
Show HN: Kobble – Notes app that saves directly to GitHub - kobble
https://kobble.io
======
abrussak
I think I'm able to view all other gists.

If I open the Gist on [https://gist.github.com/](https://gist.github.com/)
then go to the original gist at 'kobble-git/channel-groups.json' I can
navigate to all the forks and see data for other users.

~~~
ytjohn
Oh wow. Look at that.

[https://gist.github.com/kobble-
git/87ea625d421177f9e9307c6ce...](https://gist.github.com/kobble-
git/87ea625d421177f9e9307c6cee259e63/forks)

And each fork is a link to a secret gist.

~~~
stevejackson
This isn't directly obvious, so I'll clarify. Anyone who has used this app -
all of your notes are publicly available by following the link above.

Everyone - revoke access to the app and manually delete all the gists it
created in your account.

To view anyone's notes, all you have to do is visit
[https://gist.github.com/kobble-
git/87ea625d421177f9e9307c6ce...](https://gist.github.com/kobble-
git/87ea625d421177f9e9307c6cee259e63/forks), click anyone's "View fork", then
follow the trail of gist links in the JSON.

~~~
kobble
Please read the comments above about the various uses of Kobble. Gists are for
public use and sharing. Private repos are coming very soon for other use
cases.

------
matt4077
> Kobble is the only app available where you own all of your data.

What? I find that highly unlikely. In what way do I not "own" the texts I
write in–for example–Apple's Notes.app?

And what is even meant by "own"? Even for something like Facebook, I'm pretty
sure that I still own the copyright for texts I write in their app.

~~~
kobble
By 'own', we mean that no data is stored on our servers. The goal is privacy
and to protect your data.

~~~
grovegames
We don't own Githubs servers any more than we own Apples. This statement is a
falsehood.

------
lol768
Interesting tool, I like that it works with GitHub and the repo support will
be cool to see.

The design is neat (I generally like dark themes) although the fading
animations got a bit annoying after a few minutes using it. Some of the
dialogs could do with supporting common shortcuts (e.g. enter to create a new
track, escape to close the dialogs). Sometimes I managed to click outside of
the presentation view without realising, and then left/right arrow keys
stopped working. Sometimes I wasn't sure where to find certain functions (e.g.
I looked for "Edit" on a presentation item on the context menu, but then
realised I had to click it and then click the pencil icon). I couldn't get the
Share functionality to work, and wasn't sure why it was in its own context
menu with no other items.

I'm not sure I understand the purpose of the tracks/channels distinction. I
can understand creating a project to store presentations (items) in, but why
is there another level in Kobble?

~~~
kobble
Public and private repos are available now.

------
insomniacity
What does this have over Standard Notes?

[https://standardnotes.org/](https://standardnotes.org/)

~~~
BlackjackCF
Oh my god, thank you. This is something I've been looking for as a replacement
to Quiver.

I love Quiver, but it no longer cuts it since I've migrated to Linux.

~~~
littlehood
I've using Standard Notes for almost three months already. It's neat, but
"standard editor" is kind of weak (like not supporting tab to indent), I have
to try using the extended editor. Everything syncs nicely BUT on two
occassions a tag got duplicated with some of the notes. I have no idea how -
but at that time I had it open on two desktops. Not sure how nicely the
encryption is done. You can create your own server for notes too!

------
Namrog84
30 second impression:

The landing page has side arrows? Is this meant to be a Powerpoint slides deck
type app?

Why isn't it just a 1 page vertical scroll to showcase the 'notes app'? Or do
all the pages in notes have to be a click page arrow?

edit: I looked around a little more (never logged in) but all I ever saw was
the slides. I am still not sure if that's the only mode, or is there another
preview showing other modes/styles of notes? As boring as it may be, I'd love
to see some generic notes examples: grocery list, todo, programmer's notes,
school notes, lorem ipsums, or anything more representative of a real world
notes and less of just listed features.

~~~
kobble
You create content using Markdown with Kobble. The content can be rendered as
simple markdown or as slide decks. Our landing page was created with Kobble as
a markdown slide deck.

If you log in (with GitHub), you'll see the rest of the UI.

~~~
Namrog84
It does look neat and definitely beautiful. Thanks I'll login and check it out
some more.

------
rekshaw
Devs, pro tip: if you call a file "minified", please minify it. Your
main.min.js is a whopping 4.7mb of un-minified JS.

~~~
kobble
True, but it's less 1M compressed. Including the other static files, it's
still less than 1M for the entire app.

~~~
throwanem
Compression isn't minification.

