
Show HN: Umbrella Note – Simple app for notes and journals - arpban
http://umbrellanote.com
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Octplane
This looks nice! The homepage confused me for a while until I saw I could
scroll down and not try to click on the blue open link like a donkey.

Also, probably the only feature I use with evernote as a paying user is its
OCR and search engine.

But, true, the UI is not fantastic for that kind of tool.

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arpban
Thanks. And i should probably remove those blue 'open' buttons. It confused a
lot of people.

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hknd
I was trying to click those and checked my console for errors for roughly 1
min

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erdemozg
That's exactly what I did, too. :)

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drannex
Same here!

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qznc
I'm still looking for an app that works for notes _and_ as a journal.

Evernote and OneNote are the big note taking apps. Hierarchical, nifty
searching and tagging, easy to include all kinds of images, pdfs, etc.

Journaling (for me) focuses on easy and quick entries without distractions.
OneNote can do that via Win+N, but it seems to have no good way to show me all
the entries in chronological order, so I can do post-processing when I have
the time.

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solarkraft
I like Simplenote. However as soon as you edit the note comes to the top. The
synching is phenomenal, but it may be a bit too Simple.

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X6S1x6Okd1st
I've been using Joplin for my daily journal. I used to use evernote & tried
google docs, but so far Joplin has worked well for me, it syncs with the same
targets as this and more and most importantly has an android app.

I might circle back on this when I have some use case that joplin isn't
meeting.

[https://joplin.cozic.net/](https://joplin.cozic.net/)

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mcrider
Joplin would be great if it just had some organization of todos approaching
GTD (inbox, views based on due date). I really want an app that combines my
notes and todos together but anything that does that (which i've tried) treats
todos as notes with a checkbox next to it.

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garmaine
Why? GTD has a clear separation between reference materials and tasks. Why try
to combine them?

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cloverich
Because its very natural to mix them into your daily notes, and reasonable to
have them auto-collected and managed by a note tracking system. I have a notes
app that does this, but haven't had time to clean it up and publish it.

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garmaine
Why do you mean by “mix”? It is not very natural to use the same system for
both as you end up with non actionable data (notes) clouding your todo
lists...

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cloverich
To take an example from this weeks notes:

    
    
      - [ ] fix `params.key_` copy pasted code
      - [ ] add ui to search mls listings  
      - [ ] review pr  
    
      Not sure how the extra param ended up on the search API but its there. Now have to pull it out and see if any systems are relying on its existence.  
    

Etc. I have one system to write everything out, and put todo's wherever is
relevant to what i'm writing about. I then have the system parse the notes,
pull out all the todo's and collect them in a single place. If your needs are
less "estimate, time track" and more "here's things I need to do, and whether
i've done them." it works great.

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bachmeier
Is it possible for the user to add their own data? In other words, can I use
my preferred front end (my desktop text editor) to create notes, but display
them using this app? Browsers are the only sensible choice for displaying
content with links, but they are a horrible way to create content.

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teknopaul
I wasnt able to write any text? Windows version presented a plain panel tried
to put my cursor there kind of wrote brief a title. clicked that edit pen and
this duplicated the page. But no delete button. I got q few copues of the
titled page but I wasnt able to add text to the pages?

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ibdf
Is this website for real? Links that don't work, text spread out from end to
end, low res images, and poor product information. I'm not sure what I'm
looking at or what it does just that it takes "beautiful" notes. Beauty is
subjective. I just see a layout that has been used over and over again. It
looks like a note album?

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arpban
I'm sorry you had a bad experience. Right now, website is getting a lot of
traffic. I will change those blue 'open' buttons. A lot of people confused
from those.

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jannes
Looks very nice!

The only small criticism would be that most people are not professional
photographs, so they wouldn't even come close to having cover photos for every
one of their notes.

Also, a Mac version would be nice.

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gabrielcsapo
Easy fix might be rasterizing the first few lines to an image or doing
sentiment analysis and having pictures default for the type of emotion being
exemplified.

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solarkraft
That doesn't really fix that that's ... pretty dumb. I don't need an image
telling me nothing polluting the list.

I can see the appeal from the graphic designer's stand point, but it's totally
superfluous information I didn't create and that just distracts.

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mywacaday
FYI, Downloaded the portable version but Symantec Endpoint Protection advised
not opening it. Have PM'd you a screenshot on twitter

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pnutjam
It looks like it's designed to keep adding to another note, or you have to
manually delete all the text to create a new page.

Am I missing a button?

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mcfunk
Self-hosted could be nice, though I don't see any other advantages (aesthetic
or otherwise) that this offers over Bear ([http://www.bear-
writer.com/](http://www.bear-writer.com/)) - though I assume Bear only appeals
to markdown users. Also would be good to have an opened note screenshot on the
Umbrella site...

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_bxg1
No mobile support? Hopefully that's coming. I'd download it in a heartbeat.

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gormz
Any plan for a mac version?

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uhkevin
Awesome, self hosted!

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swrobel
Electron. Just gonna leave it at that.

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zpr
You know Slack, VSCode, and Spotify are all built on Electron? Better leave it
at that if anything.

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ben_jones
Sure you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but if the book has poor multi-
threading, bloated mark-up, and requires everyone you share it with to
download another copy of chromium...

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nulagrithom
I really get sick of people shitting on Electron just because it's the hip
thing to do or whatever.

Umbrella Note is a whopping 78mb versus Evernote at 129mb. I'm not sure
"another copy of Chromium" is a big deal. I'm not sure what you're talking
about in regards to the bloated markup. Are you referring to HTML and CSS? I'm
also not really of the opinion that a simple note taking app _needs_ to be
multithreaded. This would increase complexity in _any_ language.

My first thought when looking at this project wasn't "oh no Electron!" My
first thought was "I could actually contribute to this project," because I,
like many many others, use and understand what is likely the most prevalent
programming language in the world.

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alsetmusic
> I really get sick of people shitting on Electron just because it's the hip
> thing to do or whatever.

This sounds very much like a comment I saw where a person said that they
thought most atheists were only on board a bandwagon because it was hip. How
terribly offensive.

Some people genuinely dislike certain projects and have no interest in being
hip when they say so.

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nulagrithom
Electron has its place as a framework. Blindly disliking _every single
project_ that uses it is silly, and I really don't mind offending anyone who
does so.

