8 ms·

A different approach to note-taking and research

112 points by trungdq88 5y ago

cabalamat 5y ago
I've been using my CatWiki[1] for making notes since 2016 and find it quite easy to use. It stores notes as Markdown files on a local hard disk. [1]: https://github.com/cabalamat/catwiki https://github.com/cabalamat/catwiki
- noname120 5y ago
  Obsidian[1] uses a similar approach. [1] https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/
- kushan2020 5y ago
  I’m working on Bangle[1] which is similar that saves notes locally in Markdown but provides a nice notion like UI. [1] https://bangle.io https://bangle.io
  - nnwright 5y ago
    thank you for posting this.... it looks like exactly what I've been wanting. Looking forward to where the product goes!
    - kushan2020 5y ago
      Thanks for the kind words, my goal is to make note taking portable and delightful.
  - cabalamat 5y ago
    Bangle looks like an interesting project. I tried using it but couldn't get it to work. It relies on keystrokes like Ctrl-P and Ctrl-Shift-P, which I dislike for 2 reasons: (1) it forces people to remember commands when they shouldn't have to. GUIs have used menus, buttons etc for this for ages. (2) Perhaps importantly, it doesn't work for my setup (Firefox on Linux), where Ctrl-Shift-P opens another Firefox window for privater browsing. Also I note that File System storage only works with the Chrome browser. This is probably a good thing because I do not want random web pages being able to look at my filesystem!
    - kushan2020 5y ago
      Those are great points, I will be working on the product to improve upon those. > Also I note that File System storage only works with the Chrome browser. This is probably a good thing because I do not want random web pages being able to look at my filesystem! Just like how a random web page cannot access your webcam, similarly a random web page cannot access your file system without your permission.
holonomically 5y ago
I didn't see if it was possible to self-host. Is that a planned feature?
- benmann 5y ago
  Hey, I'm the creator of Ummm. Not really on the roadmap anytime soon, but it's also still early for the product! Right now it's more about getting a grasp of what people want out of it, squashing some bugs and improving the UX further — before moving development further into a specific direction.
  - lovelyviking 5y ago
    >Right now it's more about getting a grasp of what people want out of it Looks like at least some people for sure want a way to store things locally and in current setup the only option they have is to ' want to be out of it'.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    Have you consulted with any researchers on this project? I would suggest it would be a good idea to ask your target audience what kind of pain points you can solve for them, and I think your product would benefit greatly. As someone who would be your stated target audience, I can’t see anything here that would benefit me. As an example of my greatest pain point when conducting research would be organizing all of my research sources. The mind maps and cross references are a good start in this direction, but there are tools out there that do a much better job and are free. You’ll need to explain why this is better than all of those.
prox 5y ago
Just heads up that the videos don’t work on iOS Safari here.
- dkural 5y ago
  What video? I am on chrome and don' see a video.
  - prox 5y ago
    It’s on the feature page.
usrme 5y ago
Congratulations on getting something out there! As a nitpick: it's really difficult to understand what the product is trying to achieve, and my friend had the same complaint. Might I suggest a more concrete way to explain how this approach differs exactly, with ample examples if at all possible. An interactive demo page would also be very helpful.
- mrleinad 5y ago
  Spent 1 minute trying to understand how it works, so, I agree.
lekevicius 5y ago
For a local filesystem alternative similar to this, Obsidian + Sliding Panes (Andy Matuschak Mode) plugin is similar.
- rcarmo 5y ago
  That seems like an excellent alternative. Thank you.
- EleanorKonik 5y ago
  Oh that's what this is doing. Thank you for the explanation; I couldn't quite figure out what they meant by "take notes horizontally" until I saw this comment. It just looked like dual panes at first. I guess it's hard to convey with static screenshots
Brajeshwar 5y ago
Best Wishes to your Work. The name reminds me of Phil Libin's mmhmm - https://www.mmhmm.app https://www.mmhmm.app
rcarmo 5y ago
Like the UX (although I'm curious as to how the mind maps may look), won't use a service that bills me for having Markdown export. Or most things with a subscription. (I got badly burnt by Evernote and tend to prefer having most of my notes on an actual usable filesystem, with the exception of OneNote since it's been around for so long - and I work at MS, so have learned to live with it).
luismartinezs 5y ago
I do something similar with https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ and there I have everything in my own repo in github Not sure how a 9 euro monthly subscription is justified in comparison particularly since I can use vscode as a power user
- dkural 5y ago
  This is awesome! Thank you for sharing. On the page you linked, the github link doesn't take me to the repo, just to a generic github page; you might see an increase in users if it did!
- noname120 5y ago
  Can you embed websites[1] inside Foam? [1] https://www.ummm.co/#:~:text=embed%20websites%20and%20links%20right%20in%20your%20train%20of%20thought%20and%20reference%20in%20your%20notes%20right%20next%20to%20them.%20avoid%20context-switching%20and%20keep%20your%20focus%20when%20doing%20research%2C%20instead%20of%20opening%20a%20new%20tab%20every%20time%20you%20want%20to%20look%20something%20up%20on%20a%20website https://www.ummm.co/#:~:text=embed%20websites%20and%20links%...
  - karpovv-boris 5y ago
    Idea behind Foam is that they use GitHub and vscode features - answering on your question, I didn't find any extension with this feature. But more interesting question, do you really need this "copy/paste" feature in your research (or just simple notes)?
    - noname120 5y ago
      Opening external links in an external browser is too distracting and cumbersome for me.
akho 5y ago
