4 ms·

If I had a dollar for every damn note taking app (2 for open source note taking app), I'd be set on rent money for a few months. What about note taking makes pe

If I had a dollar for every damn note taking app (2 for open source note taking app), I'd be set on rent money for a few months. What about note taking makes people want to invent their own app? Is it just bikeshedding? Spending hours writing a note taking app sounds like a perfect way to not end up taking notes and to not use said notes to accomplish much.

jrm4 6y ago
Because this particular task really feels like the killer app that we should already have -- frictionless, non-heirarchical notes that you can just dump into the system and then retrieve based on a few relatively simple axes, date, keywords, a little semantic analysis, etc. Where I think people are going off the rails is thinking that this can work as a business. I'm hugely skeptical that there's a market here; businesses rely on some measure of "if you don't pay you can't have this part of the thing." -- and even if a startup is able to make this work, it's likely that the "value-add" will be easily replicable into something free (as in freedom) owing to the nature of this being a "power-user" thing. For example, none of these things promise too much more than, e.g. Zim-wiki (longtime user here) -- which itself is extensible either as FOSS, or simply owing to the fact that it saves in Markdown-ish, immediately MAKING it extensible anyway.
- Swizec 6y ago
  > frictionless, non-heirarchical notes that you can just dump into the system and then retrieve based on a few relatively simple axes, date, keywords, a little semantic analysis, etc. You mean a piece of paper with a filing cabinet? I’ve been trying note taking apps for 15 years and nothing beats a plain old notebook for ease of use, flexibility, and helping me think. I don’t do filing cabinets so retrieval has suffered. And for me personally that hasn’t been a problem because most of my notes are ephemeral. When I’m ready to save something long term I write a blogpost and let Google take care of the rest. PS: the main issue with most note taking apps is that there’s just something fundamentally different about thinking on the keyboard vs. thinking with a pen in hand. Digital pens have so far not been able to replicate the feeling for some reason.
  - voidhorse 6y ago
    Agreed. A keyboard is fine for hammering out thought that's already relatively structured, rote notes on a subject, or for thoughts I've worked out to some extent already. For me, pen and paper are leagues superior for any kind of thinking that requires creativity or delving into the unknown.
  - benrbray 6y ago
    It's great that pen+paper works so well for you! I hope you can understand that other people have different workflows, and would prefer something like a personal wiki to organize their thoughts. The recent surge in note-taking apps is all centered around this idea. For me, I like to save URLs and write a short note about everything I read. Typing is much quicker than hand-writing, and I can easily embed images / math / etc..
- benrbray 6y ago
  Exactly my thoughts. Note-taking should be a solved problem, but for some reason it isn't, yet. I'm loving this note-taking app renaissance, because in a few years we'll converge to something stable. It's quite similar to the proliferation of code editors from 2005-2015ish. For a while, practically every language had its own IDE (for me, I remember using HaXe and FlashDevelop). Then, editors like Atom and Sublime came along, raising the bar. For the past five years or so, seems to be the default. The excellent extension system allows people to worry about features, rather than re-creating the IDE. When it comes to note-taking, I expect the same thing to happen--we just need a good, open-source foundation. I fully expect that the winner will be a wrapper around ProseMirror [1]. See also ReMirror [2] [1] https://prosemirror.net/ https://prosemirror.net/ [2] https://remirror.io/ https://remirror.io/
  - tennineeight 6y ago
    Language specific IDEs are less because Language Server Protocol solved this real problem. We converged on a good enough solution. But unlike IDEs and programming language support, note-taking is inherently personal. There is no one-size fits all. I am more disorganized than otherwise, but I prefer separate tools for separate occasions. I like pen and paper for quick jot-downs and napkin math, notepad++/Sublime for quick copy-pastes, OneNote for $DAYJOB and org-mode for long term knowledge base and blogging. I am sure real people exist who prefer one over the other on more than one occasion.
    - Kinrany 6y ago
      The same could be said about IDEs before the LSP came around, no?
