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Grug Notes, A tool for text: simple, fast, self-organizing notes
- culi 4y ago> we take design inspiration from websites like Hacker News, Craigslist, and McMaster Carr I bet they'd love when2meet.[0] It's a gem for organizing, completely free and zero sign-up required. It's really inspired me to push myself to see how far I could take "no signup required" in any app I work on [0] https://www.when2meet.com/ https://www.when2meet.com/ > The first 99 paying users are "Founding Grugs." For any referral you get to sign up for a paid account, we'll pay you 25% of the persons recurring revenue. Oh it's a pyramid scheme
- graypegg 4y agoEhh, not really a pyramid schemes if there’s a reason to use the app beyond just signing up more people. Feels like a shallow growth-hack.
- keizo 4y agothat's the idea. and desire to have no longterm marketing costs after that.
- Zagill 4y agoIt's a very poorly conceived pyramid scheme if so, since it's limited to 99 people and the revenue share only goes one referral deep
- culi 4y agoI didn't paste the rest of it: Paying users 100-999 are "Early Grugs." Same deal, at 20% Paying users 1000-9999 will be "Grug 'Ohana." Same deal, at 15%
- throwaway290 4y ago> the revenue share only goes one referral deep "25% of the persons recurring revenue" must be all the referrals of that referral and all the way down. I don't like it because it introduces difficult to understand incentives that may be different than "make good product" and difficult to understand. Maybe the most obvious wrong incentive is "make product that is easy to get your friends to start and keep using". A product like that would benefit from network effects and social contagion and no interoperation with other products, and build features correspondingly. (cf Facebook)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- keizo 4y agojust an idea since I haven't enabled payments. open to feedback.
- graypegg 4y ago> We are a product from a canoe-building company. No joke. We are born out of Kamanu Composites, a local manufacturer in Hawai'i … GrugNotes is a rewrite/spin-out of a DIY ERP software started in 2008. Cool that this was made as a ERP solution for their manufacturing business FIRST, and now that they’ve refined the idea somewhat, they are making it a white-labeled app. Following in some big footsteps! (Rails, AWS, React etc)
- keizo 4y agoHa! fairly certain I don't belong in any list with those other things, but thanks! also, what I said was a small stretch. I had one text box for weekly notes on my django app i made to collect my canoe building records and customer data. I did more or less start over from scratch with this. But yes, 1000% of my ideas are from making project websites 2000-2014, and from building canoes for 15 years.
- lumb63 4y agoI love the spirit of this. Caveman-level simplicity is awesome! I think I am personally too Grug of an audience for Grug Notes, though; my current note taking scheme is vim on text files in a notes folder.
- clnq 4y agowrite on hand not bad. enough usually. note always “on-hand” when need. hehe
- randomluck040 4y agoJokes aside, I’ve tried what feels like almost everything and outside of taking notes with Code this is what I’m doing. Writing it down in a notebook. Is it flawed? Yes. The time I need to learn the medium is zero however.
- lumb63 4y agoI also find (and have heard from others) that the act of writing things down helps you to remember them better (which somewhat obsoletes the note). It also, in my experience, forces your brain to think about them more because it has to externalize them through the slow medium of your hand. It results in surprising new thoughts being generated. Some people I know follow the system of, if they want to remember it, they write it down. If they don’t want to have to, they type it up.
- throwaway_9572 4y agoCaveman simplicity is the best! The “gardening” involved in many PKM apps is what has turned me away from them. I’ve started just throwing my stuff into a Markdown file on GitHub (so I can easily sync across devices). I’ve taken the same ethos to my website on GH pages (steph-inners.github.io) and use it to share knowledge that people commonly ask me about. It’s super easy to update, and Ctrl+F takes care of finding things later.
- BirAdam 4y agoI do the same, but I have a few bash scripts to handle search, tags, date sorting, git commit/push/pull for sync, and a few other things. Works well for me, but I imagine that others would hate it.
- cfr2023 4y agoInteresting. This has a lot of features that appeal to me, automatically pulling certain data types with lists of backlinks seems great. The not local, not end-to-end encrypted parts are enough of a turn off that my wandering in the notes wilderness will continue. Good luck with your project though, I will be watching for further developments.
