently so I won't go into it here - needless to say they're anything but efficient in my experience. Edit: Also, I should note that I have many hundreds of notes in Evernote, where I created 15-20 in this app, I would have expected Evernote to need more resources to search such a large number of notes. ~/Library/Application Support/com.evernote.Evernote % du -sh . 608M .
  - orthecreedence 11y ago

kumarski 11y ago

Evernote made the mistake of going multiplatform really aggressively and too much scope creep. I'm glad to see they're scaling back a lot of their scope creep. Goo on you for trying to do this. Be ambitious and swing for the fences. Evernote's product crashes frequently.

mrmondo 11y ago
Honestly, one of the main reasons I use Evernote is because it's Mac and iOS clients are so damn good, other than a few performance issues on websites with a lot of elements that have been clipped (and hey even Firefox struggles with those), I honestly can't remember the last time Evernote has crashed on either platform.
julianz 11y ago
On which platform? I use Evernote a lot on Windows and Android, and a bit on iOS, and haven't seen a crash in a very long time.
- djhn 11y ago
  OSX: lots of crashes, sync errors, etc.
- V-2 11y ago
  Out of my experience it's stable on Windows, although lacking in other departments (eg. no dark theme)
jimktrains2 11y ago
One of their strength _is_ multiplatform support. There was and is tons of scope creep. Hopefully they can turn that around and start improving core functionality again.

phillc73 11y ago

I was going to rail against another app I could be interested in which forces an Android installation through Google's Play Store. Then I noticed the link to sources on GitHub and the ability to build the APK oneself.[0] I will certainly try this. Thank you for the option. [0] https://github.com/turtl/mobile https://github.com/turtl/mobile

natch 11y ago

Does it run on my own server, encrypting data with keys the server never sees?

orthecreedence 11y ago
Yes.

triplesec 11y ago

I'm glad of an alternative, mostly because Evernote being the last bad option to date, has terrible UX. And the search is substandard. I use it because I can use it on mobile and desktop, and back it up frequently to multiple formats in case Evernote dies, or wipes my data in error. (Please everybody who uses note apps, back them up now to external files!)

ommunist 11y ago

Why on Earth people are not using git? on iOS it is Working Copy app. any good client for Android?

orthecreedence 11y ago
I think the Android client is good, but I am biased. iOS coming soon.

segphault 11y ago

It's really neat to see that the backend is built with RethinkDB and Common Lisp. I am looking forward to setting up my own instance from source and playing around with it. Great project.

polm23 11y ago

Is something wrong with the CSS on the site? Everything looks kind of overly large in my browser (Desktop Linux Chrome).

Seven_Hong 11y ago
Same here on my linux machine
mrmondo 11y ago
Proportions wise it all looks on Firefox 44 and the CSS seems to be valid, the image of the phone is however 360KB but that's the kind of large you're talking about.
phlyingpenguin 11y ago
Just to add in a screenshot, here's what it looks like on my copy of Chrome on Linux: http://i.imgur.com/6YPbAg6.png http://i.imgur.com/6YPbAg6.png

orthecreedence 11y ago

Hi everyone, creator of Turtl here. It's getting late here (2:15 am) so if you ask a question or have feedback, I'll be able to get back to you in a few hours. Thanks for checking out my project!

satai 11y ago
Hi May I have two recommendations? - put more screenshots on the web page to apetize us - if you provide server... provide it as an Docker image too, so it's easy to test Looks good anyway, I am going give it a try.
- orthecreedence 11y ago
  Thanks! Lots of people are requesting docker images, so this sounds like the way to go. I'll look into it.

