[HN Gopher] Show HN: Supernotes - Embeddable Markdown note-cards
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Show HN: Supernotes - Embeddable Markdown note-cards
Author : tobeagram
Score : 50 points
Date : 2021-01-15 12:54 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (supernotes.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (supernotes.app)
| moneywoes wrote:
| Anki is free, besides the advertising, why would I consider this
| fastball wrote:
| Anki is great and I actually use it myself for language
| learning and such.
|
| Supernotes is a notecard system rather than a flashcard system
| (though we actually plan to allow you to have "flashcard
| notecards" on Supernotes, along with spaced repetition, at some
| point in the future).
|
| But for now Supernotes is meant as more of a note-taking app,
| so if you're in a lecture or a meeting taking notes or jotting
| down a recipe or a grocery list or anything else, that's what
| SN is great for. Active sharing is also important in the
| design, so you can have a _shared_ grocery list or notes or
| anything else.
|
| And with the new embedding, obviously the goal is that you can
| create content on Supernotes and put it in your blog or
| wherever else, and if you ever modify the card on SN you don't
| need to edit your blog post because the embed is pulling your
| content directly from our servers so it propagates everywhere
| you've shared / embedded it automagically!
| randomchars wrote:
| As much as I like Anki, it's as usable and nice-looking as it
| is expensive. So shortly, it isn't either.
|
| It's only natural that most people gravitate towards easier to
| use and nicer looking software.
| leshokunin wrote:
| There's a lot of Synology NAS users who use DS Note (the Synology
| solution), which is functionally fine, but the UX is poor. If I
| could use Supernotes as just a client, but use my own hosting,
| it'd be excellent.
|
| Is there a way I could use Supernote with my own data? Eg if I
| have markdown files on my ftp / webdav or other, could I load
| them in Supernotes? Could I export the .md to ftp or other?
|
| PS: what did you use to create your community site? I like the
| solution. Is it Discuss?
| fastball wrote:
| At the moment the backend architecture of SN is definitely not
| suitable for that unfortunately, due to necessary trade-offs we
| made to enable low-friction sharing between users.
|
| One possible way to do this would be to use our API to create
| some sort of intermediary service that allows this, but that is
| not something on our roadmap at the moment.
|
| Yep, the forum is Discuss. We were originally using Spectrum
| but honestly it was kinda terrible haha. We also really like
| how with Discuss it was (relatively) easy to setup SSO so our
| users login with their SN account and everything just works.
| Would definitely recommend!
| meagher wrote:
| Is HN a good acquisition channel for you folks?
|
| I say this because Supernotes has been posted five times in the
| last nine months.
| [deleted]
| fastball wrote:
| It's actually not the best channel, but we're long-time HN
| readers ourselves and know that a lot of people around here are
| interested in PKM! Development is moving fairly rapidly, so
| whenever we release a new feature we think HNers might
| appreciate we make a new post.
|
| Since the last time SN was posted on HN, we've added:
|
| - public sharing pages
|
| - embedding
|
| - pinning
|
| - today view
|
| - visibility (show / hide cards)
|
| - and more!
|
| Impetus for this post was the embedding though because we're
| really excited about the possibilities for that feature. Have a
| lot of great new features in the works as well, so you might
| see more posts in the future...
| meagher wrote:
| Cool. Looks like Supernotes has made a lot of progress. I
| recently started using Craft (https://craft.do).
|
| Does the concept of "cards" resonate with people? To me, it
| feels too constrained, but I haven't tried out Supernotes
| yet.
| saadalem wrote:
| Cards help me personally in in Mind Mapping and is the kind
| of thing that can also be done in a group. It involves
| getting something to write upon (ideally poster board paper
| and a mix of different colored magic markers) and thinking
| non-linearly while filling that paper up with ideas.
| fastball wrote:
| Craft is cool too! A lot like Notion, which is actually the
| tool we use internally for a lightweight CRM and such
| (though as we've progressed with SN we find ourselves using
| it less and less).
|
| I definitely think people are more _accustomed_ to
| documents vs. cards, but we 've many users say they enjoy
| the card format more once they acclimate. The real power in
| the cards though is less that they look like cards and more
| just encouraging people to be a little bit more modular /
| atomic in their thinking (which humans seem to do anyway).
| Other great tools like Roam/Obsidian do this by encouraging
| your atomic thoughts to be represented as bullet points and
| that can work great for some people too, but one of our
| goals is to have a fairly portable format that you can use
| anywhere (hence the push for embedding) and cards works
| very well for that.
|
| On Supernotes you can also turn on "seamless mode" which
| makes delineation between cards disappear entirely so it
| just looks like you're reading a document, and we want to
| add more flows like that in the future so that the line
| between cards and docs blurs even more when you want/need
| it to.
