9 ms·

Show HN: I wrote a local-first notes app for Mac, with data longevity in mind

127 points by ricg 5y ago

ricg 5y ago
Hi HN, I spent the past 3 years working on a personal notes app that focuses on data longevity. Everything is saved as simple files and folders. In fact, you can open any folder as notebook. External documents/files/PDFs can live alongside notes (the app shows a preview). Files are saved as HTML to ensure that even in 20 years form now you can still access your notes with a browser even if the app should not be around. Tags, bi-directional links, rich text, images are supported. I also added a few neat features to extract knowledge from notes like a spreadsheet view and one page summaries. For example, let’s say you keep monthly project review notes, each with a section “Lessons Learned”. You can generate a page with all “Lessons Learned” sections from all notes tagged #postmortem to see them all on a single page. I’m very happy that the app finally went live. Many of you will know that the last 20% of actually getting a project out of the door seem to take just as much work as the first 80% (hat tip to Vilfredo). Looking forward to your feedback!
oceankid 5y ago
Congratulations on the launch! Downloaded and seems quite polished. Recently found and use 30% of something called Obsidian so native UI and attachments are welcome. I saw the option to view as Spreadsheet but wasn’t obvious how one was made? The concept of fields seems cool. Are there plans for data extraction/APIs? Congrats again!
- ricg 5y ago
  Thanks for your feedback! The spreadsheet view works in combination with metadata fields. Let's say you have a number of notes for your contacts. You tag each note with #contact and add a few fields like "Name", "Department", "Diet". Type #contact into the location bar to find all contacts and switch from there to the spreadsheet view. You'll get a list of your contacts and you can quickly tell who is a vegetarian, for example. Great for planning a party (once in person meetings are a thing again). Another neat thing: Add a new note and add the tag #contact. The right sidebar will now suggest fields and headings that you used in other contact notes. This way you can use the same fields to keep your notes consistent.
  - jitl 5y ago
    Really nice design; do you have a “rename field” action for editing all those metadatas across matching tags at once?
    - ricg 5y ago
      Not yet, but that's on my list. Same for headings. I'm still debating if I implement this as a separate "rename" feature or instead implement a project-wide search and replace.
wodenokoto 5y ago
Looks really cool. The introduction video was very informative, but on a kinda unrelated sidenote, the way the narrator talks reminds me of a 90s infomercial - the cube-swipe also has a pretty nostalgic vibe.
- ricg 5y ago
  Thanks for your feedback! I was looking for a voice over that does not sound as polished as a radio ad. Sounds like I went a bit overboard with that :)
torstenvl 5y ago
Love the idea and, from the screenshots, the execution looks great. I've been looking for something like this and I'm still undecided, with Joplin and StandardNotes leading the pack for my use case. It looks like you've settled on an App Store-only distribution model and a subscription-only pricing model. I'm curious about how you made that decision - subscription-only would suggest you're revenue-sensitive and want to provide continued updates, but App Store-only distribution means giving up revenues and putting someone else in control of updates. As a result, from the outside looking in, it seems a little incongruous. Just wondering :) obviously don't feel obligated to answer, either way it looks like a great piece of software.
- ricg 5y ago
  Awesome, thanks for your feedback! Yes, I plan to provide continued updates. I have lots of more ideas (block based editor, large calendar view, smart search folders, …). I considered a one-time paid with paid upgrades model, but decided to use a subscription. What would be your use case and is there something in particular that leaves you undecided between Joplin and StandardNotes?
  - cyberge99 5y ago
    Not the commenter, but I’ve been in a similar struggle to find “thw perfect note app” since evernote went South. I’ve been trying Obsidian, Joplin, Bear, and Craft. A must have for me is a code-block (three backticks enter or similar). A killer feature would be a rest api so I could integrate with cli tools (bash, jq, grep, etc) without having to parse html. I’m excited to try this out.
    - bachmeier 5y ago
      You say you've been struggling even though you've tried Obsidian. It has support for code blocks. I don't know about a rest API, but if you want to use CLI tools, the files are already stored in markdown format on your hard drive. I use CLI tools on my Obsidian files all the time.
convivialdingo 5y ago
Congrats, looks great! I'm a huge fan of notes in general and I use a few different apps. I love the idea of quick linking and tags. Layout is polished. I'll definitely have to try it out.
- ricg 5y ago
  Awesome! Let me know how the app works out for you. One pet peeve of mine is that many notes apps make it easy to enter notes, but when it comes to retrieving content all I'm left with is full text search. I added two additional ways, the spreadsheet view and one page summaries. The summaries are shown towards the end of the demo video. If you take lots of notes, this might be useful for you to extract knowledge from your notes.
lolski 5y ago
I haven't tried it but it looks amazing. Well done.
- ricg 5y ago
  Thanks!
rubatuga 5y ago
I would purchase it if it was one time only, outside of App Store distribution. But otherwise amazing notes app!
- ricg 5y ago
  Thanks for your feedback and your kind words!
bjtitus 5y ago
This looks really awesome! I always find myself looking for a mobile companion for these types of apps, though (it's what made me stop using Roam). Do you have any plans for a mobile app in the future? I assume the files could probably sync over iCloud as an optional feature.
- ricg 5y ago
  Thank you! Yes, I have plans for an iOS app, but want to add a few things to the Mac app before that. I have a block-based editor 70% ready and want to get that shipped before working on an iOS version. Syncing will work through iCloud Drive. Since the app already saves as plain files and folders there is not a lot of work needed there (mainly conflict handling).
beachwood23 5y ago
