
OpenNote – an open web-based alternative to Microsoft OneNote and EverNote - caberus
https://github.com/FoxUSA/OpenNote
======
FreezerburnV
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't have a few features
that I find incredibly invaluable as an Evernote user:

* 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.

* Indexing of documents and text in images. I'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.

* 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'll be able to search for the text in the recipe.

* 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't find via search engine but is comfortably nestled in Evernote.

Don'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's a hard
field you entered into, with a couple of great competitors. But keep up the
hard work, and keep improving.

~~~
jordigh
> it has a ways to go before it will actually be a competitor. And it doesn't
> have a few features that I find incredibly invaluable as an Evernote user:

[list of features snipped out]

As an Octave developer, I frequently hear exactly the same things about Octave
vs Matlab, and if I listen too closely, I find it disheartening. Why work on
something that will forever suck and not be a competitor, and can't implement
the full list of features because we don't have the giant budget of our non-
free competitor?

But then I remember that people are typically more flexible than they appear
to be when they write these lists, and you'll discover that they may do
without some of the features that they list, at least in some circumstances.
And that there exist many other people with different lists of sine qua nons
who will use the free as in freedom alternative you're working on because they
have different needs.

So, to the OpenNote developers and to anyone else implementing a FAIF
replacement I say this: don't let these giant lists of features and
suggestions about how you'll never be competitive grind you down. There are
many people out there who will appreciate your work, sometimes even the people
who compiled these lists. Look at the lists, see what you can implement, and
don't be disheartened by the parts that seem impossible to implement. Who
knows, maybe some day someone will come along and help you implement the parts
that seem so hopeless to you.

Keep your chin up, free software devs!

~~~
pwnna
Octave is awesome. MATLAB can go die in a fire (purely for the reason of being
non-free, otherwise it's great too).

If there's one thing that Octave is absolutely better than MATLAB is the
alternative syntax for things like strings and ~=.

------
jroseattle
In the Credits section:

    
    
       Microsoft - For making terrible products
       Evernote - For making better products in a slightly evil way
    

MSFT does make some lousy products, but OneNote seems decent enough. And
Evernote is a commercial product, but I don't necessarily see it being evil.

But those matters were obviously pain points for others.

~~~
schuke
It's not decent enough, it's truly awesome! In fact it's the only reason I am
reluctant to switch to a Mac.

------
adamcooke
I hate to be negative about this but this certainly doesn't seem comparable to
either OneNote or EverNote. Both of these products seem far superior to this.

~~~
pweissbrod
+1 The credits on the site speak volumes about the author: "Microsoft - For
making terrible products Evernote - For making better products in a slightly
evil way"

That is quite the snarky attitude towards predecessors. This project reads
like someone wrote a vastly simplified version of onenote claiming its
superiority.

That's like taking CK Editor, putting it on a web page, backing it with a
database and calling it a "replacement" for MS word and google docs because
microsoft sucks and google is evil.

------
greyman
I wonder if it is possible to create an "ultimate" notetaking application.
What I found out is that whether it is "open" is not important to me, but the
GUI is. For example, organizing notes in a folder tree doesn't work for me - I
need to have them in a list, tagged and instantly searchable.

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's text-only
nature.

~~~
taude
This is the route I go, I used RespohNotes on a Windows box and nvAlt on OSX.
Global hot-key and I'm typing, either searching for an existing note, or
creating a new one.

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rjcz
Has anyone noticed that the usage restriction:

"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)"

is incompatible with its (OpenNote) license (GPLv3)?

~~~
jordigh
It would be, but GPLv3 states, in section 7, paragraph 4:

    
    
        If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a
        notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a
        term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.
    

So the author just didn't read GPLv3 and added meaningless additional
restrictions.

~~~
rjcz
That is what I mean, basically :^)

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foz
I would love to see an EverNote/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.

Maybe markdown + git + nice UI clients?

~~~
hassy
I have some awful elisp code that glues together org mode, iimage.el and Deft
to do something along these lines. All notes are stored as plain text with
images in a sensible directory structure. I don't use git, everything just
sits in a Dropbox folder. Emacs works well for me as the UI, but there's no
reason a web-based UI couldn't be written. I could look into tidying it up
over the Christmas break and publishing it if there's interest.

~~~
minimalist
I would also be interested! A sane structure for embedding images within org-
mode notes is one thing that I haven't bothered to make a solution for.
(Instead, I defected to Zim.)

------
Spearchucker
Being web-based is a blocker for me. No offline with multi-device store-
forward sync means any other merits become semantic.

What I'd pay money for is OneNote with credible encryption.