| hliyan wrote:
| I played around with the "seamless view" and found it
| very appealing. I wish my twitter timeline could look
| like that...
| fastball wrote:
| Glad to hear it!
|
| One of my (mostly unspoken) goals of Supernotes is
| actually that one day someone will write an entire book
| using our notecards. Create parent notecards that
| represent the chapters, child notecards for paragraphs
| within each chapter, drag cards around to quickly
| restructure your book, automatically generate a TOC based
| on that structure, one-click export to dump the whole
| thing as an epub... I think that would be very cool.
| searchableguy wrote:
| > t's actually not the best channel
|
| Could you tell us which channel works the best for you?
| tobeagram wrote:
| Of course! The best channels for us have definitely been
| growing organically through seo-targeted blog posts,
| productivity communities and comparison sites.
|
| Unfortunately more traffic [?] more subs.
| prepend wrote:
| I really like the considerate cookie prompt and clean design.
|
| I want a product like this that syncs to the cloud file system of
| my choice for both portability and ease to edit on my desktop.
|
| I would try this product but don't want the mental friction of
| yet another blob of my data that's in some proprietary store.
| Even if they are cool, like this seems, and will export/import.
|
| A good example of this is ynab back in the day where they just
| had a file protocol on top of dropbox. And Moneydance still does
| this.
|
| I'm paying for data storage and am steady comfortable with the
| the encryption, privacy, etc. if all this needs to do is store
| and organize markdown, then that should be done on a file base.
|
| I need every note I write to exist forever. I'm cool dragging a
| folder around my whole life. I don't want to drag around 100
| companies.
| fastball wrote:
| That's definitely fair and the "bring your own cloud" structure
| was originally how we were going to build Supernotes.
|
| However, besides being able to organize your own knowledge in a
| better way, one of the main pain points we were/are trying to
| solve with Supernotes is sharing _pieces_ of information. What
| we noticed with a lot of other systems is that you end up with
| a situation where you 're creating content, and then at some
| point want to share it with a friend/co-worker/lover. With
| systems structured as you describe, what usually happens is the
| user just copy-pastes the content into their messaging app of
| choice (or email or similar) and that's that. The problem with
| this is that the info then immediately becomes stale. If I edit
| the content at some point down the road, in order for you to
| get the updated version I would need to send it to you on
| Signal again. With Supernotes, because you're sharing the
| actual card object on the SN platform, any changes you make to
| cards are reflected in everyone else's system.
|
| In my case I think the simplest example is recipes: I have a
| sister that is a pastry chef, and we like sharing various
| recipes with each other. With the way Supernotes is structured
| (around cards + multi-parent hierarchies), she can share recipe
| cards with me that I then integrate alongside the recipe cards
| that I've made myself. If at any point she updates one of these
| cards, it's updated for me too. But unlike with a shared
| folder/file system, with a multi-parent card system I can
| easily hide her content or move it somewhere else on my system
| while on her system it continues to look exactly how _she_
| wants it to look. This was difficult enough with a centralized
| system and would 've been practically impossible with a "bring
| your own dropbox" structured system, which is why we went with
| the former in the end.
|
| But absolutely, we want users to still feel like they wholly
| own their own content (because they do[1]), which is why we
| eventually plan to add E2EE capability for your cards as well
| as continuing to build out our API[2] (want users to be able to
| easily get at their content without having to go through our
| interface) and export functionality.
|
| [1] https://supernotes.app/terms/
|
| [2] https://api.supernotes.app/docs/swagger
| prepend wrote:
| I think a simple approach to this problem, and I think it's
| an important issue, is to just assign a guid to each file and
| create a link with that guid that pulls the individual note
| from Dropbox/whatever.
|
| This can be on top of the file structure and this is sort of
| how google docs and Dropbox already function where there's a
| file structure and also a permalink.
|
| I think it's hard to balance ease of use with portability. I
| imagine that's why there are so many homegrown solutions. For
| me, keeping knowledge is really important and I value this as
| more important than being able to easily share and integrate
| information with others (something I almost never do). But if
| there's a market for recipe clubs or whatnot that might be
| really important.
|
| I think this is the difference between independent mental
| models and shared mental models. Where for a wiki, a group
| needs to agree on a shared mental model and work together.
| For note taking, I don't want to preemptively think in a
| common model so that I can easily share 1% of my thoughts.
|
| I do this currently by keeping a bunch of markdown files in
| gdrive and sending links to particular items when I want to.
| The link is never stale and changes are visible immediately,
| and I can even grant edit permissions. AND I can port that to
| any file system that ever existed or will ever exist through
| dragging and dropping. I can even keep the same files synced
| into gdrive/Dropbox. Of course when I port, all the links
| die.
