UpNote continues to improve

Posted by steveylang
May 11, 2021 at 08:08 PM

satis wrote:
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.

I think what ended up compelling me to move to it was that despite having more fully-featured apps, I always found myself using Apple Notes on my Mac and my iPhone for note-taking, information repository, writing up quick daily task lists, etc. But now I find UpNote as easy to use while adding some features that I appreciate (even if relatively basic.) Task management in particular is very light, although maybe with hashtags and perhaps more filter types (and nested filters) the app can become more versatile overall.

>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.)

I doubt that outlining and hashtag management will be nearly as deep as some other apps, but similarly will probably be good enough for me to stop using Workflowy. Did I am not a power user? But for reference the main PIM/Outliner/task apps I have been currently using are Apple Notes, The Hit List, and Workflowy.

>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.

There are a couple of clunky aspects here and there in the app, hopefully those can be smoothed out over time. I think being on 4 different platforms makes these more improvements slower, but I appreciate having Mac, iOS, and Android/Chromebook platforms as I use all 3. I think if I was Mac/iOS only I’d have a lot more choices.

>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.

You are right, although I guess it’s the same thing in the end regardless of the name?

>
>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.

As long as you know you can click on ‘Notebooks’ to view them all, I ‘think’ its better to have the option to hide than not.

Currently you can search within a note on Mac, but don’t think on other platforms.

>
>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.

I agree, an online form with a couple of ‘Are you extra extra sure?’ confirmations would be better. Or within the app, but requiring you to re-enter login info to prevent accidental wipes.

>
>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.
>

I wonder if a storage limit could be implemented down the road. I think a large repository of notes is not a big deal bandwidth-wise, but a lot of attachments could be. Although I don’t know why one would use an app like this for general file storage (as opposed to just attaching relevant files here and there within your notes database.)