Screenshots looks nice. Maybe you should focus more on the differentiating aspects? The note-taking application market is extremely crowded. (which is indicative that the issues are human, rather than technical — people feel the need to record stuff, but are not really able to stick with it and get good results; I have a stack of paper notebooks where I tried different systems as a physical manifestation; the software cemetery is less visible, but no less extensive. I may have found my final system, but who knows how long it will stick…) Are you targeting per-project, short-to-medium term notes? If you have “second brain” ambitions, and choose to provide a hosted solution with no standardized format for export, you have to have some sort of long-term commitment. I do not see how that commitment can be taken in a way that is credible.
- tillcarlos 5y ago
  I learned a lot from this post. it’s humble, gives compliments and addresses key points the product falls short of. I upvoted the first harsher comment but then saw how you. framed it. I’ll try to give criticism more like yours in the future. thanks.
bachmeier 5y ago
What I learned from visiting the site: It's an app that lets you take notes horizontally - apparently there's a claim that this is an advantage. I'm supposed to buy a subscription for more than Evernote costs and hand over all of my data, which may or may not be encrypted, to a random person on the internet. Sorry if this is harsh, but the website didn't make its case to me, and this is an extremely crowded space.
- mgax 5y ago
  +1
- asdf_snar 5y ago
  Seconding these thoughts, but also I don't think they're harsh. After a minute on the site I still have no idea what makes this different from writing Markdown in Notepad. If I really need the "horizontal time" aspect I can come up with a dozen ways of automating that with my text editor of choice + a bash script. And, ugh, with Firefox running on Ubuntu, clicking the "Changelog" fires a prompt to download a "hotkeys.mp4". What?
- freetinker 5y ago
  It does say it’s for “professional” thinkers. I’m a non-professional thinker. (Sorry, can’t help the snark.)
bsedlm 5y ago
no tool can organize your thoughts for you. all these tools only allow you to store/record them. the tools do not provide the organization.
jorgeudajer 5y ago
I agree with some of the other comments here. I think that features can be best shown with videos or GIFs, as it took me a while to see what exactly "horizontal note-taking" was.
shadeslayer_ 5y ago
Oh great, another note taking app I can buy for $9 a month.
allenu 5y ago
It’s hard to tell exactly how the horizontal note taking and linking work, but it does remind me a bit of Gingko [1] which works as a nested outline style note taker. I think having nested lists is a “natural” way to organize your thoughts. [1] https://gingkowriter.com/ https://gingkowriter.com/
chrismeller 5y ago
“For professional thinkers” came off as kind of douchey to me. So because my job expects me to actually do things, not just think about them, it’s probably overkill for me? Meh.
- _hcuq 5y ago
  [flagged]
kushan2020 5y ago
The note taking is such a crowded space that I wonder how did we get here? Is this a signal that there still is no clear winner or just that this space is easy to enter but difficult to find success ?
- lekevicius 5y ago
  Everyone’s mind is of different shape. We won’t ever have enough note-taking, to-do and email apps. And all existing ones will be bad in some way.
DeathArrow 5y ago
Why shouldn't I use Obsidian for free? Why should I subscribe to this software?
- bikingbismuth 5y ago
  I bought a Catalyst license for Obsidian a while ago because I like to toss money at neat projects (especially when they are NOT subscription based). I expected it to get to a decent state and then slowly get abandoned, but I am very happy to have been wrong about that. I'm impressed with the rate of development and community support for Obsidian. Given the incredible variety of note taking apps, I decided to just be happy with Obsidian and stop agonizing over non-essential features.
amree 5y ago
This helped me discover https://gingkowriter.com/ https://gingkowriter.com/
wellthisisgreat 5y ago
$9/mo wow lol
TickCount 5y ago
I've found the best note taking system that works for me is literally to store my notes in a full fledged programming language with built-in OOP support. So for (a super simplified) example if I want to have a daily note system, I'll just define (say) a JavaScript object called DailyNotes, and everyday I'll just append some lines to my code saying, in effect, add the key for today's date to the object DailyNotes and assigns that key an array and each time I have a thought or idea I just pushes ["thought", "…"] into it. So all of my notes comprise a huge code project. (My actual system isn't quite like that, I use a custom syntax + language server that serves my purpose better and faster (in particular, it makes it easier to write multiline notes without need of escaping and makes it easier to default to do the literate programming style of defaulting to text)) The nice thing about it is I get to piggyback on IDE features of vscode. All the "roam-like" features are available in VSCode and implemented better (think the "peak" feature, and the wiki link feature, which can easily be simulated by using function calls! (And you can project-rename a function name at a reference just like in Roam)
- zachlatta 5y ago
  Can you share any screenshots of this system with the text itself blocked out? I am super curious to learn more.
- neuronexmachina 5y ago
  I haven't used it much, but I think Dendron's schemas have some elements of this. It's also a VSCode plugin to take advantage of IDE features: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/c5e5adde-5459-409b-b34d-a0d75cbb1052/ https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/c5e5adde-5459-409b-b34d-a0d75c...
wodenokoto 5y ago
It's kinda hard to get what the "different" is in the approach. I think they are trying to combine the pages of a physical notebook with the endlessly long digital page. So just like pages in a notebook, you align your markdown documents next to eachother. Also, if you scroll down and click the squares on the features page, you get taken to little animations that shows off each feature. They're pretty good. https://www.ummm.co/features https://www.ummm.co/features
gxonatano 5y ago
As a former user of a number of proprietary, web-based notetaking app services, I come from the future to tell you never to sign up for one of these. Not even if it's free. The company will fold after a year or two, and sometimes take your notes down with it. You'll be left with the nightmare of losing all your notes—or, in the best-case scenario—at least having to convert all your notes to a new format. You need: (1) free and open-source software, which (2) uses open and future-proof file formats. I use org-mode and org-roam on Emacs, but there are plenty of other solutions for those outside the Emacs world. Others in this thread recommend Foam for VSCode, and Obsidian for a standalone solution.

