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I really like the considerate cookie prompt and clean design. I want a product like this that syncs to the cloud file system of my choice for both portability

I really like the considerate cookie prompt and clean design. I want a product like this that syncs to the cloud file system of my choice for both portability and ease to edit on my desktop. I would try this product but don’t want the mental friction of yet another blob of my data that’s in some proprietary store. Even if they are cool, like this seems, and will export/import. A good example of this is ynab back in the day where they just had a file protocol on top of dropbox. And Moneydance still does this. I’m paying for data storage and am steady comfortable with the the encryption, privacy, etc. if all this needs to do is store and organize markdown, then that should be done on a file base. I need every note I write to exist forever. I’m cool dragging a folder around my whole life. I don’t want to drag around 100 companies.

Terretta 6y ago
Yes - markdown is about portable text. This and most such tools should be a folder structure of .md files. You can then open that same structure in e.g. Ulysses or VSCode. iCloud storage is “built in” on the Apple camp and OneDrive or Dropbox are ubiquitous enough on the Windows and cross-platform camp.
nelsonenzo 6y ago
I use Notable tied to a save folder in Keybase file storage for this purpose. You can set the folder to whatever you want, like a Dropbox or Google drive folder. The interface is similar to this actually, and it's free. All markdown based.
fastball 6y ago
That's definitely fair and the "bring your own cloud" structure was originally how we were going to build Supernotes. However, besides being able to organize your own knowledge in a better way, one of the main pain points we were/are trying to solve with Supernotes is sharing pieces of information. What we noticed with a lot of other systems is that you end up with a situation where you're creating content, and then at some point want to share it with a friend/co-worker/lover. With systems structured as you describe, what usually happens is the user just copy-pastes the content into their messaging app of choice (or email or similar) and that's that. The problem with this is that the info then immediately becomes stale. If I edit the content at some point down the road, in order for you to get the updated version I would need to send it to you on Signal again. With Supernotes, because you're sharing the actual card object on the SN platform, any changes you make to cards are reflected in everyone else's system. In my case I think the simplest example is recipes: I have a sister that is a pastry chef, and we like sharing various recipes with each other. With the way Supernotes is structured (around cards + multi-parent hierarchies), she can share recipe cards with me that I then integrate alongside the recipe cards that I've made myself. If at any point she updates one of these cards, it's updated for me too. But unlike with a shared folder/file system, with a multi-parent card system I can easily hide her content or move it somewhere else on my system while on her system it continues to look exactly how she wants it to look. This was difficult enough with a centralized system and would've been practically impossible with a "bring your own dropbox" structured system, which is why we went with the former in the end. But absolutely, we want users to still feel like they wholly own their own content (because they do[1]), which is why we eventually plan to add E2EE capability for your cards as well as continuing to build out our API[2] (want users to be able to easily get at their content without having to go through our interface) and export functionality. [1] https://supernotes.app/terms/ https://supernotes.app/terms/ [2] https://api.supernotes.app/docs/swagger https://api.supernotes.app/docs/swagger
- prepend 6y ago
  I think a simple approach to this problem, and I think it’s an important issue, is to just assign a guid to each file and create a link with that guid that pulls the individual note from Dropbox/whatever. This can be on top of the file structure and this is sort of how google docs and Dropbox already function where there’s a file structure and also a permalink. I think it’s hard to balance ease of use with portability. I imagine that’s why there are so many homegrown solutions. For me, keeping knowledge is really important and I value this as more important than being able to easily share and integrate information with others (something I almost never do). But if there’s a market for recipe clubs or whatnot that might be really important. I think this is the difference between independent mental models and shared mental models. Where for a wiki, a group needs to agree on a shared mental model and work together. For note taking, I don’t want to preemptively think in a common model so that I can easily share 1% of my thoughts. I do this currently by keeping a bunch of markdown files in gdrive and sending links to particular items when I want to. The link is never stale and changes are visible immediately, and I can even grant edit permissions. AND I can port that to any file system that ever existed or will ever exist through dragging and dropping. I can even keep the same files synced into gdrive/Dropbox. Of course when I port, all the links die.
  - fastball 6y ago
    > I think this is the difference between independent mental models and shared mental models. Where for a wiki, a group needs to agree on a shared mental model and work together. For note taking, I don’t want to preemptively think in a common model so that I can easily share 1% of my thoughts. This is actually exactly what we are going for with the notecard + multi-parent hierarchy system – a hybrid of the two. You structure your own cards however you want, and if someone shares a card with you then you can easily integrate it into your own structure. So you have shared content, but not shared necessarily structure, which is generally a requirement of other collaboration tools like Google Docs or Notion. But it is also very important to us that even if you are not collaborating / sharing at all, Supernotes is still a great tool to use for PKM, it just really shines (we think!) when you also want to do granular collaboration.