------
danellis
Curious as to what makes this "beautiful".

~~~
devopsproject
same. they also forgot to add "made with <3 in san francisco" at the bottom

~~~
kobble
Made in New Zealand!

~~~
devopsproject
Still no ascii heart or emoji. This will never succeed :P

------
passivepinetree
> Kobble is the only app available where you own all of your data.

If it's hosted on Github's servers, you don't really "own" it. Or at least you
don't have sole proprietorship of your data.

------
ronilan
Shameless plug time again...

* My summer project (2016):

[http://public.docs.xstatic.site](http://public.docs.xstatic.site)

* The pitch goes something like this:

<xstatic>| Docs is a simple, fast and easy to use, web based document editor.

It generates static (but editable) HTML files that can than be easily shared
and printed. Like Google Docs inside an AWS S3 bucket.

* More info in this document:

[http://docs.xstatic.site/markdown_db86ac26-f232-4400-a544-d5...](http://docs.xstatic.site/markdown_db86ac26-f232-4400-a544-d59e9dc06b0d.html)

~~~
always_good
I think a Show HN is the one time it's bad form to shamelessly plug your own
product.

~~~
ronilan
But your username says otherwise ;)

More seriously - Why so?

I think that:

1\. It's on topic.

2\. It's a project not a product. I ain't sellin anything.

3\. There is no thunder to steal. Usually, more comments, more votes, more
rain for the show.

4\. Shameless has to be shameless.

5\. It adds to the discussion. See, it just did...

~~~
duiker101
It's like going to the inauguration of some new shop giving out flyers for
your own competing shop. It's just bad taste.

~~~
ronilan
I think it is like coming to a jam session and blowing your trumpet with a
whimsical tune.

There is no competition.

P.S - I've reread this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)
just to make sure I wasn't in the wrong.

------
jaquers
Having read your explanation of channels/tracks - I get it, you have to
serialize your storage into something and it's neat that it's representable
through url. I was a little confused at first. I agree with others that the
organization seems a little bit too forceful or opinionated for the primary
use case of a "notes app" which is jotting down a quick note.

Maybe you could have an "unsorted" channel by default, and then split out the
context dropdown into little icons? Simplify the work flow to be: 1. Click
"new markdown" button, 2. Write some markdown. 3. Save.

If you defer asking the user to name a file up front, you can auto generate a
filename based on the contents of the document (like parse 1st line for # My
Title -> my-title.md). The only sacrifice you pay is making them click "save"
the first time; but IMO that is a lot less friction than having to name
documents before I even start writing. Plus even if your parsing fails -
you're no worse off than where you started by asking the user for a filename.

~~~
kobble
These are all great suggestions. You'll see shortcuts drop next week. Maybe
even better than you expect :).

------
coalaber
This feels excessively complicated to me. what's a track? what's a channel?
why do I need filenames for everything? why does it take 3 minutes for a new
user to write a single line of 'note' ?

a beautiful notes app (to me) would be one where you start with writing a note

~~~
kobble
Everything in Kobble can be shared. Channels are there to organize tracks -
your tracks and tracks from other users.

Kobble can be used for much more than just note taking. It's meant to share
meaningful content with other users. A track is like a project, and channels
make it easy to share them.

~~~
Etheryte
Why did you choose obscure names instead of something everyone could
understand right away? To me, it seems "channels" are just
"groups"/"categories"/"folders" and "tracks" are just "notes"?

The fact that you need to explain it is a good indicator that it's
unnecessarily complex.

~~~
kobble
The model is very similar to other popular apps, like YouTube or Spotify.
Instead of organizing songs or videos into channels, you organize tracks.

~~~
pjungwir
People don't seem to like your names, and perhaps the names do need more work,
but I wanted to commend you for _trying_. Whenever I see something named
"Group" I cringe a little, because it is so abstract and meaning-free. It is
barely better than names like "Thing" and "Entity". So I appreciate your
attempt to be more concrete and creative!

~~~
throwaway55523
This is such an important point. I'm living with a generic "group" feature in
a SaaS app and it's a nightmare. It's been used by numerous clients for
totally different things. These are the weeds that will choke your garden.

~~~
cyberferret
...or they will be the very thing that frees up your users to use them in
creative ways without feeling hemmed in to a particular mindset.

We have the concept of 'tags' in our app, which are used by our users to
delineate anything from company departments, social groups, locations, age
bands etc. - basically anything they see fit. It saves us creating a mess of
drop downs to try and cater for all edge cases, and they feel the freedom to
think of them however they like.

------
masukomi
All this is is a presentation with a boatload of text and absolutely NO
indication of what the app looks like or how you go about using it.