This looks really cool. But my pet peeve is hidden pricing for paid products. If it's worth buying, then show the price up front. I can't easily view the price anywhere on the website, and it's not displayed on the App Store description either. I was ready to download the app and try it out if I could view this information up front
- shadowoflight 5y ago
  To be fair to OP, Apple makes it dead easy to see how much the IAPs are for a given app (in the case of this one, $2.49 monthly or $24.99 yearly).
  - michaelmcdonald 5y ago
    Apple does, but the product's website does not. As the above poster was pointing out: if the product is worth paying for the Op should make that clear.
    - shadowoflight 5y ago
      Sure, the product's website doesn't display the price, and I agree that it should, but I was replying to this: > it's not displayed on the App Store description either. Developers don't need to (and, imo, shouldn't) put pricing in the App Store description, because that's what the auto-generated "In-App Purchases" list is there for.
      - ricg 5y ago
        Agreed, you'd have to localize the description to support all currencies and then update whenever the price tiers or tax rates change. For the website: I just added the pricing in USD.
    - selykg 5y ago
      If a product is available in the Mac App Store only, it gets tricky because you can provide the US price, but all other prices are generated by Apple in relation to the US price for other regions. This can cause confusion. Been there, done that. It's a tricky situation even for the developer.
alfonsodev 5y ago
Did you build this in Swift UI? Would you make different technology choices if you started today?
- ricg 5y ago
  No SwiftUI, just plain Swift and AppKit/Cocoa. I considered SwiftUI, but at the time it was not ready and was missing a few core things I needed, like an outline view (this was 3 years ago). Sometimes I wonder if I should have gone for a Catalyst app like Craft, for example, but again, at the time when I started Catalyst was in a very early stage. Today I'd probably give it another try. I also considered a Swift wrapper around an HTML/JS core (kind of my own slim Electron version) but decided to go for a native Mac app.
mxuribe 5y ago
Great-looking application! I really love the direction to use html; kudos for supporting data longevity!
- ricg 5y ago
  Thank you very much for your kind words!
hunterb123 5y ago
I've been happy with FSNotes if someone is looking for a light markdown note taking app for Mac/iOS that syncs via iCloud. This looks good if you are looking for something a bit more for school or something.
- colecut 5y ago
  I've used QOwnNotes which is open source and cross platform Windows/OSX/Linux, but sadly I don't think there's a mobile version... Using HTML instead of Markdown gives some nice advantages if you want to use more than just text, so I am going to give this new app a try.
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    A lot of markdown note apps including FSNotes (https://fsnot.es https://fsnot.es) support the TextBundle (http://textbundle.org http://textbundle.org) format so you can embed images in the same document. HTML is nice for more advanced documents, but I prefer note taking in markdown as it's a simpler syntax, even when viewed in raw text. I think HTML is perfect for this app because it's more for academic use and less personal use like grocery/todo lists, reminders, etc. Having a synced mobile version is crucial as you want to access your notes on the go right? (at the grocery store, etc.)
    - ricg 5y ago
      I considered textbundle, but went for HTML for one reason: data accessibility. Imagine in 20 years from now you'd want to access your data and do not have the app around for some reason. You would need to find another app that supports the .textbundle format. Or you would need to manually rename all .textbundle notes to .zip to extract them. Even if a normal user would know about this, it would still be a pain. With HTML you can drag a note into a browser and see the contents. Links to other notes will work as well. Images will show right away, too. Pros and cons for each format...
      - hunterb123 5y ago
bachmeier 5y ago
Simple curiosity, with no claim of good or bad. Why a Mac app in 2021 when that excludes such a large part of the market?
- jitl 5y ago
  When it’s not Electron/Web: wHy nOt an eLEctRoN wEB aPp When it’s Electron/Web: wHy nOt nATivE When it’s iOS: wHy nOt aNDroId; 80% oF tHe wOrLd When it’s Android: i pErSoNALly prEfeR iOS fOr tHe UX Maybe I should take a break from HN
  - bachmeier 5y ago
    > Maybe I should take a break from HN Wouldn't be a bad idea, since it seems to bother you that different people ask different questions, and none of your cases is related to my question. Unless you think "why are you intentionally limiting your market" is the same as the ones you've listed. PS: I think your keyboard is broken.
  - eps 5y ago
    Oh, please, your reddit is leaking. Don't do it on HN.
    - hunterb123 5y ago
      I don't know, his comment was a pretty accurate representation of common responses of HN. Though it's just the case of the loudest people voicing these complaints. It doesn't represent everyone, but it certainly is prevalent and can be demoralizing hearing all the hate.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    A well-made UX in GTK or QT can look fairly native on Mac with little-to-no effort, and would let you also distribute it to Windows/Linux/Chromebook (the other 93% of the PC market, for those of you who aren't paying attention) I love Mac apps, I like their silly use of euphemism and laissez-faire design language, but I will outright not integrate it into my lifestyle if I can't run it on my 5 other devices too. Getting work done comes first, and I'm sure as hell not going to boot up my QEMU container just to add a bullet point for my shopping list.
softwarebeware 5y ago
Upvote just for even thinking about using local storage and a universal file format.
newman314 5y ago
You have a typo on the landing page. "Learn from the past an become a smarter person today"
- ricg 5y ago
  Fixed now, thanks a lot!
eps 5y ago
As they say - I am a simple man, I see a well-made installable desktop software, I upvote it. Even if it's just for Mac. Well done, OP. Break a leg. -- Edit -- Ah, damn! A subscription! For a desktop app! Noooo... I have to withdraw my praise and the upvote. Subscriptions for installable apps are completely unacceptable.