V-2 11y ago

I feel the UI (of the desktop version) is a bit lacking. Within one minute from installing it, the following happened. I added a note: a text note, fine. So a side bar opens... Why is it only ever a side bar? I have a 1920px wide monitor - not really unusual - but you're forcing me to edit my notes in a fixed 700px sidebar, the rest of the screen estate just darkened out. Evernote lets me use all my screen. But I've typed some stuff in. So, I'm clicking on "Add text note", the first most obvious call-to-action that catches my eye. A dialog pops up: "The note has unsaved changes. Really leave?". Well, I just clicked on "Add text note", what do you mean? Only after a while I realized that I'm not supposed to click on the most prominent (white on black) caption bar at the top, but on the greenish "Add" in bottom right corner. Even though the title does say "Add text note", which is as explicit as it gets. Okay, time to edit my note. It opens in preview mode by default, I still have to click on a floating button to make it editable - another little mental bump, but okay. I can click on an eye icon to get a preview of the note. Once I do that, the eye icon vanishes, and I'm left with an uneditable note. That's quite weird, normally the "eye" icon would just be replaced with a symbol indicating return to edit mode, allowing to switch back and forth with no fuss. Makes sense, especially sice it's easy to anticipate that the preview function would often be used just to quickly catch a glimpse of whether our work (markup, etc.) looks fine, and further we go, it's not a Rembrandt painting : ) Not here, though - I click on the eye, but in order to resume editing I have to move mouse cursor to the left now, and tap on the "<-" back button. Or, as it turns out, anywhere outside of the magical 700px wide (36% of my screen) get-things-done area. I guess I'm sort of a power user (I'm a software dev for starters), so these confusions don't stop me for more than 5 seconds each. It is frustrating nevertheless, because being computer-savvy, I'm not used to that. And when my mum clicks "Add text note" only to be asked if she really wants to cancel all changes, I can tell you she'll look like a deer in headlights rather than mumble "what's this bs" as I did ; ) I understand you're an indie dev, but hallway usability testing doesn't require hiring focus groups etc., all it takes is have a few people sit in front of the monitor and watch them go at it

claudius 11y ago

http://i.imgur.com/sDzAMjg.png http://i.imgur.com/sDzAMjg.png That’s a rather large font size.

orthecreedence 11y ago
Well yeah, we need a callout or customers won't know where to look. In all seriousness though, it seems the site has linux/chrome issues. I am looking into it. Thanks for the screenshot =]
- Gracana 11y ago
  It has IE11 issues also. http://i.imgur.com/flVRw9M.jpg http://i.imgur.com/flVRw9M.jpg

oliv__ 11y ago

Just a heads up: I'm being shown the Windows x64 button and I'm using a Mac (OS X 10.10) and Firefox. There is only one button on the front page but you seem to support multiple platforms so I'm assuming this is a bug?

Kadin 11y ago
Same thing happened to me. If I hadn't dug around a little I would have assumed it's a Windows-only app and moved on.

osoti 11y ago

From 7 cases to 4 million: America at high Alert from Zika Virus :WHO http://goo.gl/1MZ68q http://goo.gl/1MZ68q

dutchbrit 11y ago

Are you using truecrypt? Isn't that a dead project with security issues?

Kadin 11y ago
It's a forked project with leadership-drama issues, but several ongoing audits haven't turned up any serious security issues. The original anonymous maintainers apparently tried to kill it, for reasons that aren't clear, by saying that it's insecure. It seems to have been a red herring, and their suggestions of alternatives were comically bad. Lots of people are still using the last Truecrypt release, or one of the several forks that have sprung up that have attempted to improve upon it in various ways (sometimes in incompatible ways, though). Hopefully the situation will stabilize with one clear winner in the future.
sarciszewski 11y ago
No, they are not using truecrypt. They're using SJCL for AES-GCM and OpenPGP for public-key encryption.

philodendron 11y ago

I really like the idea of a secure Evernote alternative. For me, however, the by far most important feature is decentralization. Until someone builds this I'm stuck using org-mode and a git repo...

r3bl 11y ago
It is decentralized: https://turtl.it/docs/server/ https://turtl.it/docs/server/ You only use their servers if you want to.

formichunter 11y ago

Is it possible, or maybe I should offer, to encapsulate this in docker using docker-compose? I find it easier and cleaner to try new things out running docker-compose up.

orthecreedence 11y ago
By all means, if you want to take on this project I'd gladly advise and link to it from the server page. I don't know enough about Docker to be useful for that portion, but I can certainly help in getting the server set up properly.
- formichunter 11y ago
  I'll work on this tonight, EST, but if someone beats me to it please don't hesitate to link to them first. Thanks for the reply.