  - tleb_ 6y ago
    > I'm loving this note-taking app renaissance, because in a few years we'll converge to something stable. Being pessimistic, but I would bet it will be a walled garden. The solution will probably be key-in-hands and the easiest way for this is a traditional webapp. Not many people care about data ownership and bother dealing with their own file server. See Notion, Google Keep, WorkFlowy, Dynalist, etc.
- pbalau 6y ago
  > Because this particular task really feels like the killer app that we should already have -- frictionless, non-heirarchical notes that you can just dump into the system and then retrieve based on a few relatively simple axes, date, keywords, a little semantic analysis, etc. The killer app is "context aware indexing", not notes...
  - pugio 6y ago
    This reminds me of the truly excellent (as they all are) short story by Ted Chiang - The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling [0]. We've gotten pretty good at recording everything, but recalling it at the appropriate time and context is still the big challenge. When Roam started becoming popular, I began hearing about Zettelkasten. It's yet another note taking system, except that it focuses on the context of when you might need the information, rather than just what's the best way to sort/archive it. A new way of thinking, to me. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_of_Feeling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth...
voidhorse 6y ago
I think part of it has to do with a sort of mythos around note taking. This is pure speculation, but it seems to me that part of the reason note taking apps are so popular is that we've built this cult of productivity that is very much magical and religious in the sense that we think 10x producers simply must have some secret trick, that they meditate, take godly notes, have supreme organizational skills or...something...we're all looking for the secret sauce, the silver bullet. There's this latent idea of "man if only I could get a proper note taking system in place I'd be doing killer work", put another way, "we aren't successful because we're taking notes the wrong way! (not because our ideas are not good or because we simply are not one of the lucky few that will make it)" which unfortunately, is usually false. We like to focus on little micro improvements to our processes because they tangentially relate to work and feel productive, but at the end of the day, are still just another form of procrastination. All that said, I use org mode and you should too :P
- apostacy 6y ago
  While I do think that there is a lot of hype and "productivity porn", there's a good 10% of it that is really on to something. There is obviously an itch that needs scratching in personal knowledge base software. That has certainly been my experience. I can see from the outside it might just look like 100% hype. Personally, my life has been vastly improved with note taking software over the last four years. I can't imagine going back now. Some people I'm sure are ok with just a big text file. The software is almost not important. A new knowledge-base language is emerging, with Markdown-like formatting, but less emphasis on html style page breaking, [[wiki style]] links, and various syntaxes for backlinks and metadata. I've gone from vim-wiki, to various other systems, and migrating I was able to just do with some simple perl scripts. But my knowledge wikis have been effortlessly growing. I have a git repo now with many submodules for my different wikis. I really think that we are looking at this the wrong way. This is not nearly that much of a technical problem. This is just at the awkward stage where we are figuring out the best patterns for personal knowledge. It's not a problem that we will solve, but at least some good general strategies will probably emerge. Personally, I mostly just use a roam-like wiki, but I also have two Zettelkasten submodules as well. My two zetts deal with such different domains that it would be more helpful that they be in completely different namespaces. But yeah, most of the software is crap. The best tools I have found have been small user scripts for editors. I used an Atom based suite that handled my digital gardens. I've been moving to FOAM. I think the best thing you can do is try to learn from what has worked for other people, and not get too hung up on any one technology.
qwerty456127 6y ago
> If I had a dollar for every damn note taking app There indeed had always been many but I've never seen anything nearly as cool before Roam and Notion arrived. And we certainly need a free self-hosted alternative to be able to use this at work without uploading company-confidential data to a 3rd-party black-box cloud.