- ricg 5y ago
  Thank your for part 1 and I hear you for part 2 :)
miles 5y ago
Congratulations - looks beautifully crafted. Sadly, MAS and subscriptions (as opposed to a one-time purchase with paid upgrades for major versions) make it a non-starter for me, especially given that it was made with "data longevity in mind".
- ricg 5y ago
  I hear you. Trouble is, paid upgrades are tricky to implement in the MAS. About data longevity: if you cancel your subscription, you cannot add new notes, but you retain full access to all existing notes and all features remain active (you can edit existing notes, move stuff around, etc.). A knowledge base that locks you out once you cancel would be of no use...
- ibdf 5y ago
  I agree with this - I can only have so many subscriptions and unfortunately a notes up is not top priority even though it looks really nice.
  - rkhassen9 5y ago
    Yup - was 100% excited and was going to buy it until I saw it's a subscription. Now 100% not excited and not gonna go there. It just never works out for me to be worthwhile. Sorry.
    - 1123581321 5y ago
      How much were you expecting to pay, out of curiosity?
      - rkhassen9 5y ago
        $25 seems to be appropriate for this type of a program. And if I ended up using it a lot, I'd hope for upgrades and would be happy to pay for them. What I don't want is to bleed cash. That is a negative feature. Can't tell you how many programs I don't buy because of the SAAS model.
latchkey 5y ago
I am currently a simpleton Notes.app user. It does the job enough for me. I just downloaded this, tried it out. Fantastic work. The editor is excellent and behaves how I'd expect. I love the calendar right there. The app uses a small amount of memory/cpu. What keeps me on Notes: 1. Subscription. I'd pay for a one time license. I'd pay for upgrades, but I'd want to own it. 2. It needs a mobile version with sync. 3. I don't see a way to switch into light mode.
- baran1 5y ago
  1. strangely these days I'm a lot more relieved to see subscriptions over one-time payments because those projects tend to have the funding to update their software. 2. agree, syncing is to a mobile device is required
  - ricg 5y ago
    1. Thank you :) 2. iOS with iCloud support is planned.
- jll29 5y ago
  > 1. Subscription. I'd pay for a one time license. I'd pay for upgrades, but I'd want to own it. I'd love to have this, but as latchkey says for a one-time purchase. Ideally, the app would be open source and available for Mac as well as Linux, so one could add bespoke extensions. Note the reason I say "open source" is not because I would want it for free, but because open source means I will still be able to use it in 20 years on whatever platform will be mine then. Wish list: - plug-in for Emacs, Atom and Sublime. - versioning support (Git integration)
- ricg 5y ago
  Thanks for your feedback! 1. If you cancel your subscription you cannot add new notes, but you can still access, edit, move, etc. your existing notes. All features remain active (and you get updates, important for OS upgrades). 2. iOS and iCloud Drive support are planned 3. It changes between light and dark mode automatically with the setting of macOS.
butz 5y ago
Looks great. Are there similar applications for Linux? No remote capabilities and storing data in open format is a must. Preferably native app, not packaged web app.
- schultzie 5y ago
  Obsidian.md is my go to for notes. It also has tons of extensions which take it to the next level. As the name suggests, all notes are stored as markdown files.
throwthere 5y ago
It's hard to justify a $24/year longterm commitment when FSNotes App works just as well and is free.
mattl 5y ago
"Learn from the past *an* become a smarter person today" Typo on the homepage.
- ricg 5y ago
  Thanks for the heads-up! Fixed now. Of course it had to be that heading ;)
mvind 5y ago
Number 5689 note taking app on HN.
- ricg 5y ago
  Writing your own notes app is a rite of passage ;)
sheeeep86 5y ago
Looks beautiful and well thought out, I look forward to trying it out
- ricg 5y ago
  Let me know what you think once you get a chance to try it!
andjd 5y ago
I agree with the comments that a subscription model and delivery through the Apple's app store seem at odds with the 'with data longevity in mind' objective. Requiring a subscription makes me ask what happens when you stop supporting the project? Relying on the App Store makes me wonder what happens when Apple decides to ban your developer account? I'm not saying these are dealbreakers, but I'd like to have some sort of answer to these concerns. Having a self-hosted way to download and pay for the app would increase my confidence level, even if I did decide to purchase through the app store. Similarly, there are 'subscription' apps that let the user keep using the latest version of the app if they cancel the subscription, they are just no longer able to get updates. You can also make a pledge to open-source the app if once you're no longer commercially supporting it.
- ricg 5y ago
  Yes, absolutely valid concerns and I've though about those. When cancelling the subscription, all existing notes and all data remains fully accessible (read and write). It’s a knowledge base, after all. Projects with more than 50 notes will not support adding new notes, but all other features remain fully functional. About the idea of keeping the latest version without updates: interesting, but tricky to implement in the App Store. You'd need a feature switch for everything. OS compatibility updates would still need to go through or the app would not survive in the App Store (typically this is what would get users to upgrade for apps distributed outside of the App Store). Even if the app were to disappear, you could still access your notes with a browser and copy the data over to another app. Not as convenient as using text files, but the ability to embed images into the notes led me to go with HTML. Happy to answer more questions!
mhd 5y ago
I'm still using Notational Velocity, talking about longevity...
- ricg 5y ago
  Curious about your workflow since you've been keeping notes for a long time. How often do you refer to old notes and how old are those? What methods do you use to find them (e.g. search, navigate a folder structure, etc.)?
  - mhd 5y ago