~~~
replax
Also I'd pay money for a very good OneNote (clone) for Linux! OneNote just has
no competition...

------
ozten
Why compare this to OneNote? It doesn't seem to fit the same use cases as
OneNote, which is optimized for pen based input.

~~~
rrreese
I use OneNote extensively, on multiple devices, on a daily basis. I have never
used pen input. I know many OneNote users. None use pen input.

------
jamesu
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'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 _quickly_ create notes.

Nitpicking aside, it'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.

------
smilekzs
Since someone already mentioned why it isn't an alternative to OneNote...

What's obviously missing (compared to Evernote):

1\. Web Clipper

2\. Android support

~~~
xyos
it has Android support

~~~
smilekzs
By Android support I mean taking advantage of native resources -- camera,
local storage (therefore autosaving), smooth UI, etc.

------
BUGHUNTER
Somebody has to say it, as a sacrifice for the HN crowd I take the role of the
DB:

It is unbelievable how many people that read "HN" \- obviously considering
themselves beeing "Hackers" \- are not able to understand the basic
requirements of a real hacker (TM) note taking app:

\- 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.

\- it has to have an open and good documented data format - you do not want
your notes to disappear in an undocumented binary blob.

\- if there is any way to sync data with other instances / machines, the sync
server of course has to be open sourced and available for usage on your own
server.

\- of course some more functional things like versioning via git and it has to
be lightning fast.

This is for the "cool hackers" 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!

------
mrmondo
I'm a huge Evernote fan and I love the look of this, but MySQL - seriously?

~~~
afandian
I don't like MySQL either. But it's probably the perfect choice. Or perhaps
you think something webscale[1] is required?

[1]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs)

~~~
mrmondo
I'm a fan of relational databases, just not MySQL. I've been administering
MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle (not to mention a few others I'm too embarrassed
to mention) for some time now and MySQL is a right pain in the ass. I'd rather
see it use PostgreSQL. Love the video by the way!

[http://grimoire.ca/mysql/choose-something-
else](http://grimoire.ca/mysql/choose-something-else)

------
dotemacs
Good, thanks.

As somebody who uses SimpleNote I welcome competition to this area. Primarily
because I'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.

Evernote already broke the access to their app via the existing Emacs mode.

So any app eats into this market is welcome. Thanks again.

------
acjohnson55
I would love to see this support [http://tent.io](http://tent.io). 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.

------
pwnna
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't
really need it as I can only take good notes with my Wacom tablet anyway.

------
csmuk
I can't draw on it.

------
llort
The demo site is here:
[http://stardrive.us/OpenNote/](http://stardrive.us/OpenNote/)

you can use this to login/password: crap/password

------
zvrba
> web based alternative

Well, that kills it for me. I have yet to see a web app whose latency desktop
apps.

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murrayb
I couldn't see from a scan through the docs- does any-one know if it does
attachments?

~~~
arethuza
I was pleased to see that you can copy and paste images into the text editor -
so it can certainly handle image attachments.

Dragging and dropping a file into the editor doesn't seem to work - the link
is there when you save the note but the file doesn't seem to get uploaded.

------
elbeanio
In the credits he calls Evernote "slightly evil", anyone know why?

~~~
FoxUSA
Its in my gut. For some reason I dont trust them. They have weird paid vs free
rules. They control the data(You can get it out).

OpenNote is designed to be a simple alternative. You control the data. You can
see the code. Your information in your control.

EverNote is not bad. However, in my gut I dont trust them.

Plus it was time for an open source third alternative.

~~~
jordigh
By the way, note that if your app has a noncommercial restriction, it is no
longer open source. That breaks part 1 of the definition:

[http://opensource.org/osd](http://opensource.org/osd)

~~~
nandhp
Also, Creative Commons explicitly states that their licenses "should not be
used for software."

[http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Com...](http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Commons_license_for_software.3F)

------
ChrisArchitect
not as feature laden but I've been totally happy with Google Keep. On web and
device. [https://drive.google.com/keep/](https://drive.google.com/keep/)