112 points by trungdq88 5y ago

I've been using my CatWiki[1] for making notes since 2016 and find it quite easy to use. It stores notes as Markdown files on a local hard disk. [1]: https://github.com/cabalamat/catwiki https://github.com/cabalamat/catwiki

noname120 5y ago
Obsidian[1] uses a similar approach. [1] https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/
kushan2020 5y ago
I’m working on Bangle[1] which is similar that saves notes locally in Markdown but provides a nice notion like UI. [1] https://bangle.io https://bangle.io
- nnwright 5y ago
  thank you for posting this.... it looks like exactly what I've been wanting. Looking forward to where the product goes!
  - kushan2020 5y ago
    Thanks for the kind words, my goal is to make note taking portable and delightful.
- cabalamat 5y ago
  Bangle looks like an interesting project. I tried using it but couldn't get it to work. It relies on keystrokes like Ctrl-P and Ctrl-Shift-P, which I dislike for 2 reasons: (1) it forces people to remember commands when they shouldn't have to. GUIs have used menus, buttons etc for this for ages. (2) Perhaps importantly, it doesn't work for my setup (Firefox on Linux), where Ctrl-Shift-P opens another Firefox window for privater browsing. Also I note that File System storage only works with the Chrome browser. This is probably a good thing because I do not want random web pages being able to look at my filesystem!
  - kushan2020 5y ago
    Those are great points, I will be working on the product to improve upon those. > Also I note that File System storage only works with the Chrome browser. This is probably a good thing because I do not want random web pages being able to look at my filesystem! Just like how a random web page cannot access your webcam, similarly a random web page cannot access your file system without your permission.

holonomically 5y ago

I didn't see if it was possible to self-host. Is that a planned feature?

benmann 5y ago
Hey, I'm the creator of Ummm. Not really on the roadmap anytime soon, but it's also still early for the product! Right now it's more about getting a grasp of what people want out of it, squashing some bugs and improving the UX further — before moving development further into a specific direction.
- lovelyviking 5y ago
  >Right now it's more about getting a grasp of what people want out of it Looks like at least some people for sure want a way to store things locally and in current setup the only option they have is to ' want to be out of it'.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  Have you consulted with any researchers on this project? I would suggest it would be a good idea to ask your target audience what kind of pain points you can solve for them, and I think your product would benefit greatly. As someone who would be your stated target audience, I can’t see anything here that would benefit me. As an example of my greatest pain point when conducting research would be organizing all of my research sources. The mind maps and cross references are a good start in this direction, but there are tools out there that do a much better job and are free. You’ll need to explain why this is better than all of those.