    Oh boy, my system is old, didn't say it's good... I'm not retaining ephemeral notes, no work logs or anything like that. That's on separate "systems", often text files within the projects or actual paper. This makes things a lot easier. Notational Velocity is mostly search based. I mean, it's a list of messages, a text editing field and a searchbar, nothing more. So system-wide shortcut to pop it up, Cmd-L to search and there you go. I'm mostly doing a bit of "SEO", so intentionally write content in the node that makes it easier to find. Tried tags, but that just added another layer and "Here's another good Bash Shell tip for Linux Servers:" makes it both more readable and provides hooks for searching. Synchronisation has change a few times, it's just text files after all. I'm trying to check whether the Zettelkasten method would help me, so I've currently switched to Obsidian and might try some others. They're still writing text files, so I can backport them easily when/if I'm done with it. Right now, I'm not sure whether just having a GUID/timestamp is enough even within NV. Sure, I can't just click on it, but that means that I just have to Cmd-C/Cmd-L/Cmd-V after it. And being quite fond of Emacs, I try and fail with Org-Mode once a year.
    - ricg 5y ago
      Great, thanks for sharing some details about your setup. I do something similar with my email messages. I never delete anything. Should I later need to recall a conversation I use Mail.app's full text search. Success varies depending on how much context I can recall. With the app I tried to provide additional access points into the data. Page links are an additional way if you use them like "@ mentions". Let's say you have a person or topic that a note is related to (for an email this would be the sender). I created a folder "Contacts" and added a note for each person. Now if I write something down I mention the page for that person on the note. Later on I can go to that person's page and see all notes connected to that person (the power of backlinks) or simply search for "@james", for example. Zettelkasten: I'm still trying to wrap my head around this one. What is great about it is that Niklas Luhmann figured out a way to have page links and backlinks between notes in a setup in the physical world on actual paper. With digital notes, I think GUIDs and timestamps to identify notes are not necessary anymore, because the file path (or URL if you will) uniquely identifies a note. Org mode: yes, same here with the added difficulty that I have a vi background :)
albertzeyer 5y ago
When data longevity is a goal, I would expect it to be open source, such that I have a chance to port it over to Linux or other OSs and also be able to port it to future OS in 50 years or so. I'm also not sure whether HTML is such a great format. Maybe it's fine for reading the files and content in the future but for interop with other tools, I think sth like text or markdown would be better. Or Org-mode.
amjd 5y ago
Great work! Love the effort you spent on making notes retrieval easy, all while keeping a beautiful and simple UX. Especially commendable for a solo dev. Don't be overwhelmed by the negative comments on the pricing model. To be honest, I'd prefer a one-time purchase over subscriptions too, but the recurring pricing you've kept is modest and isn't a dealbreaker for me. And as someone else commented, the monthly subscription in a way gives a sense of safety that the app is going to be actively developed and maintained. Also I like that you've decided to keep the app usable for all actions other than adding new notes if a user stops paying. I'd need that guarantee before I can commit to a new note-taking app and migrate all my notes. I'd echo the request of introducing mobile apps for this as well. Preferably on both iOS and Android, as I find that while a lot of folks use Mac because of their work, a significant number of them use Android phones. Also, markdown imports would be great, if it's not already supported.
- ricg 5y ago
  Thanks for your feedback and encouragement! I'm not taking this personal, I appreciate the feedback and I knew beforehand that subscriptions are controversial. I contemplated the pricing model for a very long time going back and forth between the two options in my head multiple times. In the end, the argument that convinced me what that with a subscription my focus is on adding features for my existing users. I'm constantly thinking "How can I make the app better for my users to keep my subscribers"? Whereas for a single purchase I have to constantly think "What can I add to attract more users"?. All my other apps use one-time payments and sometimes it really pains me to put feature requests on my backpack knowing that I will never get to implement them, because they would not increase the visibility of the app. Mobile: I have an iOS app planned, but it will take some time because I have a number of features that I want to add to the Mac app first (block based editor, smart search folders, larger calendar view).
njhaveri 5y ago
This is surprisingly sophisticated and loaded with features for a 1.0, congratulations on the release! I totally know what it's like to work on a productivity app for a long time before it feels like it meets the minimum bar for release, serious props for making it over the line. The smart summaries feature in particular looks really interesting. While I confess that I'd also like the option to purchase a 1.0 license and then pay to upgrade to 2.0 later, I fully recognize that the App Store makes that sort of arrangement extremely awkward and difficult to achieve, and think you priced it more than fairly anyways.
- ricg 5y ago
  Thank you! Those last 10% always seem to take just as long as the first 90! Ask me one day about that typo that a friend discovered that showed in all marketing materials so that I had to redo all screenshots and the demo video. Pricing: yes, agreed. One Page Summaries: I have more ideas on that front. I'd like to add a way to "save" the summary config as kind of a "smart search" so that you could have them in the outline on the left or even embedded as a block inside a note. Another idea is a kind of command line syntax for the location bar: . / #meetingminutes / H2:Lessons Learned | View:OnePageSummary This would find all notes tagged "meetingminutes" in the current note and below, pull all sections with level 2 headings "Lessons Learned" and show them as summary on one page.
waspight 5y ago
How many new subscriptions did you get from this HN post?
- ricg 5y ago
  One
  - waspight 5y ago
    I see. Do you know about how many page views you got? If I may ask. The interest seemed higher than one subscriber

