Show HN: Supernotes – a better way to collect your thoughts

by fastball • 6 years ago

22 5 6 years ago

fastball3• 6 years ago

Hey Hacker News! My co-founder and I have been working on this idea for a few years now and are finally ready to show it to HN.

Supernotes, at its most simple, is a note-taking app. It's a place to take the things in your head and dump 'em for storage (and then sharing, if you like). But the approach we've taken to note-taking is slightly different than what you'll see with other solutions. Instead of opting for a long-form document format (and folders to put them in), we decided to go with a card format. So like documents, but shorter. We also decided to make the cards themselves nestable, rather than having a folder system. This means that as you flesh out ideas, you can just add "child" cards to a "parent" card to keep yourself organized (plus cards can have multiple parents!). Each and every card can be edited, commented on, colored, titled, icon'd, linked to, and shared.

We did it this way because we think its a better fit for how our brains actually work. Humans don't think in terms of essays – we think in terms of a large number of interconnected thoughts.

When it comes time to share your cards, all you need to do is send a 4-word share code to your friends/family/pet and they can see that card right away.

So to summarize, on Supernotes you can:

- easily make notecards which have their own tags, comments, colors, icons, etc.

- cards can have parents/children, and unlike most other platforms, a child can have multiple parents (yay graphs!)

- cards can hyperlink to other cards directly in their bodies (otherwise known as wiki-style, Zettelkasten, or the internet)

- cards can be instantly shared via 4-word "share codes"

- cards can be "published" inside other cards (i.e. published children) so that anyone who has access to the parent can see the published child

- once shared, cards have fully-featured permission-system so you can decide exactly how you want to collaborate with whom

- use dark mode because who doesn't love dark mode

Anyway, I'd love for you to try it out and let us know what you think! Always open to suggestions.

If that sounds cool, sign up here! https://my.supernotes.app/entry?signup=1&ref=hn

p.s. Due to the current global pandemic / work from home situation going on, we've also decided to make Supernotes completely free until July, so even more reason to try it out.

redhale• 6 years ago

Congrats on launching!

I'm curious why you decided to focus on native desktop apps before mobile apps. For me, a note taking system is a non-starter without a solid (Android) mobile app, as much of the value comes from quickly jotting down thoughts/ideas as they come to me, which is often when I'm not in front of a computer.

fastball3• 6 years ago

Thanks!

So this is really just a time constraint issue. The desktop apps will initially just be Electron wrappers around the web app – I'm not a huge fan of this as it results in fairly bloated desktop apps, but we've had people say they'd like desktop apps anyway, so we're gonna do that for hopefully the next release.

Mobile apps is a bit harder, as it requires actually writing a new interface, either in something cross-platform like React-Native (probably what we will end up using, as the current web app is in React) or something else. Which is why for the time being we've tried to make the web app itself as responsive as possible on mobile.

We also plan to improve the web interface on mobile significantly in the next release to make it feel more like a native app even though it won't be one (yet).

But yes, mobile apps are definitely something we want sooner rather than later! Just need more time in the day ;)

jclos• 6 years ago

It looks neat, but what differentiates you from say something like Notion [1] ?

[1] https://www.notion.so/

fastball3• 6 years ago

Good question! Notion is a great product, big fan myself.

There are a couple main differences, but I think the biggest one is the way things are shared and from there the kind of workflows we are trying to accommodate. Everyone has a different way they like to organize their notes – this can make it hard for people to collaborate because they all want the final product (a collection of notes) to suit their own workflow. Notion has done a great job of building a great UX for collaborative working, but when you collaborate with someone on Notion, you still need to agree to a "structure" and then collaborate within the framework of that structure.

In contrast, we have built Supernotes to allow for many different ways to organize your notes. And more importantly, different ways that collaborators can organize the same notes.

- You can have structured hierarchies using nesting, not unlike a conventional folders + files system. Though I think our implementation is more powerful, as nesting allows you to more easily "expand" on ideas, and a single card can actually have multiple parents. This is how most existing note-taking / knowledge base apps are structured. With multi-parents though, we are fairly unique.

- You can have unstructured graphs by using our hyperlinking functionality. This is how the internet in general is structured, and now what Notion, Roam, and others are doing.

- You can have a totally flat structure using only tags.

And of course you can mix-and-match these options as much as you want / need to. This makes it easier for people (espescially people that aren't on a "team" – think freelancers, students, etc) to collaborate in their own way, because while you are organizing things with hyperlinks, I could be using tags to organize the same cards, but in an entirely different way.

tl;dr – what products like Notion are striving for is "all together sharing". What we're aiming for with Supernotes is more granulated, personalized sharing.

Show HN: Supernotes – a better way to collect your thoughts

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