prox 5y ago

Just heads up that the videos don’t work on iOS Safari here.

dkural 5y ago
What video? I am on chrome and don' see a video.
- prox 5y ago
  It’s on the feature page.

usrme 5y ago

Congratulations on getting something out there! As a nitpick: it's really difficult to understand what the product is trying to achieve, and my friend had the same complaint. Might I suggest a more concrete way to explain how this approach differs exactly, with ample examples if at all possible. An interactive demo page would also be very helpful.

mrleinad 5y ago
Spent 1 minute trying to understand how it works, so, I agree.

lekevicius 5y ago

For a local filesystem alternative similar to this, Obsidian + Sliding Panes (Andy Matuschak Mode) plugin is similar.

rcarmo 5y ago
That seems like an excellent alternative. Thank you.
EleanorKonik 5y ago
Oh that's what this is doing. Thank you for the explanation; I couldn't quite figure out what they meant by "take notes horizontally" until I saw this comment. It just looked like dual panes at first. I guess it's hard to convey with static screenshots

Brajeshwar 5y ago

Best Wishes to your Work. The name reminds me of Phil Libin's mmhmm - https://www.mmhmm.app https://www.mmhmm.app

rcarmo 5y ago

Like the UX (although I'm curious as to how the mind maps may look), won't use a service that bills me for having Markdown export. Or most things with a subscription. (I got badly burnt by Evernote and tend to prefer having most of my notes on an actual usable filesystem, with the exception of OneNote since it's been around for so long - and I work at MS, so have learned to live with it).

luismartinezs 5y ago

I do something similar with https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ and there I have everything in my own repo in github Not sure how a 9 euro monthly subscription is justified in comparison particularly since I can use vscode as a power user

dkural 5y ago
This is awesome! Thank you for sharing. On the page you linked, the github link doesn't take me to the repo, just to a generic github page; you might see an increase in users if it did!
noname120 5y ago
Can you embed websites[1] inside Foam? [1] https://www.ummm.co/#:~:text=embed%20websites%20and%20links%20right%20in%20your%20train%20of%20thought%20and%20reference%20in%20your%20notes%20right%20next%20to%20them.%20avoid%20context-switching%20and%20keep%20your%20focus%20when%20doing%20research%2C%20instead%20of%20opening%20a%20new%20tab%20every%20time%20you%20want%20to%20look%20something%20up%20on%20a%20website https://www.ummm.co/#:~:text=embed%20websites%20and%20links%...
- karpovv-boris 5y ago
  Idea behind Foam is that they use GitHub and vscode features - answering on your question, I didn't find any extension with this feature. But more interesting question, do you really need this "copy/paste" feature in your research (or just simple notes)?
  - noname120 5y ago
    Opening external links in an external browser is too distracting and cumbersome for me.

akho 5y ago

Screenshots looks nice. Maybe you should focus more on the differentiating aspects? The note-taking application market is extremely crowded. (which is indicative that the issues are human, rather than technical — people feel the need to record stuff, but are not really able to stick with it and get good results; I have a stack of paper notebooks where I tried different systems as a physical manifestation; the software cemetery is less visible, but no less extensive. I may have found my final system, but who knows how long it will stick…) Are you targeting per-project, short-to-medium term notes? If you have “second brain” ambitions, and choose to provide a hosted solution with no standardized format for export, you have to have some sort of long-term commitment. I do not see how that commitment can be taken in a way that is credible.

tillcarlos 5y ago
I learned a lot from this post. it’s humble, gives compliments and addresses key points the product falls short of. I upvoted the first harsher comment but then saw how you. framed it. I’ll try to give criticism more like yours in the future. thanks.

bachmeier 5y ago

What I learned from visiting the site: It's an app that lets you take notes horizontally - apparently there's a claim that this is an advantage. I'm supposed to buy a subscription for more than Evernote costs and hand over all of my data, which may or may not be encrypted, to a random person on the internet. Sorry if this is harsh, but the website didn't make its case to me, and this is an extremely crowded space.