127 points by ricg 5y ago

ricg 5y ago

Hi HN, I spent the past 3 years working on a personal notes app that focuses on data longevity. Everything is saved as simple files and folders. In fact, you can open any folder as notebook. External documents/files/PDFs can live alongside notes (the app shows a preview). Files are saved as HTML to ensure that even in 20 years form now you can still access your notes with a browser even if the app should not be around. Tags, bi-directional links, rich text, images are supported. I also added a few neat features to extract knowledge from notes like a spreadsheet view and one page summaries. For example, let’s say you keep monthly project review notes, each with a section “Lessons Learned”. You can generate a page with all “Lessons Learned” sections from all notes tagged #postmortem to see them all on a single page. I’m very happy that the app finally went live. Many of you will know that the last 20% of actually getting a project out of the door seem to take just as much work as the first 80% (hat tip to Vilfredo). Looking forward to your feedback!

oceankid 5y ago

Congratulations on the launch! Downloaded and seems quite polished. Recently found and use 30% of something called Obsidian so native UI and attachments are welcome. I saw the option to view as Spreadsheet but wasn’t obvious how one was made? The concept of fields seems cool. Are there plans for data extraction/APIs? Congrats again!

ricg 5y ago
Thanks for your feedback! The spreadsheet view works in combination with metadata fields. Let's say you have a number of notes for your contacts. You tag each note with #contact and add a few fields like "Name", "Department", "Diet". Type #contact into the location bar to find all contacts and switch from there to the spreadsheet view. You'll get a list of your contacts and you can quickly tell who is a vegetarian, for example. Great for planning a party (once in person meetings are a thing again). Another neat thing: Add a new note and add the tag #contact. The right sidebar will now suggest fields and headings that you used in other contact notes. This way you can use the same fields to keep your notes consistent.
- jitl 5y ago
  Really nice design; do you have a “rename field” action for editing all those metadatas across matching tags at once?
  - ricg 5y ago
    Not yet, but that's on my list. Same for headings. I'm still debating if I implement this as a separate "rename" feature or instead implement a project-wide search and replace.

wodenokoto 5y ago

Looks really cool. The introduction video was very informative, but on a kinda unrelated sidenote, the way the narrator talks reminds me of a 90s infomercial - the cube-swipe also has a pretty nostalgic vibe.

ricg 5y ago
Thanks for your feedback! I was looking for a voice over that does not sound as polished as a radio ad. Sounds like I went a bit overboard with that :)

torstenvl 5y ago

Love the idea and, from the screenshots, the execution looks great. I've been looking for something like this and I'm still undecided, with Joplin and StandardNotes leading the pack for my use case. It looks like you've settled on an App Store-only distribution model and a subscription-only pricing model. I'm curious about how you made that decision - subscription-only would suggest you're revenue-sensitive and want to provide continued updates, but App Store-only distribution means giving up revenues and putting someone else in control of updates. As a result, from the outside looking in, it seems a little incongruous. Just wondering :) obviously don't feel obligated to answer, either way it looks like a great piece of software.

ricg 5y ago
Awesome, thanks for your feedback! Yes, I plan to provide continued updates. I have lots of more ideas (block based editor, large calendar view, smart search folders, …). I considered a one-time paid with paid upgrades model, but decided to use a subscription. What would be your use case and is there something in particular that leaves you undecided between Joplin and StandardNotes?
- cyberge99 5y ago
  Not the commenter, but I’ve been in a similar struggle to find “thw perfect note app” since evernote went South. I’ve been trying Obsidian, Joplin, Bear, and Craft. A must have for me is a code-block (three backticks enter or similar). A killer feature would be a rest api so I could integrate with cli tools (bash, jq, grep, etc) without having to parse html. I’m excited to try this out.
  - bachmeier 5y ago
    You say you've been struggling even though you've tried Obsidian. It has support for code blocks. I don't know about a rest API, but if you want to use CLI tools, the files are already stored in markdown format on your hard drive. I use CLI tools on my Obsidian files all the time.

convivialdingo 5y ago

Congrats, looks great! I'm a huge fan of notes in general and I use a few different apps. I love the idea of quick linking and tags. Layout is polished. I'll definitely have to try it out.

ricg 5y ago
Awesome! Let me know how the app works out for you. One pet peeve of mine is that many notes apps make it easy to enter notes, but when it comes to retrieving content all I'm left with is full text search. I added two additional ways, the spreadsheet view and one page summaries. The summaries are shown towards the end of the demo video. If you take lots of notes, this might be useful for you to extract knowledge from your notes.

lolski 5y ago

I haven't tried it but it looks amazing. Well done.

ricg 5y ago
Thanks!

rubatuga 5y ago

I would purchase it if it was one time only, outside of App Store distribution. But otherwise amazing notes app!

ricg 5y ago
Thanks for your feedback and your kind words!

bjtitus 5y ago

This looks really awesome! I always find myself looking for a mobile companion for these types of apps, though (it's what made me stop using Roam). Do you have any plans for a mobile app in the future? I assume the files could probably sync over iCloud as an optional feature.

ricg 5y ago
Thank you! Yes, I have plans for an iOS app, but want to add a few things to the Mac app before that. I have a block-based editor 70% ready and want to get that shipped before working on an iOS version. Syncing will work through iCloud Drive. Since the app already saves as plain files and folders there is not a lot of work needed there (mainly conflict handling).

