Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by techntoke 2566 days ago
The market for markdown editors and note-takers is already saturated. Joplin appears to have all the features yours does and probably more, plus it is open source. There are a handful of other open source Markdown editors as well for note-taking that have most (if not more) of the features you are including. I don't know why anyone would pick a subscription service when they can get the same thing for free and have access to the source code to help implement their own features. Plus syncing with Joplin can be accomplished on multiple providers like Google Drive.
1 comments
cloverich 2566 days ago
If it is saturated (and by inference, unwanted), why do note taking apps consistently front-page? I can think of two possible reasons. One, there is no clear winner, and nobody has made the note taking app everyone _really_ wants. Or two, note apps are a bit like IDE's, where people use them all the time and subtle preferences mean a variety of apps doing the same thing is preferred.
link
techntoke 2566 days ago
It really comes down to the subscription-based model being profitable for people that think paying for something means they'll get a better product. People will find an open source solution and rebrand it for a $5 or $10/mo and have it sync to a server somewhere, and then move on to rebranding another solution. You can find a ton of apps in the app store where they do this.
link
cloverich 2565 days ago
> You can find a ton of apps in the app store where they do this.

But those do not consistently front-page as well, do they?

link
techntoke 2565 days ago
Yes, HN is a PR site. People pay to get content frontpaged here.
link
cloverich 2565 days ago
That doesn't explain that they also get a lot of discussion (relative to other posts). To me the story is a bit different. I've talked to a lot of people that take notes daily, and the only consistent theme I've found is that none of them are satisfied with their experience thus far. Until that changes, I'd expect every reasonably good notes application to front-page.
link
fock 2566 days ago
well, the basic gold standard for note taking are GUI apps like evernote and onenote (their GUI works well). I guess upvoters are the people on HN using plain-text, expecting a real nice GUI for their plain-text-markup-files, only to find yet another text-editor based on electron and it's own sync-thing...
link