Jot.as - private notes

Naveen, thanks for mentioning Dynalist, which now has me thinking about mind-mapping. I wonder if there are any combination notes / mind-mapping apps.

Automattic is behind Simplenote…

As for SN, I don’t know.

Here’s what I found for SN:

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/standard-notes

What is Automattic?

The company behind Wordpress. As I’ve been a heavy user for years and was worrying about long term sustainability, I sent them an email.

They answered without answering.

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Standard Notes is a small company. They have a Slack channel where you can also speak directly to the founders. They are self-funded, as far as I know.

They had a low-priced five year pricing plan which was their way of raising money for sustainability.

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Well, it IS low price if you take a 5 years plan, but I’m not sure I’ll still want to use it in 5 years. Time flies fast, especially in tech.

I’m happy with Simplenote and find SN a bit too complex ; as someone says it’s not really a notes app but more like a note OS…

Markor, Joplin and IA Writer are great, but none of them included all of the features of Simplenote.

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@matt @cjeller1592

Is there an estimation regarding the release of jot.as?

Note: as a heavy note taker, I’d gladly beta test the app.

Hi @matt
Write.as is a really cool product, but here … I don’t understand, why remade the wheel one more time ? Why not a cooperation with other great open source tools : jopplin, standard notes, Zettlr , etc …

Actually, i’m an heavy user of SN for notes because :

  • long term support (+5 years)
  • simplicity as goal
  • searching into notes at speed of light
  • heavilly encrypted from scratch + passcode protected notes + 2FA
  • open source with docs
  • made with lot of love, dev (@mobitar) on slack are really kind/human with community on slack
  • publishing platform with encrypted file attachment : listed.to

but it lacks :

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@sfss, thanks for info on Wordpress behind Simplenote. But Wordpress isn’t known for its privacy / security, as far as I’ve seen.

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Well, here’s an excerpt from their FAQ:

Are my notes encrypted in storage?

In terms of security, Simplenote works a lot like other popular online services such as Gmail and Facebook. Your personal information is protected by a strict Privacy Policy. But due to the need for searching your notes from the web, the contents must remain unencrypted while in storage so the software can find your search terms. For this reason we recommend not using Simplenote to store anything particularly sensitive.

Unlike a lot of other services, however, by default your notes in Simplenote are always encrypted when they’re in transit across a network. This is important. It’s when your personal information is most vulnerable. We believe that all modern services should provide this level of protection by default.

Thanks for the feedback @reyman!

Is there anywhere you see Write.as cooperating with these open source note-taking apps you mentioned?

We’ve really only talked before about being able to publish to Write.as from these note-taking apps, but I was curious if you had anything else in mind. We could make it easier to publish your notes to Write.as from our CLI client!

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Doesn’t Standard Notes have full-text search even though encrypted?

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Yes, I’m pretty sure it does, @nibl.

Awesome!

Hi @matt

It is great that you are working on a note-taking app. I am definitely excited, after having used write.as which is brilliant.

Below is my features whish-list:

  • wiki style links between notes
  • Knowledge-graph view to explore links between notes
  • Full markdown support
  • formatted PDF export

Link support and knowledge graph will make the entire repository of notes a lot more usable once the total number of notes stored by a user become large in number.

Visual representation makes it easier for navigation and reference, without having to manually remember the relationship between various notes.

PS: In addition, consider a +1 from me for the inputs from others on encryption and privacy. I didn’t feel the need to elaborate on that as I know that you will adopt a privacy centric design. Love your work! Thank you!

I don’t have much use for notes applications. Pretty much everything for me fits into Day One and I use multiple journals but I do have some things which could sway me I think.

  1. End to end encryption. I’ve gotten spoiled with the transparent way Day One manages this. I tried standard notes a few times. I don’t care for the mobile apps that much. I don’t like the extension method in standard notes either.
  2. Folder based navigation. I don’t care for hashtags as the only method like how Bear notes works
  3. Publish to write.as as a service. I’d like to publish to write.as from a notes app. This may be the biggest gee whiz wowzers thing for me.
  4. Focused writing like IAwriter or the others.
  5. Backlinks or wiki links or whatever to link between notes like Bear notes does things now. This is not big for me. It just seems like one of the features everyone could use. I like it though!

All this being said since I am not a big note taker, I may try the app and particularly how well it syncs and publishes to a blog but I doubt I would change my lack of desire to write notes. To publish now to write.as it’s easy to just use copy and paste so I can use a tool like IAwriter or pretext, or 1writer.

I’m probably not the target audience for a detailed note taking app. I don’t have any real use for one but I do like new shiny things :grinning:

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StandardNotes dead-simple publishing to listed.to is a great feature. I used to use HackMD which also had a publish button. But at the same time you can’t beat the collaboraion on Google Keep: the ability to create a grocery list with actual items that can be checked off and share that with someone who can see/make changes in realtime. Maybe this puts a dependency of getting draft.as out the door first :wink:

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interesting i know for one collaborative live documents, typing or viewing indicators are a surefire way to have me never use a tjing again. it is an intellectual encroachment, and while i dont value the judgement of others unless i ask for advice, it still feels stifling.

what aspect of this do you find beneficial in your workflow? does it fractalize your attention? if not ever considered see perhaps if yore more productive in a text editor and then run the same kind of workday in a realtime collab thing like google sheets.

im actually way curious. i think about how the human mind parses and processes quite often (daily really,) so this is intriguing.

salut :slight_smile:

Typing indicators in live documents? Can you show an example? I have only seen those ("…") in messaging applications. Viewing indicators are nice to know who’s there, just as a bunch of people standing at a whiteboard can all see each other, but I’m not talking about and don’t really need that.

Many scnarios require concentration and working solo is best, but for those that require interaction, theres not really a replacement for it. Having the functionality there doesn’t require you use it. If it makes you shy you simply do not enable sharing and the experience is identical.

The only example I mentioned was a grocery list, which I hope doesn’t also make you vulnerable to feeling intellectually encroached upon by someone adding their items to the list or crossing items off as you shop at different parts of the store.

There is not one workflow for something as multifacetous as writing. Multiple people taking notes during an event/call can speak freely knowing someone else will cover if they stop typing. You can produce some types of things faster by working in different parts at the same time. You can start implementing or responding to suggestions on a finished paper before the editor even gets through the piece. You could play ASCII tic-tac-toe if you wanted haha

You mean fracture? Or somehow make my attention recursive