beachwood23 5y ago

This looks really cool. But my pet peeve is hidden pricing for paid products. If it's worth buying, then show the price up front. I can't easily view the price anywhere on the website, and it's not displayed on the App Store description either. I was ready to download the app and try it out if I could view this information up front

shadowoflight 5y ago
To be fair to OP, Apple makes it dead easy to see how much the IAPs are for a given app (in the case of this one, $2.49 monthly or $24.99 yearly).
- michaelmcdonald 5y ago
  Apple does, but the product's website does not. As the above poster was pointing out: if the product is worth paying for the Op should make that clear.
  - shadowoflight 5y ago
    Sure, the product's website doesn't display the price, and I agree that it should, but I was replying to this: > it's not displayed on the App Store description either. Developers don't need to (and, imo, shouldn't) put pricing in the App Store description, because that's what the auto-generated "In-App Purchases" list is there for.
    - ricg 5y ago
      Agreed, you'd have to localize the description to support all currencies and then update whenever the price tiers or tax rates change. For the website: I just added the pricing in USD.
  - selykg 5y ago
    If a product is available in the Mac App Store only, it gets tricky because you can provide the US price, but all other prices are generated by Apple in relation to the US price for other regions. This can cause confusion. Been there, done that. It's a tricky situation even for the developer.

alfonsodev 5y ago

Did you build this in Swift UI? Would you make different technology choices if you started today?

ricg 5y ago
No SwiftUI, just plain Swift and AppKit/Cocoa. I considered SwiftUI, but at the time it was not ready and was missing a few core things I needed, like an outline view (this was 3 years ago). Sometimes I wonder if I should have gone for a Catalyst app like Craft, for example, but again, at the time when I started Catalyst was in a very early stage. Today I'd probably give it another try. I also considered a Swift wrapper around an HTML/JS core (kind of my own slim Electron version) but decided to go for a native Mac app.

mxuribe 5y ago

Great-looking application! I really love the direction to use html; kudos for supporting data longevity!

ricg 5y ago
Thank you very much for your kind words!

hunterb123 5y ago

I've been happy with FSNotes if someone is looking for a light markdown note taking app for Mac/iOS that syncs via iCloud. This looks good if you are looking for something a bit more for school or something.

colecut 5y ago
I've used QOwnNotes which is open source and cross platform Windows/OSX/Linux, but sadly I don't think there's a mobile version... Using HTML instead of Markdown gives some nice advantages if you want to use more than just text, so I am going to give this new app a try.
- hunterb123 5y ago
  A lot of markdown note apps including FSNotes (https://fsnot.es https://fsnot.es) support the TextBundle (http://textbundle.org http://textbundle.org) format so you can embed images in the same document. HTML is nice for more advanced documents, but I prefer note taking in markdown as it's a simpler syntax, even when viewed in raw text. I think HTML is perfect for this app because it's more for academic use and less personal use like grocery/todo lists, reminders, etc. Having a synced mobile version is crucial as you want to access your notes on the go right? (at the grocery store, etc.)
  - ricg 5y ago
    I considered textbundle, but went for HTML for one reason: data accessibility. Imagine in 20 years from now you'd want to access your data and do not have the app around for some reason. You would need to find another app that supports the .textbundle format. Or you would need to manually rename all .textbundle notes to .zip to extract them. Even if a normal user would know about this, it would still be a pain. With HTML you can drag a note into a browser and see the contents. Links to other notes will work as well. Images will show right away, too. Pros and cons for each format...
    - hunterb123 5y ago

bachmeier 5y ago

Simple curiosity, with no claim of good or bad. Why a Mac app in 2021 when that excludes such a large part of the market?

jitl 5y ago
When it’s not Electron/Web: wHy nOt an eLEctRoN wEB aPp When it’s Electron/Web: wHy nOt nATivE When it’s iOS: wHy nOt aNDroId; 80% oF tHe wOrLd When it’s Android: i pErSoNALly prEfeR iOS fOr tHe UX Maybe I should take a break from HN
- bachmeier 5y ago
  > Maybe I should take a break from HN Wouldn't be a bad idea, since it seems to bother you that different people ask different questions, and none of your cases is related to my question. Unless you think "why are you intentionally limiting your market" is the same as the ones you've listed. PS: I think your keyboard is broken.
- eps 5y ago
  Oh, please, your reddit is leaking. Don't do it on HN.
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    I don't know, his comment was a pretty accurate representation of common responses of HN. Though it's just the case of the loudest people voicing these complaints. It doesn't represent everyone, but it certainly is prevalent and can be demoralizing hearing all the hate.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  A well-made UX in GTK or QT can look fairly native on Mac with little-to-no effort, and would let you also distribute it to Windows/Linux/Chromebook (the other 93% of the PC market, for those of you who aren't paying attention) I love Mac apps, I like their silly use of euphemism and laissez-faire design language, but I will outright not integrate it into my lifestyle if I can't run it on my 5 other devices too. Getting work done comes first, and I'm sure as hell not going to boot up my QEMU container just to add a bullet point for my shopping list.

softwarebeware 5y ago

Upvote just for even thinking about using local storage and a universal file format.

newman314 5y ago

You have a typo on the landing page. "Learn from the past an become a smarter person today"

ricg 5y ago
Fixed now, thanks a lot!

