Looks interesting. Currently offering beta invitations. In some ways it looks similar to MindMup, but in MindMup you work on one mind map at a time, while in OctopusNote one can navigate within a single database of notes (judging from the screenshots). Maybe this could be the WorkFlowy of the mind-mapping world?

https://www.octopusnote.com/

Dr Andus wrote:

In some ways it
looks similar to MindMup, but in MindMup you work on one mind map at a
time, while in OctopusNote one can navigate within a single database of
notes (judging from the screenshots). Maybe this could be the WorkFlowy
of the mind-mapping world?

Upon closer look it looks even more interesting than that. It looks like a web-based personal wiki that is equipped with a mind map facility to allow for a hierarchical organisation of the notes as well.

In some respects it reminds me of ConnectedText, in the sense that the actions and interfaces shown in the animations could be emulated in CT.

Looks fascinating, in truth. Not dissimilar to MarginNotes, the tag-based PDF annotator, but much more flexible in that you're annotating your own notes.

But if it's destined to remain an online app, then alas, not of lasting interest to me. Let's hope they roll out apps - I'd jump at it!

I'm with Bill -- very interesting, but the privacy thing is an issue.

Bill, btw, I think you might be thinking of TagNotate ("tag-based PDF annotator"). You can send your "own notes" to TagNotate and MarginNote, for notation, as PDFs. Admittedly, not the same idea as Octopus.

MadaboutDana wrote:

Looks fascinating, in truth. Not dissimilar to MarginNotes, the
tag-based PDF annotator, but much more flexible in that you're
annotating your own notes.

But if it's destined to remain an online app, then alas, not of lasting
interest to me. Let's hope they roll out apps - I'd jump at it!

Quite right, I was. They're both impressive (TagNotate and MarginNote), but I love the flexibility of OctopusNote.

But not if it's yet another attempt to store all my data in somebody else's "Cloud" (a word that journalists appear - on very flimsy evidence - to have decided means "secure, stable data repository managed by Very Big Data Providers who aren't going to go bust anytime soon, so must be regarded as pretty much totally reliable or infallible, even though they're all based in the US of A and will shortly be subject to the whims of Donald Trump").

Gimme a hybrid on-/offline solution anytime!

Kind of off-topic, but in my new job I'm tracking a lot of international privacy issues. An increasing number of companies refuse to do business with American cloud-based businesses. Why? Because the U.S.government can issue a subpoena under the PATRIOT Act, and slap a gag order on it. So not only would information be compromised, but the "owner" would never even know about it.

I can understand that some people and organisations may need to avoid online apps and cloud services for privacy and security reasons (though it's increasingly difficult or even impossible?) or because they don't have reliable internet access.

But at the same time there is a revolution taking place out there. There are huge advantages to living and working in a browser. You are no longer tied to a specific machine, or a specific location. It's a lot easier to collaborate. And so on. And backing up your data online might be more secure in some situations than being locally exposed to theft and the elements (fire, flood, accidents etc.).

There are all kinds of benefits to adopting a thin client model such as the Chromebook way, for instance. Schools in the US have been converting to Chromebooks in a massive way, and the next wave is going to be Chromebooks for Work (Dell, HP and Acer have just launched or are about to launch Chromebooks for business use). Once these kids grow up, it's unlikely they'll be demanding a Windows PC or even a Mac, once they've experienced the speed of Chromebooks and the convenience of the cloud.

I suspect that we will be seeing more and more development in the online space, and possibly less in the traditional, locally installed software market.

I totally agree, Dr. Andus, but doesn't that just highlight the need to think hard about the international privacy issues raised by Jaslar?

I already use quite a lot of Cloud services: our business uses a Dropbox-a-like service called Soonr (file syncing, but with Cloud repository in Norway, although they've just been taken over by a US company).