Terretta 6y ago

Yes - markdown is about portable text. This and most such tools should be a folder structure of .md files. You can then open that same structure in e.g. Ulysses or VSCode. iCloud storage is “built in” on the Apple camp and OneDrive or Dropbox are ubiquitous enough on the Windows and cross-platform camp.

nelsonenzo 6y ago

I use Notable tied to a save folder in Keybase file storage for this purpose. You can set the folder to whatever you want, like a Dropbox or Google drive folder. The interface is similar to this actually, and it's free. All markdown based.

fastball 6y ago

That's definitely fair and the "bring your own cloud" structure was originally how we were going to build Supernotes. However, besides being able to organize your own knowledge in a better way, one of the main pain points we were/are trying to solve with Supernotes is sharing pieces of information. What we noticed with a lot of other systems is that you end up with a situation where you're creating content, and then at some point want to share it with a friend/co-worker/lover. With systems structured as you describe, what usually happens is the user just copy-pastes the content into their messaging app of choice (or email or similar) and that's that. The problem with this is that the info then immediately becomes stale. If I edit the content at some point down the road, in order for you to get the updated version I would need to send it to you on Signal again. With Supernotes, because you're sharing the actual card object on the SN platform, any changes you make to cards are reflected in everyone else's system. In my case I think the simplest example is recipes: I have a sister that is a pastry chef, and we like sharing various recipes with each other. With the way Supernotes is structured (around cards + multi-parent hierarchies), she can share recipe cards with me that I then integrate alongside the recipe cards that I've made myself. If at any point she updates one of these cards, it's updated for me too. But unlike with a shared folder/file system, with a multi-parent card system I can easily hide her content or move it somewhere else on my system while on her system it continues to look exactly how she wants it to look. This was difficult enough with a centralized system and would've been practically impossible with a "bring your own dropbox" structured system, which is why we went with the former in the end. But absolutely, we want users to still feel like they wholly own their own content (because they do[1]), which is why we eventually plan to add E2EE capability for your cards as well as continuing to build out our API[2] (want users to be able to easily get at their content without having to go through our interface) and export functionality. [1] https://supernotes.app/terms/ https://supernotes.app/terms/ [2] https://api.supernotes.app/docs/swagger https://api.supernotes.app/docs/swagger

prepend 6y ago
I think a simple approach to this problem, and I think it’s an important issue, is to just assign a guid to each file and create a link with that guid that pulls the individual note from Dropbox/whatever. This can be on top of the file structure and this is sort of how google docs and Dropbox already function where there’s a file structure and also a permalink. I think it’s hard to balance ease of use with portability. I imagine that’s why there are so many homegrown solutions. For me, keeping knowledge is really important and I value this as more important than being able to easily share and integrate information with others (something I almost never do). But if there’s a market for recipe clubs or whatnot that might be really important. I think this is the difference between independent mental models and shared mental models. Where for a wiki, a group needs to agree on a shared mental model and work together. For note taking, I don’t want to preemptively think in a common model so that I can easily share 1% of my thoughts. I do this currently by keeping a bunch of markdown files in gdrive and sending links to particular items when I want to. The link is never stale and changes are visible immediately, and I can even grant edit permissions. AND I can port that to any file system that ever existed or will ever exist through dragging and dropping. I can even keep the same files synced into gdrive/Dropbox. Of course when I port, all the links die.
- fastball 6y ago
  > I think this is the difference between independent mental models and shared mental models. Where for a wiki, a group needs to agree on a shared mental model and work together. For note taking, I don’t want to preemptively think in a common model so that I can easily share 1% of my thoughts. This is actually exactly what we are going for with the notecard + multi-parent hierarchy system – a hybrid of the two. You structure your own cards however you want, and if someone shares a card with you then you can easily integrate it into your own structure. So you have shared content, but not shared necessarily structure, which is generally a requirement of other collaboration tools like Google Docs or Notion. But it is also very important to us that even if you are not collaborating / sharing at all, Supernotes is still a great tool to use for PKM, it just really shines (we think!) when you also want to do granular collaboration.