eps 5y ago

As they say - I am a simple man, I see a well-made installable desktop software, I upvote it. Even if it's just for Mac. Well done, OP. Break a leg. -- Edit -- Ah, damn! A subscription! For a desktop app! Noooo... I have to withdraw my praise and the upvote. Subscriptions for installable apps are completely unacceptable.

ricg 5y ago
Thank your for part 1 and I hear you for part 2 :)

miles 5y ago

Congratulations - looks beautifully crafted. Sadly, MAS and subscriptions (as opposed to a one-time purchase with paid upgrades for major versions) make it a non-starter for me, especially given that it was made with "data longevity in mind".

ricg 5y ago
I hear you. Trouble is, paid upgrades are tricky to implement in the MAS. About data longevity: if you cancel your subscription, you cannot add new notes, but you retain full access to all existing notes and all features remain active (you can edit existing notes, move stuff around, etc.). A knowledge base that locks you out once you cancel would be of no use...
ibdf 5y ago
I agree with this - I can only have so many subscriptions and unfortunately a notes up is not top priority even though it looks really nice.
- rkhassen9 5y ago
  Yup - was 100% excited and was going to buy it until I saw it's a subscription. Now 100% not excited and not gonna go there. It just never works out for me to be worthwhile. Sorry.
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    How much were you expecting to pay, out of curiosity?
    - rkhassen9 5y ago
      $25 seems to be appropriate for this type of a program. And if I ended up using it a lot, I'd hope for upgrades and would be happy to pay for them. What I don't want is to bleed cash. That is a negative feature. Can't tell you how many programs I don't buy because of the SAAS model.

latchkey 5y ago

I am currently a simpleton Notes.app user. It does the job enough for me. I just downloaded this, tried it out. Fantastic work. The editor is excellent and behaves how I'd expect. I love the calendar right there. The app uses a small amount of memory/cpu. What keeps me on Notes: 1. Subscription. I'd pay for a one time license. I'd pay for upgrades, but I'd want to own it. 2. It needs a mobile version with sync. 3. I don't see a way to switch into light mode.

baran1 5y ago
1. strangely these days I'm a lot more relieved to see subscriptions over one-time payments because those projects tend to have the funding to update their software. 2. agree, syncing is to a mobile device is required
- ricg 5y ago
  1. Thank you :) 2. iOS with iCloud support is planned.
jll29 5y ago
> 1. Subscription. I'd pay for a one time license. I'd pay for upgrades, but I'd want to own it. I'd love to have this, but as latchkey says for a one-time purchase. Ideally, the app would be open source and available for Mac as well as Linux, so one could add bespoke extensions. Note the reason I say "open source" is not because I would want it for free, but because open source means I will still be able to use it in 20 years on whatever platform will be mine then. Wish list: - plug-in for Emacs, Atom and Sublime. - versioning support (Git integration)
ricg 5y ago
Thanks for your feedback! 1. If you cancel your subscription you cannot add new notes, but you can still access, edit, move, etc. your existing notes. All features remain active (and you get updates, important for OS upgrades). 2. iOS and iCloud Drive support are planned 3. It changes between light and dark mode automatically with the setting of macOS.

butz 5y ago

Looks great. Are there similar applications for Linux? No remote capabilities and storing data in open format is a must. Preferably native app, not packaged web app.

schultzie 5y ago
Obsidian.md is my go to for notes. It also has tons of extensions which take it to the next level. As the name suggests, all notes are stored as markdown files.

throwthere 5y ago

It's hard to justify a $24/year longterm commitment when FSNotes App works just as well and is free.

mattl 5y ago

"Learn from the past *an* become a smarter person today" Typo on the homepage.

ricg 5y ago
Thanks for the heads-up! Fixed now. Of course it had to be that heading ;)

mvind 5y ago

Number 5689 note taking app on HN.

ricg 5y ago
Writing your own notes app is a rite of passage ;)

sheeeep86 5y ago

Looks beautiful and well thought out, I look forward to trying it out

ricg 5y ago
Let me know what you think once you get a chance to try it!

andjd 5y ago

I agree with the comments that a subscription model and delivery through the Apple's app store seem at odds with the 'with data longevity in mind' objective. Requiring a subscription makes me ask what happens when you stop supporting the project? Relying on the App Store makes me wonder what happens when Apple decides to ban your developer account? I'm not saying these are dealbreakers, but I'd like to have some sort of answer to these concerns. Having a self-hosted way to download and pay for the app would increase my confidence level, even if I did decide to purchase through the app store. Similarly, there are 'subscription' apps that let the user keep using the latest version of the app if they cancel the subscription, they are just no longer able to get updates. You can also make a pledge to open-source the app if once you're no longer commercially supporting it.

ricg 5y ago
Yes, absolutely valid concerns and I've though about those. When cancelling the subscription, all existing notes and all data remains fully accessible (read and write). It’s a knowledge base, after all. Projects with more than 50 notes will not support adding new notes, but all other features remain fully functional. About the idea of keeping the latest version without updates: interesting, but tricky to implement in the App Store. You'd need a feature switch for everything. OS compatibility updates would still need to go through or the app would not survive in the App Store (typically this is what would get users to upgrade for apps distributed outside of the App Store). Even if the app were to disappear, you could still access your notes with a browser and copy the data over to another app. Not as convenient as using text files, but the ability to embed images into the notes led me to go with HTML. Happy to answer more questions!

mhd 5y ago

I'm still using Notational Velocity, talking about longevity...