jrm4 6y ago

Because this particular task really feels like the killer app that we should already have -- frictionless, non-heirarchical notes that you can just dump into the system and then retrieve based on a few relatively simple axes, date, keywords, a little semantic analysis, etc. Where I think people are going off the rails is thinking that this can work as a business. I'm hugely skeptical that there's a market here; businesses rely on some measure of "if you don't pay you can't have this part of the thing." -- and even if a startup is able to make this work, it's likely that the "value-add" will be easily replicable into something free (as in freedom) owing to the nature of this being a "power-user" thing. For example, none of these things promise too much more than, e.g. Zim-wiki (longtime user here) -- which itself is extensible either as FOSS, or simply owing to the fact that it saves in Markdown-ish, immediately MAKING it extensible anyway.

Swizec 6y ago
> frictionless, non-heirarchical notes that you can just dump into the system and then retrieve based on a few relatively simple axes, date, keywords, a little semantic analysis, etc. You mean a piece of paper with a filing cabinet? I’ve been trying note taking apps for 15 years and nothing beats a plain old notebook for ease of use, flexibility, and helping me think. I don’t do filing cabinets so retrieval has suffered. And for me personally that hasn’t been a problem because most of my notes are ephemeral. When I’m ready to save something long term I write a blogpost and let Google take care of the rest. PS: the main issue with most note taking apps is that there’s just something fundamentally different about thinking on the keyboard vs. thinking with a pen in hand. Digital pens have so far not been able to replicate the feeling for some reason.
- voidhorse 6y ago
  Agreed. A keyboard is fine for hammering out thought that's already relatively structured, rote notes on a subject, or for thoughts I've worked out to some extent already. For me, pen and paper are leagues superior for any kind of thinking that requires creativity or delving into the unknown.
- benrbray 6y ago
  It's great that pen+paper works so well for you! I hope you can understand that other people have different workflows, and would prefer something like a personal wiki to organize their thoughts. The recent surge in note-taking apps is all centered around this idea. For me, I like to save URLs and write a short note about everything I read. Typing is much quicker than hand-writing, and I can easily embed images / math / etc..
benrbray 6y ago
Exactly my thoughts. Note-taking should be a solved problem, but for some reason it isn't, yet. I'm loving this note-taking app renaissance, because in a few years we'll converge to something stable. It's quite similar to the proliferation of code editors from 2005-2015ish. For a while, practically every language had its own IDE (for me, I remember using HaXe and FlashDevelop). Then, editors like Atom and Sublime came along, raising the bar. For the past five years or so, seems to be the default. The excellent extension system allows people to worry about features, rather than re-creating the IDE. When it comes to note-taking, I expect the same thing to happen--we just need a good, open-source foundation. I fully expect that the winner will be a wrapper around ProseMirror [1]. See also ReMirror [2] [1] https://prosemirror.net/ https://prosemirror.net/ [2] https://remirror.io/ https://remirror.io/
- tennineeight 6y ago
  Language specific IDEs are less because Language Server Protocol solved this real problem. We converged on a good enough solution. But unlike IDEs and programming language support, note-taking is inherently personal. There is no one-size fits all. I am more disorganized than otherwise, but I prefer separate tools for separate occasions. I like pen and paper for quick jot-downs and napkin math, notepad++/Sublime for quick copy-pastes, OneNote for $DAYJOB and org-mode for long term knowledge base and blogging. I am sure real people exist who prefer one over the other on more than one occasion.
  - Kinrany 6y ago
    The same could be said about IDEs before the LSP came around, no?
- tleb_ 6y ago
  > I'm loving this note-taking app renaissance, because in a few years we'll converge to something stable. Being pessimistic, but I would bet it will be a walled garden. The solution will probably be key-in-hands and the easiest way for this is a traditional webapp. Not many people care about data ownership and bother dealing with their own file server. See Notion, Google Keep, WorkFlowy, Dynalist, etc.
pbalau 6y ago
> Because this particular task really feels like the killer app that we should already have -- frictionless, non-heirarchical notes that you can just dump into the system and then retrieve based on a few relatively simple axes, date, keywords, a little semantic analysis, etc. The killer app is "context aware indexing", not notes...
- pugio 6y ago
  This reminds me of the truly excellent (as they all are) short story by Ted Chiang - The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling [0]. We've gotten pretty good at recording everything, but recalling it at the appropriate time and context is still the big challenge. When Roam started becoming popular, I began hearing about Zettelkasten. It's yet another note taking system, except that it focuses on the context of when you might need the information, rather than just what's the best way to sort/archive it. A new way of thinking, to me. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_of_Feeling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth...

voidhorse 6y ago

I think part of it has to do with a sort of mythos around note taking. This is pure speculation, but it seems to me that part of the reason note taking apps are so popular is that we've built this cult of productivity that is very much magical and religious in the sense that we think 10x producers simply must have some secret trick, that they meditate, take godly notes, have supreme organizational skills or...something...we're all looking for the secret sauce, the silver bullet. There's this latent idea of "man if only I could get a proper note taking system in place I'd be doing killer work", put another way, "we aren't successful because we're taking notes the wrong way! (not because our ideas are not good or because we simply are not one of the lucky few that will make it)" which unfortunately, is usually false. We like to focus on little micro improvements to our processes because they tangentially relate to work and feel productive, but at the end of the day, are still just another form of procrastination. All that said, I use org mode and you should too :P

apostacy 6y ago
While I do think that there is a lot of hype and "productivity porn", there's a good 10% of it that is really on to something. There is obviously an itch that needs scratching in personal knowledge base software. That has certainly been my experience. I can see from the outside it might just look like 100% hype. Personally, my life has been vastly improved with note taking software over the last four years. I can't imagine going back now. Some people I'm sure are ok with just a big text file. The software is almost not important. A new knowledge-base language is emerging, with Markdown-like formatting, but less emphasis on html style page breaking, [[wiki style]] links, and various syntaxes for backlinks and metadata. I've gone from vim-wiki, to various other systems, and migrating I was able to just do with some simple perl scripts. But my knowledge wikis have been effortlessly growing. I have a git repo now with many submodules for my different wikis. I really think that we are looking at this the wrong way. This is not nearly that much of a technical problem. This is just at the awkward stage where we are figuring out the best patterns for personal knowledge. It's not a problem that we will solve, but at least some good general strategies will probably emerge. Personally, I mostly just use a roam-like wiki, but I also have two Zettelkasten submodules as well. My two zetts deal with such different domains that it would be more helpful that they be in completely different namespaces. But yeah, most of the software is crap. The best tools I have found have been small user scripts for editors. I used an Atom based suite that handled my digital gardens. I've been moving to FOAM. I think the best thing you can do is try to learn from what has worked for other people, and not get too hung up on any one technology.

qwerty456127 6y ago

> If I had a dollar for every damn note taking app There indeed had always been many but I've never seen anything nearly as cool before Roam and Notion arrived. And we certainly need a free self-hosted alternative to be able to use this at work without uploading company-confidential data to a 3rd-party black-box cloud.