- keizo 4y agorad thanks. I wasn't planning any ai features, or datatypes -- but in toying with open ai it came about. I still need to add more inline methods to cast datatypes beyond people, companies, and locations. I'm working on attributes getting pulled out of notes too, so structured data is automatically created -- but not fully fleshed out yet. absolutely understand the need for local and encryption.
- ditsuke 4y agoConcerns aside, automatic structured data is an exciting idea (and one I've been wanting in my workflow). Looking forward to seeing how it turns out!
- vmoore 4y ago[flagged]
- Bjartr 4y ago> How about you don't 'keep track' of what's on my mind? What else is the act of taking notes for?
- KingLancelot 4y ago[dead]
- krackers 4y agoGrug thinking why login for write text website? Model schema and database in notes too big brain. Grug use notepad and search with grep.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- keizo 4y agoso it pushes the text down the screen each day. grep also too advanced for me. need cmd-f. :)
- bobnamob 4y agoI feel like this is trying to play off of https://grugbrain.dev/ https://grugbrain.dev/ Not sure if the riff lands though (same author?) Edit: “with HTMX (big fans and of grugbraindev -- no relation)” apparently unrelated.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- keizo 4y agokind of a play, but yep I'm just an htmx fan boy. I did web dev growing up -- but haven't exactly kept up past 10 years. htmx has filled that gap for me. Also, the grug thing was a meme before htmx. I thought it was dumb, but honestly fits in every way with what I want in a note app.
- test6554 4y agoOne look at that logo, and I'm on the floor laughing.
- thunderbong 4y agoIt's a hat-tip to https://grugbrain.dev/ https://grugbrain.dev/
- keizo 4y agoYou’ll remember it haha
- keizo 4y agomaker here. well hot dam, not sure I'm ready for this. But happy to answer any questions if it stays online. Literally I'm the only daily active user right now. back story -- I was a happy roam research user, but i found it too slow for my iphone se. Been at home more with a one year old, so gotten back in to programming during naps.
- ditsuke 4y agoAlways excited to have more options in the PKM space. I have a couple questions — have you tried Obsidian.md? And what does grugnotes plan to use OpenAI for (besides as a development aid)
- keizo 4y agobriefly, but not extensively. I was a roam user for almost 3 years. I actually prefer a simple website for mobile and not having an app. I really dislike tags, and the look of brackets. in fact note taking in general lol. Preference is to type minimal notes, minimal configuration, minimal 'gardening'. The complexity and plugins people get into for note taking seems over the top for me. Gpt-3 for automatic entity extraction/tagging. Embeddings and Pinecone for similarity searches.
- lawgimenez 4y agoI want to access my notes both macOS and Linux. Is this possible in the future? I haven’t watched the video yet (I’m traveling right now).
- keizo 4y agoIt’s mostly a sever side rendered website, so no problems. As long as you’re good with that.
- fortylove 4y agoYou must have a good napper if you have time to get into a programming mindset during their naps! Congrats!
- kelsolaar 4y agoSuper cool! Have you considered making it a Logseq plugin?
- keizo 4y agoLogseq is awesome. But I really wanted a text box on a website.
- emsign 4y agoThat 4chan meme picture doesn't make it look very trustworthy to be honest. Especially because the site asks for my data right after that. I'm sure I'm not going to give someone who likes 4chan memes my data.
- bitwize 4y agoThe idea for the grugjak image comes from the origin of the "grug" meme itself -- https://grugbrain.dev https://grugbrain.dev
- keizo 4y agoYeah, that’s my one hesitation. But proceeding until I come up with something better or have time to polish. Trying to be brutally honest with wall of text on what it is and isn’t. My normal business has always tried to present as having it together. With this, putting up every update I make each night is kinda freeing.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- burnished 4y agoData in this case being: an email address and a password. Your concern feels overblown given that.
- rchaud 4y agoemail address, pw, and presumably a whole bunch of unencrypted personal notes.