Even before i saw the note about the security issues i wouldn't click on try
because why should i invest my time in trying it. I have no clue what it does
beyond saving markdown files to github. I've got plenty of markdown apps that
I like quite a bit, and uploading my notes to github is not something i've
been going "damn i wish i had an app that would do that" because anyone who
knows about github already knows how to commit their files and push them up...

doing it in gists is even worse (ignoring security aspects) because at least
with my manually managed notes their organized in folders, browsable,
greppable, etc.

~~~
kobble
I'm one of the devs for Kobble. Since Kobble is such a versatile tool, it can
be quite difficult to tune a marketing message clearly. We are working on it!

One of Kobble's primary uses is as an open content sharing platform. GitHub
gists were chosen for this purpose intentionally, because the discovery
mechanisms are built into GitHub. On top of that, we have built a flexible
data model (similar to YouTube) for organizing and sharing the content.

Private repos (which are coming shortly) address the other use case where you
want to keep data private. We have clarified this in the intros.

------
peterburkimsher
I like the idea of saving directly to Github. I'm using Github API for
dictionary changes in my Chinese text translator that I'll release soon.

The user interface is, indeed, beautiful. But that's not enough to make me use
it.

Notes on my iPhone can't be stored in a hierarchy of subfolders. In order to
do that, I made my own notes app in PHP, but it's pretty awful. I plan to port
it to JS+Github, but I have other priorities right now.

Is it possible to only commit changes to a file using git, instead of re-
uploading the whole file? I wish there was an easy way to append to a file
without a download-append-upload process. Please teach me if you know how to
do this in git!

------
philters
Anyone looking for a nice interface to manage your Gists should take a look at
[http://www.gistboxapp.com](http://www.gistboxapp.com)

~~~
fudged71
If I'm not much of a coder, is this app okay for regular documentation/notes?

~~~
philters
The main use case for Gists and thus Gistbox is storing code snippets. However
you can save any kind of text you want. Gistbox lets you organize your Gists
under labels so they're easy to find back. Moreover it offers you the option
to save private Gists. Using a tool like nativefier you can even turn it into
a desktop app.

------
thanatropism
So I have (and bought!) not one but two plaintext editors for iOS that save
directly to Dropbox or iCloud: iWrite Pro and 1Write.

I have both apps because iWrite is my reach-for text box while 1Write opens to
a Dropbox folder that has a semi-organized idea box (a "personal wiki" of
sorts, but informally so).

Why do I want this instead? Versioning? I've thought of moving my ersatz
"personal wiki" to Github for that, but I don't wish to make it visible to the
world.

------
philliphaydon
I registered localnotes.io or something a couple of years ago to make a notes
app (just a side list of note files and then a markdown editor) that would
persist to local storage and could be synced to private gists and images would
store as base64 encoded files under that gist.

I got a proof of concept working but was too lazy to integrate with GitHub and
canned it.

Working on something more fun now and learning vue.js.

~~~
hk__2
Note that you can store images and other binary files in gists; no need to
base64-encode them. Gist are git repos too and can be cloned and commit/pushed
to.

~~~
philliphaydon
Didn't know that. Awesome.

------
baby
Unfortunately I cannot access this because it can read my private gist. I
understand why it needs the access though :(

~~~
kobble
GitHub Integrations are coming!

------
b88d80170
I think adding encryption at the client side would make more practical, like
what laverna does.
[https://github.com/Laverna/laverna](https://github.com/Laverna/laverna)

------
aorth
Small, non-technical pet peeve: they repeatedly spell GitHub as Github.

~~~
kobble
Duly noted and fixed. Most of the data in Kobble is built with Kobble, so
changes are trivial.

------
tylerbrazier
One problem with using gists is that each modification adds another entry in
the response's history array; over time the responses get larger and larger.

------
anticodon
I use Zim Wiki. Also, it has version control plugin, so you can store your
notes on the GitHub or BitBucket or GitLab if you want. I prefer plain old
backups.

------
bdickason
I'm into the idea (I currently use Ia writer saving to a folder in Dropbox).
Is there a desktop client or only the web version?

------
lfender6445
i would love something like this for free bitbucket private repos, is there
any planned support? realtime updates would also be great

------
grogenaut
Why do you need access to my email address?

------
orschiro
Can I use Kobble offline?

~~~
kobble
Not the web version. Other versions are in the works. Stay tuned.

~~~
orschiro
Thanks!

What versions are you working on?

What do I generally need to use this?

A web browser? Git? Github? A Markdown Linux editor?

I would love some further explanation!

------
Eun
Would be nice, if there is a mobile friendly version.

~~~
kobble
Mobile is coming soon.

------
webwanderings
How do I use this? Is there a bookmarklet?

------
rileytg
mobile?