ricg 5y ago
Curious about your workflow since you've been keeping notes for a long time. How often do you refer to old notes and how old are those? What methods do you use to find them (e.g. search, navigate a folder structure, etc.)?
- mhd 5y ago
  Oh boy, my system is old, didn't say it's good... I'm not retaining ephemeral notes, no work logs or anything like that. That's on separate "systems", often text files within the projects or actual paper. This makes things a lot easier. Notational Velocity is mostly search based. I mean, it's a list of messages, a text editing field and a searchbar, nothing more. So system-wide shortcut to pop it up, Cmd-L to search and there you go. I'm mostly doing a bit of "SEO", so intentionally write content in the node that makes it easier to find. Tried tags, but that just added another layer and "Here's another good Bash Shell tip for Linux Servers:" makes it both more readable and provides hooks for searching. Synchronisation has change a few times, it's just text files after all. I'm trying to check whether the Zettelkasten method would help me, so I've currently switched to Obsidian and might try some others. They're still writing text files, so I can backport them easily when/if I'm done with it. Right now, I'm not sure whether just having a GUID/timestamp is enough even within NV. Sure, I can't just click on it, but that means that I just have to Cmd-C/Cmd-L/Cmd-V after it. And being quite fond of Emacs, I try and fail with Org-Mode once a year.
  - ricg 5y ago
    Great, thanks for sharing some details about your setup. I do something similar with my email messages. I never delete anything. Should I later need to recall a conversation I use Mail.app's full text search. Success varies depending on how much context I can recall. With the app I tried to provide additional access points into the data. Page links are an additional way if you use them like "@ mentions". Let's say you have a person or topic that a note is related to (for an email this would be the sender). I created a folder "Contacts" and added a note for each person. Now if I write something down I mention the page for that person on the note. Later on I can go to that person's page and see all notes connected to that person (the power of backlinks) or simply search for "@james", for example. Zettelkasten: I'm still trying to wrap my head around this one. What is great about it is that Niklas Luhmann figured out a way to have page links and backlinks between notes in a setup in the physical world on actual paper. With digital notes, I think GUIDs and timestamps to identify notes are not necessary anymore, because the file path (or URL if you will) uniquely identifies a note. Org mode: yes, same here with the added difficulty that I have a vi background :)

albertzeyer 5y ago

When data longevity is a goal, I would expect it to be open source, such that I have a chance to port it over to Linux or other OSs and also be able to port it to future OS in 50 years or so. I'm also not sure whether HTML is such a great format. Maybe it's fine for reading the files and content in the future but for interop with other tools, I think sth like text or markdown would be better. Or Org-mode.

amjd 5y ago

Great work! Love the effort you spent on making notes retrieval easy, all while keeping a beautiful and simple UX. Especially commendable for a solo dev. Don't be overwhelmed by the negative comments on the pricing model. To be honest, I'd prefer a one-time purchase over subscriptions too, but the recurring pricing you've kept is modest and isn't a dealbreaker for me. And as someone else commented, the monthly subscription in a way gives a sense of safety that the app is going to be actively developed and maintained. Also I like that you've decided to keep the app usable for all actions other than adding new notes if a user stops paying. I'd need that guarantee before I can commit to a new note-taking app and migrate all my notes. I'd echo the request of introducing mobile apps for this as well. Preferably on both iOS and Android, as I find that while a lot of folks use Mac because of their work, a significant number of them use Android phones. Also, markdown imports would be great, if it's not already supported.

ricg 5y ago
Thanks for your feedback and encouragement! I'm not taking this personal, I appreciate the feedback and I knew beforehand that subscriptions are controversial. I contemplated the pricing model for a very long time going back and forth between the two options in my head multiple times. In the end, the argument that convinced me what that with a subscription my focus is on adding features for my existing users. I'm constantly thinking "How can I make the app better for my users to keep my subscribers"? Whereas for a single purchase I have to constantly think "What can I add to attract more users"?. All my other apps use one-time payments and sometimes it really pains me to put feature requests on my backpack knowing that I will never get to implement them, because they would not increase the visibility of the app. Mobile: I have an iOS app planned, but it will take some time because I have a number of features that I want to add to the Mac app first (block based editor, smart search folders, larger calendar view).

njhaveri 5y ago

This is surprisingly sophisticated and loaded with features for a 1.0, congratulations on the release! I totally know what it's like to work on a productivity app for a long time before it feels like it meets the minimum bar for release, serious props for making it over the line. The smart summaries feature in particular looks really interesting. While I confess that I'd also like the option to purchase a 1.0 license and then pay to upgrade to 2.0 later, I fully recognize that the App Store makes that sort of arrangement extremely awkward and difficult to achieve, and think you priced it more than fairly anyways.

ricg 5y ago
Thank you! Those last 10% always seem to take just as long as the first 90! Ask me one day about that typo that a friend discovered that showed in all marketing materials so that I had to redo all screenshots and the demo video. Pricing: yes, agreed. One Page Summaries: I have more ideas on that front. I'd like to add a way to "save" the summary config as kind of a "smart search" so that you could have them in the outline on the left or even embedded as a block inside a note. Another idea is a kind of command line syntax for the location bar: . / #meetingminutes / H2:Lessons Learned | View:OnePageSummary This would find all notes tagged "meetingminutes" in the current note and below, pull all sections with level 2 headings "Lessons Learned" and show them as summary on one page.

waspight 5y ago

How many new subscriptions did you get from this HN post?

ricg 5y ago
One
- waspight 5y ago
  I see. Do you know about how many page views you got? If I may ask. The interest seemed higher than one subscriber