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OpenNote – an open web-based alternative to Microsoft OneNote and EverNote

91 pointsby caberusover 11 years ago

21 comments

FreezerburnVover 11 years ago
While I certainly appreciate the attempt to create more competition in this market, as well as adding an open-source competitor, it has a ways to go before it will actually be a competitor. And it doesn&#x27;t have a few features that I find incredibly invaluable as an Evernote user:<p>* Native UI and sync to every device under the sun. I have a Windows gaming desktop, a Macbook Air, iPad, and Windows Phone. Being able to access everything in Evernote across all devices is highly valuable to me.<p>* Indexing of documents and text in images. I&#x27;m the kind of person who still keeps a paper journal and pen with him at almost all times, which is finally starting to be replaced because of Evernote. They have an app for writing on the iPad which syncs with their service, and they later index all of my handwriting so I can search it. That is one of the most valuable things to me, and any competitor would have to do as well or better for me to want to switch.<p>* Hooks in with different types of apps. Such as Evernote Food. I love to cook and collect recipes, and I would need to be able to do something similar, easily, in any competitor. This also hooks in with the image text indexing, where I can take photos of recipes from my iPad and eventually I&#x27;ll be able to search for the text in the recipe.<p>* Web clipper. I cannot even begin to express how valuable this is. There have been multiple times where I was able to find something I clipped from a couple years ago that I desperately needed. Or a recipe that I clipped, which I now can&#x27;t find via search engine but is comfortably nestled in Evernote.<p>Don&#x27;t take this as a downer comment. I love it when there is more competition, because it makes everyone step their game up. Meaning I get better quality of service, as well as everyone else who uses any of those services. It&#x27;s a hard field you entered into, with a couple of great competitors. But keep up the hard work, and keep improving.
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jroseattleover 11 years ago
In the Credits section:<p><pre><code> Microsoft - For making terrible products Evernote - For making better products in a slightly evil way </code></pre> MSFT does make some lousy products, but OneNote seems decent enough. And Evernote is a commercial product, but I don&#x27;t necessarily see it being evil.<p>But those matters were obviously pain points for others.
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adamcookeover 11 years ago
I hate to be negative about this but this certainly doesn&#x27;t seem comparable to either OneNote or EverNote. Both of these products seem far superior to this.
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greymanover 11 years ago
I wonder if it is possible to create an &quot;ultimate&quot; notetaking application. What I found out is that whether it is &quot;open&quot; is not important to me, but the GUI is. For example, organizing notes in a folder tree doesn&#x27;t work for me - I need to have them in a list, tagged and instantly searchable.<p>So far, I settled with ResophNotes (and SimpleNote backend), since I found out that the speed of the New note dialog launch is of a great importance to me, and ResophNotes is instaneous, and generally very quick due to it&#x27;s text-only nature.
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rjczover 11 years ago
Has anyone noticed that the usage restriction:<p>&quot;This software(OpenNote) cannot be sold as a product, as a component, as a service, or in any other way unless a distribution license is purchased from the author(J. Liscom)&quot;<p>is incompatible with its (OpenNote) license (GPLv3)?
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fozover 11 years ago
I would love to see an EverNote&#x2F;OneNote replacement that was based on the filesystem and git. In addition to a great web UI, any client could then access and edit notes via git. Sync could be provided with Github or your own repo.<p>Maybe markdown + git + nice UI clients?
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Spearchuckerover 11 years ago
Being web-based is a blocker for me. No offline with multi-device store-forward sync means any other merits become semantic.<p>What I&#x27;d pay money for is OneNote with credible encryption.
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oztenover 11 years ago
Why compare this to OneNote? It doesn&#x27;t seem to fit the same use cases as OneNote, which is optimized for pen based input.
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jamesuover 11 years ago
Feels more like an Evernote clone to me, though it needs a lot of work. For instance when you load a note you need to click edit to enter editing mode which coming from Evernote feels very clunky. I&#x27;m also not sure why there needs to be a long fade-in for everything... one of the most important things for me in a note taking application is the ability to <i>quickly</i> create notes.<p>Nitpicking aside, it&#x27;s great to see more people trying to compete with Evernote. There seems to be a serious lack of note taking applications where I can simply take rich text, HTML, or images and place them in a note.
smilekzsover 11 years ago
Since someone already mentioned why it isn&#x27;t an alternative to OneNote...<p>What&#x27;s obviously missing (compared to Evernote):<p>1. Web Clipper<p>2. Android support
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BUGHUNTERover 11 years ago
Somebody has to say it, as a sacrifice for the HN crowd I take the role of the DB:<p>It is unbelievable how many people that read &quot;HN&quot; - obviously considering themselves beeing &quot;Hackers&quot; - are not able to understand the basic requirements of a real hacker (TM) note taking app:<p>- it has to be open source - you do not want to hand over your personal notes to some unknown company and their decision making process, maybe they will just disappear or not support their product anymore.<p>- it has to have an open and good documented data format - you do not want your notes to disappear in an undocumented binary blob.<p>- if there is any way to sync data with other instances &#x2F; machines, the sync server of course has to be open sourced and available for usage on your own server.<p>- of course some more functional things like versioning via git and it has to be lightning fast.<p>This is for the &quot;cool hackers&quot; that are STILL using services like dropbox, evernote or onenote. Learn it: these services are for uneducated people who did not understand anything. Please do not hurt the eyes of HN readers with advertising these anti-privacy services here, thanks!
mrmondoover 11 years ago
I&#x27;m a huge Evernote fan and I love the look of this, but MySQL - seriously?
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dotemacsover 11 years ago
Good, thanks.<p>As somebody who uses SimpleNote I welcome competition to this area. Primarily because I&#x27;ve pleaded with SimpleNote crew to let me have documentation to their latest API as I maintain the simplenote.el, Emacs frontend for it. Only to be consistently ignored.<p>Evernote already broke the access to their app via the existing Emacs mode.<p>So any app eats into this market is welcome. Thanks again.
acjohnson55over 11 years ago
I would love to see this support <a href="http://tent.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tent.io</a>. I still need to look more deeply into the architecture of Tent, but from my cursory examination, it seems like a really ideal solution to the lack of cloud services that let users own their own data.
pwnnaover 11 years ago
Ever since I bought a Wacom tablet to take notes.. all of these apps do not beat xournal. Granted I cannot use it to take notes on my phone, I don&#x27;t really need it as I can only take good notes with my Wacom tablet anyway.
csmukover 11 years ago
I can&#x27;t draw on it.
llortover 11 years ago
The demo site is here: <a href="http://stardrive.us/OpenNote/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stardrive.us&#x2F;OpenNote&#x2F;</a><p>you can use this to login&#x2F;password: crap&#x2F;password
zvrbaover 11 years ago
&gt; web based alternative<p>Well, that kills it for me. I have yet to see a web app whose latency desktop apps.
murraybover 11 years ago
I couldn&#x27;t see from a scan through the docs- does any-one know if it does attachments?
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elbeanioover 11 years ago
In the credits he calls Evernote &quot;slightly evil&quot;, anyone know why?
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ChrisArchitectover 11 years ago
not as feature laden but I&#x27;ve been totally happy with Google Keep. On web and device. <a href="https://drive.google.com/keep/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drive.google.com&#x2F;keep&#x2F;</a>