- burnished 4y agoIts.. a.. note taking app? Im not trying to convince you to use it, especially if security of your notes is a concern, but the data being asked of you is pretty much the bare minimum required to provide the described service. Its just weird to take exception to the rare service that authentically obeys a least access model
- symlinkk 4y ago[flagged]
- bitwize 4y ago> So tired of these projects I could make in a few hours "But you didn't, did you?" --Damien Hirst
- symlinkk 4y ago[flagged]
- jakelazaroff 4y agoWe don’t need to compare anyone’s project to poop. Less of this, please
- becquerel 4y agoIt's a lot harder to make a project in a few hours than in a few months
- burnished 4y agoOr, because it was neat and people liked it. You're giving off a weird vibe here
- speed_spread 4y agoA few hours to build, years to develop the need for the right features.
- pps 4y agoI shared it for completely different reasons than you listed, but you do not seem like someone who would be worth talking to, so yeah, "whatever".
- keizo 4y agoThanks for sharing!!!
- fortylove 4y agoI'm not a big notetaker, so truthfully I probably won't try your app. But out of curiosity I watched your youtube video demo, and I have to say, I really like how the website looks. Simple, pleasant colors (for me anyways, but not sure how that works with accessibility), and easy to find things on the screen. Nice! Oh, and did Barack Obama really call you?
- keizo 4y agoLol. No, he vacations in my town and bought a house like 100 yards from a studio I used to rent. I'm confident he'll buy some canoes from me at some point. I'm not a big note taker at all either. I had a crazy covid, needed to manage a big project and 90 people over a few months. And found roam research invaluable in that process. More recently I got tired of the spinner on mobile so made this. Day to day, I use it to manage myself -- jotting down a few todo items daily. And as a personal crm, ie notes from phone calls and meetings. Basically a homepage to tell myself what to do. appreciate kind words on the design (a process of tweaking tailwind classes til I'm not grumpy about it). at some point will get to more customization as others have mentioned things being hard to read.
- threesmegiste 4y agoHtmx and named entity recognition based pkm. Are you me:) Perfect start. Hope to see similar aproach from others.
- keizo 4y agoLove htmx — literally gave me modern day skills. Still haven’t figured out npm, webpack, and how to use any js that’s not standalone
- return_to_monke 4y agoyou guys have an API?
- keizo 4y agoI’ll have to learn to make one. But lots of other things first.
- tiotempestade 4y agoSeems a nice tool. I’m gonna daily drive it for a week. Note to OP: the sign up process completely brakes the iOS password save thingy :)
- keizo 4y agoEpic, thanks. Tweet at me or email keizo at grugnotes.com any questions, feedback or thoughts. There are lots of problems, many I’m aware of. But you already pointed out a good one I didn’t know! Will investigate.
- swah 4y agoI feel like this would integrate pretty well with Tana (http://app.tana.inc/ http://app.tana.inc/) - I mean they will probably have this in a few weeks/months...
- riz_ 4y agoPlease add better color contrast between the back- and foreground. This is unusable for anyone with bad eyesight or visual impairments.
- VoodooJuJu 4y agoYet another casualty of poorly contrasting text.
- keizo 4y agoNoted. I try to keep the actual notes a little higher contrast. I don’t want any interface hence the low contrast on those things. But obviously what I like not for everyone and I’ll will add more options!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rco8786 4y agoI haven't tried this out, but I can basically guarantee that Apple Notes is better.
- 411111111111111 4y agoCan you stop flamebaiting?
- keizo 4y agoTry it. I would think the same — but also Apple notes often blanks out when i open it on my iPhone se. I need to quit it and reopen fairly often.
- dang 4y ago"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jamesu 4y agoI'd love something with more workflow centred around pruning and reorganizing notes. Often I'm just dumping lots of info into notes which end up not being so useful in the long-run since the signal-noise ratio is too low.
- keizo 4y agoNoted. I’d like to add some functionality through right click for removing or altering when ai gets things wrong. And drag and drop sorting of blocks.