| fastball wrote:
| > I think this is the difference between independent mental
| models and shared mental models. Where for a wiki, a group
| needs to agree on a shared mental model and work together.
| For note taking, I don't want to preemptively think in a
| common model so that I can easily share 1% of my thoughts.
|
| This is actually exactly what we are going for with the
| notecard + multi-parent hierarchy system - a hybrid of the
| two. You structure your own cards however you want, and if
| someone shares a card with you then you can easily
| integrate it into your own structure. So you have shared
| _content_ , but not shared necessarily _structure_ , which
| is generally a requirement of other collaboration tools
| like Google Docs or Notion. But it is also very important
| to us that even if you are not collaborating / sharing at
| all, Supernotes is still a great tool to use for PKM, it
| just really shines (we think!) when you also want to do
| granular collaboration.
| Terretta wrote:
| Yes - markdown is about portable text.
|
| This and most such tools should be a folder structure of .md
| files.
|
| You can then open that same structure in e.g. Ulysses or
| VSCode.
|
| iCloud storage is "built in" on the Apple camp and OneDrive or
| Dropbox are ubiquitous enough on the Windows and cross-platform
| camp.
| nelsonenzo wrote:
| I use Notable tied to a save folder in Keybase file storage for
| this purpose. You can set the folder to whatever you want, like
| a Dropbox or Google drive folder. The interface is similar to
| this actually, and it's free. All markdown based.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Are you people working on a bulk data export anytime soon? It's
| not a feature you use right away, but it's what allows confidence
| to sink your time in a platform.
| tobeagram wrote:
| Right now you can export all your note-cards as a single
| markdown file, or use our API [1] to cherry pick which data you
| would like. We are working on more comprehensive front-facing
| export options at the moment.
|
| [1]: https://api.supernotes.app/docs/
| [deleted]
| abeppu wrote:
| I keep seeing notes / zettelkasten / second brain projects posted
| on HN. But for the HN audience, are any of these satisfying?
|
| As a person who builds software, a decent chunk of the content I
| would like to gather in a second brain or zettelkasten system is
| about code (in multiple languages). But the systems I see popping
| up here are 95% text focused. They typically let you write code
| snippets, but to run them, or see anything about how they
| interact, you have to copy them somewhere else and create a
| suitable environment in which to run them.
|
| The best solution I've managed to set up so far is emacs org-roam
| set up alongside a set of toy projects, where note files can link
| to specific lines (it's brittle) in files in those toy projects.
| I found org-babel too cumbersome to configure, and too hard to
| deal with code snippets that depend on libraries.
|
| But I hope someone builds something like a zettlekasten + repl.it
| mashup which removes the setup burden, such that it can be fast
| and easy to take notes which include a snippet of code from a
| paper, without having to stop to create a project with a list of
| dependencies, a build script, etc.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| I hear you and feel the same way. Since most of the code I
| write is JS, I think MDX might play a role for me in bridging
| text with runnable code.
| junipertea wrote:
| I tried many of them. All of them are innovative in some ways
| and scratch certain itches well, but none of them are _perfect_
| (i.e. good for my set of use cases with no compromises) yet, so
| I am still looking and regularly trying new ones. (As long as
| it is easy to mass import data from TiddlyWiki /jsons)
| orliesaurus wrote:
| I use google Keep notes all the time because it syncs and has a
| fast UI with just the right amount of features, gonna give this a
| try see how it stacks!
| tobeagram wrote:
| We've had quite a few users migrate over from Google Keep! You
| can colour code your cards on Supernotes as well.
| joegahona wrote:
| What is the reason people migrate from Keep?
| tobeagram wrote:
| Google Keep is great for quick to-do lists and ideas.
| however once you have 100+ notes that it can get quite
| difficult to organise. This is where Supernotes has an
| advantage giving users a lot more flexibility, here's just
| a few differences:
|
| - Infinitely nestable hierarchy
|
| - Note-cards support multi-parents
|
| - Bi-directional links between note-cards
|
| - Pinned note-cards
|
| - Filter note-cards by tags, author and more
| tobeagram wrote:
| Hey Hacker News, I'm one of the (two) co-founders of Supernotes,
| a PKM where your knowledge is stored as taggable, linkable and
| nestable note-cards. A bit like a zettelkasten system for the
| digital age.
