
Transpose: A structured alternative to Evernote - porker
https://transpose.com/
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zaargy
Website isn't great. It wants me to signup just so I can see what it does. It
talks about templates but I can't see a link to what a template is and what it
looks like anywhere. I don't want to watch a video to get a product tour. It
could honestly be the best thing ever but I'd never know!

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lcall
I am not familiar with this product, but based on the brief blurb, I'm working
on a Free version: [http://www.onemodel.org](http://www.onemodel.org). The web
site is really outdated but the code works as the best personal organizer I've
ever used. Very efficient, unfortunately I haven't posted the .jar to download
yet so you have to compile it, and configure postgres, but I hope to get the
web site updated with a free .jar, in a couple of weeks.

At the moment it's keyboard-driven, desktop-only. But everything you need to
know is on the screen, and it is very efficient for note-taking,
brainstorming, making lists of lists, everything interlinkable, and lets you
store either lists of blurbs or as mapped to reality: ie, entities that have
attributes like an object model built on the fly by virtue of just using the
system. There's a mailing list ready for use.

Again, I meant to have the web site better updated with the current status,
but the INSTALLING in github is accurate, the tools works well and has good
data integrity and high efficiency. I use it for everything now. And I'll try
to post a jar within a couple of weeks. I'm just really slow right now.

I think the possibilities with the concepts are very big, and it's a working
foundation.

~~~
delluminatus
That looks like a fun project. I like the idea of looking toward an improbable
future goal for the sake of better understanding simple problems facing us
today (like how to represent and compute semantics).

I think the really difficult problems for that project will probably be
importing data into the model (i.e. semantic analysis of content) and scaling
the model to a great enough extent for the real benefits of using a semantic
structure to appear. The problem of defining a networked object model is
arguably already solved, but I don't think there are any solutions that could
scale to the extreme number of concepts and connections that such a system
would require.

I also have to say, that site really made me want to use Smalltalk as a PIM
for some reason.

~~~
lcall
Thanks. I'm hoping we can see concrete progress, or learn well, by being able
to efficiently put our own notes in a system that lets those notes naturally
become an object model, then share it with others and collaborate in the data.
So at least that much data is computable, or structured enough to grow well
together. I'm hoping the network effect can get us going enough to take us to
the next level or learn how to move forward from there.

I.e., if several people start putting our notes in a structured, computable
model, and we collaborate, then we have all _our_ notes in a possibly single
place. That could become a community of practice. That's a step toward having
all useful info on that topic, in a single, extremely useful model. Etc.

(At a minimum, I get to use it. :) If there are other effective Free systems
for this, I've missed them but am interested.

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27182818284
Echoing the other posts, I have no idea what this product does. Did someone
throw this together overnight after the threads about Evernote were on the
front page?

Sadly I know the price of the Prime membership before I know what the free
tier or Prime membership even get me productwise.

If this isn't vaporware, I hope the founders see this comment and the others
in this thread and re-work the copy.

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fsiefken
Is there an open source server implementation or equivalent for people to host
it on their own server, similar to the Gitlab CE vs EE SaaS solutions?

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k2enemy
It looks kind of like a user friendly database app a la File Maker.
Interesting that it is marketed as a note taking app.

On a mac though, I still haven't found anything better for notes than
VoodooPad. Too bad it seems to be languishing with few updates.

~~~
porker
> It looks kind of like a user friendly database app a la File Maker

Cross-commenting as the other's right at the bottom of the page, but yes, a
user friendly database with easy custom schemas is something I feel there's a
great need for.

Perhaps I work differently, but 50+% of my notes in Evernote would be better
as structured data, so I can make better use of their contents, both in my
life and cross-referenced in other notes. E.g. I record foods I like, places
I've eaten (my private TripAdvisor) and structuring that data would be really
useful for plotting on a map, making lists and the rest.

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mrmondo
The website is too broken for me to load properly but this doesn't look
anything like a replacement for Evernote but more an online ticket / GTD
application?

~~~
favadi
Same here, I read for a while and still don't know what it is.

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HolyHaddock
The "See what it does" slideshow's totally broken for me - what does it
actually do?

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charlieegan3
"Windows & Mac - Transpose works on all kinds of desktops."

Are there native clients? The screenshots appear to show a web interface.

Evernote's clients are a selling point for me personally.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
All kinds being two? Or is there a Linux version as well?

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JustSomeNobody
This looks more like a report generator than a note taking app. Yeah, I get
they mentioned "structured", but I can't see this as an Evernote replacement.

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ngrilly
It looks more like an alternative to Trello than Evernote.

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transpose
Hi everyone, I'm Hussein, the CEO of Transpose. Thanks for the feedback,
positive and negative.

The idea behind Transpose is the lack of options between something as simple
and ubiquitous as note taking apps like Evernote and fully fledged database
solutions like FileMaker and Access.