- 58x14 4y agoI just really appreciate the candid GTD attitude you guys have. Having just spent 2 weeks migrating from Notion to Obsidian, investing dozens of hours obsessing over various features that save me <5 minutes/day, your “marketing” style clicks with me. While I’m not a prospective user (my workflows now require local storage and I’m too pot committed to return to the harmonious simplicity) I’d be keen to play with Grug, break some stuff, and maybe send you referrals when you’re ready. Any plans to integrate something like Whisper for dictation/transcription?
- keizo 4y agoThanks! Don’t have time for any other way! I don’t plan a whole lot, but whisper looks fun and all other open ai stuff has been smooth to integrate. So sure, that’s a plan! In the mean time, I’ve used apple dictation when driving a couple times.
- deburo 4y agoCool! Looks really nice. Why is the smart indentation active in view mode but not edit mode? :/
- dkarl 4y agoIf the Evernote sale has the dire consequences everyone expects it to, then the note-taking space is wide open. After ten years with Evernote, I migrated to Notion a few months ago and am heading towards another migration unless Notion starts to feel better to me soon. There are a lot of note-taking apps, but no gold standard yet. Someday someone will produce a polished app with quick search, sync, and navigation, and all the popular features implemented in a way that imposes zero cognitive overhead if you don't use them. Most of the apps seem to be competing to figure out a unique killer feature or a unique experience to distinguish themselves from the pack, but I think the biggest winner will be the one that is just quietly better, a little bit smoother and quicker, that looks like it has no features at all except the ones you need. That's an incredibly high bar for design and implementation, but somebody is going to hit it eventually. Who knows, maybe it will be Grug Notes!
- alex3305 4y agoI have setup Joplin a few weeks ago and I really enjoy using it. AFAIK it is not as powerful as something like Notion or Obsidian, but it just works. And is already miles better than using loose txt files, like I was before.
- throwaway4aday 4y agoJoplin is great. Easy to use, simple, markdown powered and the export to web is not bad.
- dkarl 4y agoI'll have to give Joplin another try. Last time I tried it (probably more than a year ago) the sync interval was fixed, and the fastest option was five minutes, which didn't work for the use case of making a note on my laptop, tossing my laptop in my bag, walking out the door, and having the note available on my phone.
- alex3305 4y agoThe shortest sync interval is still 5 minutes. But I have developed the habit of CTRL+S'ing after each important change. Which is coincidentally the sync shortcut key within Joplin. So for me that isn't really an issue. But to be fair, I was looking for a 'real-time' webbased app, like Notion. But I wanted it to be self-hosted, use Markdown for formatting, (a little) polished and easy to setup and maintain. And while Joplin isn't perfect, or even fits all of my criteria, it was a close second. Even if it has it's drawbacks.
- justsomeuser 4y agoI like the way you use a combination of <textarea> for editing and <pre> for DOM elements. I actually have come to the same solution for a transcription web app. I have found that <textarea> manipulation from JS is not really possible without `Document.execCommand` which is deprecated. Some edits will clear the undo history. Do you have any notes you can share?
- keizo 4y agoYeah definitely seeing how far I can push textarea! Not sure it’s smart and the one issue I haven’t solved is the block indents on editing. But it’s ok. Still have the occasional or semi frequent rendering error when tags interfere. Hoping to stay away from content editable and any complicated editors. I use js to measure the width of spaces to set up pre so the two layers line up.
- cline6 4y agoThe non-local and not end to end encrypted nature of this are my only turn offs. I suspect that's the case for a lot of folks. You seem like the kind of person that wouldn't go looking at everyone's notes for fun and profit but that's not enough of a guarantee. Are you planning to add encryption at some point? You'd get at least 1 more user if you do! ;)
- keizo 4y agoI'd like to encrypt, but don't currently know the path to implementation and how it would or could work with ai features. I realize it's one of those key features that's a deal breaker for many, so depending on where this all goes I'll adjust as a priority. I still put sensitive banking/health etc in apple notes lol. But I'm glad I at least seem honest! I am removing any admin views of note blocks so I can't even accidentally view anything, but every web person still knows it's possible with db access. Totally understand the need for guarantee. Thanks for checking it out. Unrelated, just did a search and gmail just added end to end encryption last month!