|
| We recently did a major overhaul of how sharing works on
| Supernotes [1], and added ability to share / embed your note-
| cards around the web like tweets. With no strict character limit,
| the ability to edit and full markdown + LaTeX maths support;
| Supernotes cards are a lot more flexible. Some great examples
| include reusable checklists, highlighted code snippets and
| interactive study cards; see them in action here [2]
|
| A bit of background. We came up with the idea for Supernotes
| while at university a few years ago, while being frustrated with
| a mess of folders and long-form docs that were a pain to share
| and collaborate on. We found that storing everything on note-
| cards made it a lot simpler to link thoughts, ideas and knowledge
| together. Everything, from the design to the code of Supernotes
| has been built by just the two of us.
|
| We'd love for you try out Supernotes (all our features are
| available for free), and hear what you think. Also feel free to
| ask any questions and I will be happy to answer them!
|
| [1]: https://supernotes.app/changelog [2]:
| https://supernotes.app/blog/posts/embed-your-knowledge/
| rychco wrote:
| I didn't find an answer in the docs, but can I access my note
| cards offline? If not, is offline functionality planned?
|
| Really like the product.
| tobeagram wrote:
| Really happy to hear you like Supernotes.
|
| If you lose internet connection, the platform enters a read
| only mode where you can still search for cards, but you will
| not be able to make edits / create new ones.
|
| Full offline functionality is planned once our Desktop Apps
| are out, so very soon!
| rychco wrote:
| I only had reading cards offline in mind & hadn't even
| considered editing/creating cards offline, so that's
| already more than satisfactory for my needs. Thanks!
| napolux wrote:
| What's your advantage over Bear, for example?
| tobeagram wrote:
| Bear is a really powerful markdown editor, and we are big
| fans ourselves. However, you are tied down to the apple
| ecosystem, and it still relies on files / tags with no
| hierarchical organisation.
|
| Supernotes is entirely web-based and responsive, as you can
| log on and access your notes from any device. We are working
| on desktop and mobile apps at the moment!
|
| Similar to Bear Supernotes uses tags, but our note-cards are
| also nestable. For example, you can write a note-card with a
| brief summary on a book you are reading, and then add child
| note-cards which are quotes from that book.
|
| Once you have written a few cards you can filter by tags,
| connect cards together with bi-directional links and even add
| those child cards into other parent cards - we are the only
| PKM with a true multi-parent hierarchy!
| eitland wrote:
| Looks really nice.
|
| I guess I'm staying with Joplin synced to nextcloud myself after
| burning myself once or twice and seeing others being burned again
| and again by hosted services but I think there is absolutely is
| room for your product.
| tobeagram wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| Totally get how frustrating it can be with hosted services.
| We're trying to do things a bit differently, having an API
| that's accessible from the start, being able to quickly export
| all your note-cards in markdown and involving our community [1]
| with our development. More comprehensive export / cloud sync
| options are in pipeline for even greater peace of mind.
|
| [1]: https://community.supernotes.app/
| eitland wrote:
| One tip: Be sure to not make your free tier too generous so
| you don't have to go back on it later :-)
|
| I've just trashed Dropbox, Microsoft and to some degree
| Google over that in another thread :-)
| rychco wrote:
| This is exactly the kind of thing I've been looking for. It's not
| an _absolute_ necessity, but mobile apps would basically make
| this an instant buy for me.
| junipertea wrote:
| I also really like this, I don't care for sharing per say but
| the note organization + tags is very promising. I am hesitant
| to commit to anything with a "coming soon" label, I'd rather
| pay the price when the features I want (i.e. ios app) exist
| rather than pay ahead for the promise.
| tobeagram wrote:
| Thanks, have you tried our mobile web app? It works pretty
| well, especially if you add it to your home screen. Mobile apps
| for Supernotes are on the horizon though!
| JadoJodo wrote:
| I've been using this with the Zettelkasten[0] method for a few
| months and love it. The keyboard shortcuts are really powerful
| and the UI is great.
|
| [0] - https://zettelkasten.de/
| tobeagram wrote:
| Thanks. Really happy to hear that you have been enjoying
| Supernotes with the Zettelkasten method! Looking forward to
| sharing more updates with you.
| AstroJetson wrote:
| Looks like a fancy version of a wiki. Ward would be pleased.
|
| I'm worried about the "drop a note-card" on websites I visit,
| sounds like some Google / Amazon level tracking going on, why do
| I feel I'm ( my data ) about to be monetized?
| tobeagram wrote:
| We take privacy very seriously [1], and respect that your notes
| are yours. Our business model revolves around power users
| paying for our product and we will never sell your data to
| third parties.
|
| [1]: https://supernotes.app/privacy/
| hliyan wrote:
| As an avid past user of Google Notebook, this really takes me
| back. Feels very familiar. Makes you wonder again why Google
| shuttered the project or why they replaced it with something like
| Keep.
| n1000 wrote:
| Looks inspired by https://noteplan.co/
| dilpreetsio wrote:
| Great product! I like your landing page design
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