UpNote continues to improve

Posted by satis
May 10, 2021 at 12:38 AM

Re-downloaded the app and played with it for a few hours. It seems interesting and certainly worth it for the price (one-time charge just $5 more than Bear’s annual charge?!), I’m not dazzled by it.

On the positive side, the dev recently stated, “Outlining abilities/section collapsing is in our roadmap. We hope to work on that later after web clipper and hashtags”

(Hashtags are an interesting semi-omission, as notebooks are *actually* hashtags, and you can have notes live in multiple notebooks.)

On Mac there’s no drag-and-drop of notes - you have to select each one, right-click and choose Add To Notebooks, then select/deselect the Notebooks you want to put it in.

And it’s a little odd that the app has a specific filter category/preset-tag for ‘uncategorized note’ instead of just having an Inbox.

The menubar dropdown access is very primitive compared to apps like SnipNotes (which lets you create notes from the menubar and put them into folders without accessing the app. Not to mention that SnipNotes has widgets and even Apple Watch app.)

There are a couple of design decisions I’d worry might bite me in the butt later on. For example, you can remove a notebook from the sidebar; not sure why I’d want to, but unless there was a way to rediscover notebooks removed from it, notebooks would have the potential to get lost after I’ve built up a large enough UpNote database. Also right now there’s no ability to search within a note - it only searches *all* notes.

The mobile apps are native but the Mac app is Electron, which I’m not fond of having on my hardware. Aside from it tending to bog down with large / large numbers of files (though the Mac app is speedy with my handful of test docs), it’s also to have had serious security problems. (Just a few months ago, Microsoft rush-patched an interaction-free bug in the Electron-based desktop version of its Teams app: any party in a Teams chat could abuse a relatively simple stored XSS bug to steal the access credentials of other participants simply by addressing them in a message, and using those credentials an attacker could take over a victim’s Office 365, OneNote, Teams and other Microsoft app accounts.)

https://github.com/oskarsve/ms-teams-rce

And security has been an issue with Electron apps for many years.

https://twitter.com/riskybusiness/status/1299689943711662080

And as of now in order to delete all your files from their server their FAQ says you need to email Support. There should be an easier, more elegant option.

Finally, I’ll reiterate that I strongly doubt the business case for being able to afford continued development and support of the app as a going concern with a cheap one-time license with unlimited data storage.