mgax 5y ago
+1
asdf_snar 5y ago
Seconding these thoughts, but also I don't think they're harsh. After a minute on the site I still have no idea what makes this different from writing Markdown in Notepad. If I really need the "horizontal time" aspect I can come up with a dozen ways of automating that with my text editor of choice + a bash script. And, ugh, with Firefox running on Ubuntu, clicking the "Changelog" fires a prompt to download a "hotkeys.mp4". What?
freetinker 5y ago
It does say it’s for “professional” thinkers. I’m a non-professional thinker. (Sorry, can’t help the snark.)

bsedlm 5y ago

no tool can organize your thoughts for you. all these tools only allow you to store/record them. the tools do not provide the organization.

jorgeudajer 5y ago

I agree with some of the other comments here. I think that features can be best shown with videos or GIFs, as it took me a while to see what exactly "horizontal note-taking" was.

shadeslayer_ 5y ago

Oh great, another note taking app I can buy for $9 a month.

allenu 5y ago

It’s hard to tell exactly how the horizontal note taking and linking work, but it does remind me a bit of Gingko [1] which works as a nested outline style note taker. I think having nested lists is a “natural” way to organize your thoughts. [1] https://gingkowriter.com/ https://gingkowriter.com/

chrismeller 5y ago

“For professional thinkers” came off as kind of douchey to me. So because my job expects me to actually do things, not just think about them, it’s probably overkill for me? Meh.

_hcuq 5y ago
[flagged]

kushan2020 5y ago

The note taking is such a crowded space that I wonder how did we get here? Is this a signal that there still is no clear winner or just that this space is easy to enter but difficult to find success ?

lekevicius 5y ago
Everyone’s mind is of different shape. We won’t ever have enough note-taking, to-do and email apps. And all existing ones will be bad in some way.

DeathArrow 5y ago

Why shouldn't I use Obsidian for free? Why should I subscribe to this software?

bikingbismuth 5y ago
I bought a Catalyst license for Obsidian a while ago because I like to toss money at neat projects (especially when they are NOT subscription based). I expected it to get to a decent state and then slowly get abandoned, but I am very happy to have been wrong about that. I'm impressed with the rate of development and community support for Obsidian. Given the incredible variety of note taking apps, I decided to just be happy with Obsidian and stop agonizing over non-essential features.

amree 5y ago

This helped me discover https://gingkowriter.com/ https://gingkowriter.com/

wellthisisgreat 5y ago

$9/mo wow lol

TickCount 5y ago

I've found the best note taking system that works for me is literally to store my notes in a full fledged programming language with built-in OOP support. So for (a super simplified) example if I want to have a daily note system, I'll just define (say) a JavaScript object called DailyNotes, and everyday I'll just append some lines to my code saying, in effect, add the key for today's date to the object DailyNotes and assigns that key an array and each time I have a thought or idea I just pushes ["thought", "…"] into it. So all of my notes comprise a huge code project. (My actual system isn't quite like that, I use a custom syntax + language server that serves my purpose better and faster (in particular, it makes it easier to write multiline notes without need of escaping and makes it easier to default to do the literate programming style of defaulting to text)) The nice thing about it is I get to piggyback on IDE features of vscode. All the "roam-like" features are available in VSCode and implemented better (think the "peak" feature, and the wiki link feature, which can easily be simulated by using function calls! (And you can project-rename a function name at a reference just like in Roam)

zachlatta 5y ago
Can you share any screenshots of this system with the text itself blocked out? I am super curious to learn more.
neuronexmachina 5y ago
I haven't used it much, but I think Dendron's schemas have some elements of this. It's also a VSCode plugin to take advantage of IDE features: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/c5e5adde-5459-409b-b34d-a0d75cbb1052/ https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/c5e5adde-5459-409b-b34d-a0d75c...

wodenokoto 5y ago

It's kinda hard to get what the "different" is in the approach. I think they are trying to combine the pages of a physical notebook with the endlessly long digital page. So just like pages in a notebook, you align your markdown documents next to eachother. Also, if you scroll down and click the squares on the features page, you get taken to little animations that shows off each feature. They're pretty good. https://www.ummm.co/features https://www.ummm.co/features

gxonatano 5y ago

As a former user of a number of proprietary, web-based notetaking app services, I come from the future to tell you never to sign up for one of these. Not even if it's free. The company will fold after a year or two, and sometimes take your notes down with it. You'll be left with the nightmare of losing all your notes—or, in the best-case scenario—at least having to convert all your notes to a new format. You need: (1) free and open-source software, which (2) uses open and future-proof file formats. I use org-mode and org-roam on Emacs, but there are plenty of other solutions for those outside the Emacs world. Others in this thread recommend Foam for VSCode, and Obsidian for a standalone solution.