Personally, I use Dropbox, OneCloud and iCloud (mainly for less confidential items). And they're all amazingly convenient. Indeed, to get the most out of an Apple-based ecosystem, you more or less have to use such services to shunt stuff around between various Mac/iOS devices. But it's precisely Apple's ongoing fight with the Fed (and indeed with the Chinese authorities, who have started being difficult precisely because of the US-based fight, I suspect) that has spotlighted the importance of sorting out international privacy issues as soon as possible.

Interestingly, the current media interest in privacy has failed almost entirely to mention the other major group at risk from these proposed government backdoors etc.: the business community (especially SMEs, given that many enterprises will have their own encryption arrangements - at least in theory. In practice, they're often as vulnerable as smaller companies).

And then there's the entirely separate issue of smaller providers. Like OmniGroup, for example, whose Cloud service I use (occasionally) for OmniFocus and OmniOutliner. Not to mention Workflowy, Gingko etc. What guarantees do they offer (apart from all the liability waivers)? In these cases, privacy isn't so much at threat from sinister government agencies as from incompetence (insecure systems), mortality (e.g. bankruptcy, business failure) or veniality (selling your details on to third parties). How do you prevent that? Unless you're absolutely sure that your data is being (properly) encrypted at source?

It's a Big Bad World out there. But interesting!

The nice developer of OctopusNote informs me that after perfecting the Web app, he's going to roll out separate apps for multiple platforms (including Mac, Windows, iOS, Android). Yippee!

He's planning to use his own servers, because efficient real-time synchronisation is an issue with Dropbox/iCloud etc., but might be persuaded to include e.g. Dropbox or iCloud support if there's demand for it.

No timeframe available as yet...

OctopusNote looks very interesting to me, especially if there will be a Windows desktop version.

Dr Andus wrote:

In some respects it reminds me of ConnectedText, in the sense that the
actions and interfaces shown in the animations could be emulated in CT.

Actually I used to construct a similar mind map + notes combo by combining Freeplane and CT. However, it required several steps, so it wasn't as seemless as OctopusNote's drag and drop.

Either I had to construct the outline hierarchy with the links to notes within CT first, then export it as .mm file, then import it into Freeplane, or I had to manually copy over each link individually from CT into specific Freeplane nodes, using a number of keyboard shortcuts both in CT and Freeplane.

Moreover, the above workflow was only able to establish a link between a mind map node and a CT article as a whole, as opposed to a specific piece of text (target) in the body of an article (which OctopusNote apparently does).

The big question about OctopusNote is how the mind map is going to work and in what ways it is exportable.

One possibility is that there is only one mega map (just like WorkFlowy is one big outline), and it's for organising the entire notes database. This could lose its utility as the database grows (hence the advantage of a wiki over an outliner-based database), as the mind map would become too huge and cumbersome to be navigated.

(Although this could be mitigated the same way as WorkFlowy deals with the issue, i.e. making it easy to quickly reorganise the outline with keyboard shortcuts, drag and drop, fast search, and perhaps most importantly the ability to zoom into a specific sub-outline.)

The other possibility would be to have the capacity to create as many individual maps as one likes and be able to load them at will. This then would allow for multiple different organisations of the data. For example, if this is a database for reading notes (a Zettelkasten type database), one could have several different mind maps for the outlines of different articles one plans to write using those reading notes.

Or both of the above possibilities could be implemented, such as there is a single "project outline" in CT that one can use for an overall outline, and the ability to create individual outlines for smaller sub-projects, which can be loaded or unloaded.

I've just been invited to join the OctopusNote beta, and after a preliminary play, am very impressed! It's got pretty much everything you could possibly want, including the ability to import web pages/articles and synchronise between multiple browser windows in real time. Also a very good tagging plus search feature.

I'm looking forward to testing it in much more detail.

Cheers,
Bill

Yeah,
I like marginnote, and liquidtext,

but I'll just be eager to try this, the tag and tree looks very elegant.

I hope it's not just URLs as input.

seriously, how handy would it be alongside a devonthink database?!