sarciszewski 11y ago

https://github.com/turtl/js/blob/2ca59900d71284795e278e75585787ca767e9766/library/tcrypt.js#L192-L195 https://github.com/turtl/js/blob/2ca59900d71284795e278e75585... Nothing says secure like PBKDF2-SHA1 with 50 rounds. https://github.com/turtl/js/blob/2ca59900d71284795e278e75585787ca767e9766/library/tcrypt.js#L577 https://github.com/turtl/js/blob/2ca59900d71284795e278e75585... ...or timing attacks on MAC validation. (Yeah, you switched to GCM, but a downgrade attack could potentially be used to find a valid MAC for a chosen ciphertext without the attacker knowing the key...)

mrmondo 11y ago
"When the standard was written in 2000, the recommended minimum number of iterations was 1000, but the parameter is intended to be increased over time as CPU speeds increase. As of 2005 a Kerberos standard recommended 4096 iterations,[2] Apple iOS 3 used 2000, iOS 4 used 10000,[3] while in 2011 LastPass used 5000 iterations for JavaScript clients and 100000 iterations for server-side hashing" source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBKDF2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBKDF2 *Edit: Oh.. it's PBKDF1....
- sarciszewski 11y ago
  Nope, PBKDF1 was a typo.
- logicallee 11y ago
  how can anyone take anything seriously that requires 1000 iterations. if iterations had an exponential function then the difference between 1000 iterations and 10,000 is ridiculous, like the difference between 16 bit encryption (no such thing, this would be a joke) and 160 bit encryption. But if it's not exponential, then adding thousands of iterations doesn't do much. Maybe instead of 1 day to break it, now it takes 1000 days, or instead of spending $4,000 on CPU time now you need to spend $4M to crack it. Big deal - it's just as broken. So can anyone explain the math here? How can they seriously suggest linearly increasing the number of iterations over time?
  - 11y ago

magicmu 11y ago

I've been looking for alternatives to Evernote for a long time now, but haven't found a viable one. Thanks for making this, I'll definitely check it out!

steaminghacker 11y ago

See also http://lexiy.com http://lexiy.com secure notes, but not documents.

yazriel 11y ago

Nice app. Please please add any sort of import capability (You can look at simplenote export/import csv/json format)

jaybuff 11y ago

Apple notes (in iOS 9 and El Capitan) is also a secure, encrypted Evernote alternative: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

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kusuriya 11y ago

This is pretty sweet but the UI does leave some to be desired. It would be awesome to have a UI similarish to onenote or a few others where on the left side you have a list of your boards, then either on the left or right side (users pick) you have a list of items in the board, then the rest of the screen is whatever the item is. It is a really nice start and has a lot of potential but without a web version it just wont replace anything I use right now since you dont seem to support any of the BSDs and I do a lot of switching between Windows Linux and OpenBSD

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design55 11y ago

Coming from an academic/artistic background, very very far away from the TECH industry, I've found turtl really helpful for cataloging research for upcoming projects. I think it has really great potential for people working in project based industries who need confidential platform to store large amounts of research. Although many people do not have a need for privacy in their bookmarking, it is definitely a major consideration in many other professions outside of TECH. Although it may not be as smooth running as Evernote right now, I think that privacy for my research is a trade off worth noting.

hirokiky 11y ago

I tried it. I like this app, especially this tile interface. And it won't scramble all of things into notes like evernote. bookmarks, files, notes are separated. seems nice. cons: - You need to take certifications for OSX app - it's scare to install un-certificated apps - Uploading file and images should be merged - I don't want to care whether it's image or not, App should detect, isn't it cool? - The note editor, it's too poor to use. and default height of textarea is too thin. expand it to users want to write something.

ipixny1004 11y ago

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/02/prweb13198898.htm http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/02/prweb13198898.htm Centrallo 2.0 Global Productivity App Adds Evernote Import Wizard to Its List-Making Features and Adds Former Evernote Executive Heather Wilde to Its Team