What we found out from our research is the a lot of use cases and critical
applications should have been built on a database if it was feasible,
affordable, cloud based and anyone can build without the need of hiring a
software house or even dedicating an enterprise IT department to build
something from scratch. People have been tracking orders, leads, assets and
even critical project planning on various apps including even Evernote which
is not designed for those use cases.

With Transpose we are also tackling the growing epidemic of having a dozen of
different apps all stitched together somehow duplicating the data across and
demanding the team to learn and use each one of them just to visualize
information differently; like Trello on boards, spreadsheets in table form,
notes just for ease and cross platform functionality. We shooting high aiming
to disrupt and fix that as well. If the data is structured and we extract all
this extra metadata on top of that automatically so why not utilize your data
and get as much value out of it?

Here is a quick intro video on Transpose
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfKeTljl5ro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfKeTljl5ro)

We have all sort of amazing technology working seamlessly behind the scene.
Text Analytics, Entity Extraction, Voice Transcription, OCR on images,
Filtering by fields, sorting syncing online and offline with a native iOS app
and a new Android app coming out next week. You can see your data in multiple
views, plot it on Calendar, see it as an editable spreadsheet, or even on an
interactive Kanban board. There are more than 20 patents in many areas
technological and UI its all BY DESIGN blends in to be invisible.

I do agree though, its really hard to put what we are doing and describe it in
one sentence. I love Peter Theil's talk at the Launch where he articulated
EXACTLY the situation we are in now.. what category shout that FIT in? what is
that like? who direct competition do we have? You can see that segment
[https://youtu.be/ryFB6mvy4uE?t=34m49s](https://youtu.be/ryFB6mvy4uE?t=34m49s)
and Claire from our team just wrote a piece on Huffington Post about our
"Peter Thiel Problem".

We grew from 0 to 100,000 users viraly with ZERO dollars in Marketing. Awesome
Makers create templates to solve every single problem you can think of and
then they share that template with their followers to clone a copy and they
also invite collaborators (typically co-workers) to work on a shared template
data set feeding new data and manipulating it.

Would love your feedback and thanks again everyone! You can also feel free to
reach me directly by email (hussein@transpose.com) would love to hear from
y'all!

P.S. We are re-working the homepage completely to be 100% visual to SHOW what
we offer instead of just trying to ramble and try to explain it in words...

~~~
btdollar
If you had actually tried to explain what a "template" was in words it would
have helped a great deal. My assumption was that they were fixed text
structures and you could fill in the blanks, but comments seem to indicate
they are actually more like database schemas.

~~~
transpose
Thanks for the suggestion. We are actually working now on explaining the
concept "visually" more than relying on words. They are indeed database
schemas but obviously we are avoiding to use technical terms given the
audience is non-technical from the business and corporate worlds.

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ngrilly
No way to archive a "note"?

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philtar
You're out of your mind if you think anyone will be paying $15 a month for a
note taking application.

~~~
crystaln
I'd happily pay $15 a month for a note taking application as powerful as
Evernote, that was also more usable.

Unfortunately, this does not address the core usability issues with Evernote.

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revolly
And what do you see as core usability issues in Evernote?

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ishansharma
Here are two issues that I generally face with Evernote:

\- Sync: many times, it takes too long to sync. I want something on my phone,
so I will save it on Mac and then get ready to leave but it will take 10-15
minutes to sync to phone. (Even after forcing sync on both devices multiples
times)

\- Editor: The editor has been stagnant for too long and has lots of issues.
Undo does not work reliably if you paste something from other apps, there's no
Markdown support.

Also, iOS app is too bloated and generally slow. I have resorted to using
Drafts as my note taking app and then saving to EN.

~~~
ghshephard
Your experience regarding sync is odd - the model I use Evernote in, is I take
notes on my laptop, and then, just before slapping it closed, I CMD+S, wait
for the sync Icon to stop spinning (usually about 10 seconds) - and then slap
my laptop closed. Then, while I'm walking, or in a cab, or otherwise not
connected to my laptop, I bring up my iPhone, Click on the sync button there -
and after a few seconds, I'm up to date. I've been using Evernote pretty
consistently like this for the last year+, and I'm struggling to remember if
I've ever had a sync issue.

You mention that you have taken notes on the IOS app - I've never done that,
so that might be one difference between us.

I do have a paid membership though, and I recently downgraded from Premium to
the new $2.70/month "Plus" category. It will be interesting to see if there is
any impact to sync speed.

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ishansharma
Mostly my experience is similar to you but I have seen the delay in sync a few
times recently. I was a Premium customer for a year or so but their lack of a
proper Firefox extension (back in 2013-14) made me switch to free. I upgraded
to plus again recently.

This reminds me of how bad their Firefox extension was for a year or so. They
introduced new version of clipper (6) for Chrome, Opera and Safari but Firefox
stayed at 5.9 for almost a year. They had a long forum thread about this but
took too much time! As a paying customer, I hated that and still feel that for
a company with main focus on note taking and clipping, they should have been
faster.

