I want to like obsidian, but I find it to just be such a hideous UI. Any community themes cannot fix it. But to mention proprietary. I liked Logseq too, but it has the same problem just not as bad. People really need to not do custom UIs and should stick to native widgets with Material Me support.
I was looking for a journaling app that didn’t have vendor locking, or required some weird export dump that messed your formatting and folders up. That lead me to Markdown and Obsidian. I love it. And when I die, that shit will still be readable by any basic text editor.
I’ll admit I’m a sucker for a good UI, and I’m very picky apparently. And as much as I like Markdown, I like looking at rendered Markdown more, lol. I was just looking at GitJournal and Markor and my god…hideous apps.
I came from DayOne, and their format is some json that I wasnt too keen on for future proofing.
I don’t remember why, but there was some reason I wrote off LogSeq. I tried so many apps but Obsidian was the best fit for me. Maybe I’ll have to try Logseq again and remember…
I’m still figuring out how exactly I want to use LogSeq, but for now it’s kinda acting as a Calendar, Journal, Me Wiki, ToDoList, and general notes scratchpad. I’m not sure how organized I can keep it, but it definitely is nice opening 1 app, and being able to put anything and everything in the journal page for today, just #hashtagging topics for searchability/Discoverability.
Sort of…I’m still testing various apps. The big draw for me to Keep was mobile and web apps. I will often sit at a computer to input even short ToDo because phone swipe keyboards and me do not get along. There is no shortage of Keep clones, but a bunch are missing sync function entirely or require Nextcloud, which is way too much app for my hardware and I’m not standing up an instance just to sync some notes. Here’s a not very formal rundown of what I’ve so far:
Joplin - seems like a solid app and you can easily selfhost the server. But the android app is awful. That and the fact it stores Markdown files in a sqlite db had me look elsewhere
Quillpad - a fork of Quillnote. Looks identical to Keep. Only syncs with Nextcloud and has some quirks. The big one was creating a To Do list with checkboxes from the Notes app in NC displays correctly in Quillpad, but you cannot interact with them at all. So strange.
Zoho Notebook - Zoho as a company is likely the closest you’ll get for a straight up Google replacement. But their privacy policy has some concerning statements regarding sharing data with “market partners”. It was enough for me to keep looking.
Carnet - only syncs with Nextcloud and for some reason the Android app is stupid slow.
Memos - more of a microblogging app. Similar format to Twitter but you can keep it all private and publish nothing. This one has no official app, in favor of a well done progressive web app. Also stores .md in a db file. Incredibly easy to self host. I keep wanting to love this one, but the single column view (think Twitter threads) as opposed to Keeps grid…i don’t know. I still have it up on my server since it takes almost nothing to run and I keep playing with it.
The two contenders for me right now have some amazing promise and nice features already, but it’s whats on their roadmaps that has intrigued me more:
Acreom - not FOSS yet and the mobile app can only sync with their cloud. No E2EE…yet. On desktop it’s great. You can use it without an account and like Obsidian, it stores it in flat .md. The To Do/Task function has some natural language processing that can recognize date/time for due dates like “Deploy patches Wednesday at 4am” would recognize Wednesday as Sept 20th since that’s the next closest date and the time at 4am. I think once they open source it and at least allow local only storage on a phone, it’ll be killer. I’d love to use Syncthing to just keep my pile of notes up to date between multiple devices. Not possible on mobile yet. This one is geared more towards developers to track projects, even offers a Jira tie in (gross).
Notesnook - somewhat recently open source. Has great apps for all OSes as well as a web app. And what is really nice is that the UI is consistent across platforms. They have a paid tier that’s a bit spendy for my liking, but they are working on a self hosting option that will be free of course. The dev did tell me they’re toying with the idea of a charge for commercial self hosters, but definitely not for individuals. This one isn’t in plain .md due to their selling point, which is encrypted everything.
Wow, thanks for the write-up. Joplin, Memos, Acreom sound/look the most interesting. Notesnook’s feature lockouts on the free tier makes me feel like they may not be included in the self-hosted option, that seems like a common practice. But I’ll keep an eye out… I’m gonna copy this whole thing into my page on notes-apps for later reference.
One I didn’t include because it either requires specific hardware, or some hacky workaround is Synology Note Station. Great app, and I got it up and running using a docker container that runs their proprietary OS. Other problem is the mobile app is not nearly as good.
As you can tell, I love notes apps. So the trend of all these Personal Knowledge Management/second brain apps is amazing.
You forgot “don’t say ‘thank you for pointing out that we were sending social security numbers to everyone who visits our website that anybody could stumble across,’ but rather ‘you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, hacker!’” Courtesy of the Missouri Department of Education.
Have you seen the one where the company says we shouldn’t use the terms male/female in a technical setting because it implies only 2 genders and apparently genders exist on some sort of spectrum?
So I emailed HR to ask for alternative suggestions and if I had permission to refer to ports and connectors as penis and vagina connectors. I think this will be an important discussion because the have the director of HR, legal and my manager scheduled for a meeting next week.
I love trolling over silly policy decisions!
Joking aside, I think "insertive" and "receptive" work just fine while also being more technically accurate.
The justification for the change might make ones eyes roll, because we are talking about plugs not people, but if the alternative is just as easy while also being correct, it's really no skin off my nose to use different words.
That's just my perspective though.
Joking aside I have no dog in this fight. Just tell me what to call it.
Although its a pain in the ass because I work in a country where english is a second language. And technical terms are all borrowed from English. So it may get hilarious when we have to write purchase specs or give instructions to our vendors. They’ll be scratching their heads for a bit.
Incidentally, there’s a reasonably wide range of connectors that don’t fit traditional identities. Some, like most USB connectors, have a situation where there’s a male prong in the middle of a ‘female’ connector.
Others, like Anderson Powerpole, are fully self-mating.
male/female did always seem weird to me to call plugs. It would be better if they were just called insertive/receptive. It’s much more self-explanatory and appropriate.
I only do webdev occasionally and yeah, I’ve noticed this tendency that I want to put everything in a CSS grid. At this point, I’m worried I end up with a layout that’s about as responsive as the early-2000s table layouts. 🙃
Yeah, I’ve done responsive grids before. Problem is, I’m currently working on a single-page web music player and it’s so easy to just nail all the UI elements down. Like I might want to have the play button always appear to the left of the playback bar. But that obviously can’t reflow naturally on smaller screens. Although reflowing that example won’t look good either.
I guess, I’m still figuring out, if I ever actually want things to reflow. I might just need to define static rules, so that on a small screen, the play button should appear in a different grid cell, next to the previous/next buttons, for example…
programmer_humor
Newest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.