Yesterday I thought about this... I picking up Rails using the 'Agile rails 4' book (by DHH). I have done many Sinatra applications using the MVC model so I'm quite familiar with most concepts, all I have to do is memorise and get a better grasp of Rails structure and rails approach to problem-solving.
So I used a hack to create an easy 'note' solution adding this to my .zshrc:
n() {
# $EDITOR ~/.mynotes/"$".md
open ~/.mynotes/"$".md
}
nls() {
ls -c ~/.mynotes/ | grep "$*"
}
Then I just "mkdir ~/.mynotes". I keep mostly 'rake' and 'rails' commands and a short explanation in 'md' format. It works like a charm because most of the times, I just open the note and leave it open using MacDown (an MD editor with preview mode) + it can be synced via Dropbox and you could even add encryption if you wanted too. But I'm not sure it would work for teams, while StackNotes apparently seems to me extremely well suited for teams.
I'd like to commit to it, but seeing that you might suddenly add a pricing tier (which might be imcompatible with our needs) adds a psychological barrier.
Perhaps you can add a pricing so I know it will
a) be sustainable
b) know how much to expect to pay
I feel thats a fair statement and had another user post on there the exact same thing. I changed that statement to read 100% free. Thanks for your feedback!
Hey guys, site owner here like to thank the op for sharing this, was wondering why my sign ups doubled. If you guys have any questions don't hesitate to ask!
Not sure I see the point... My IDE already lets me keep notes, contextualised to source file, project, project directory,... whatever. Why would I want to keep random notes in my browser? (Honest question; not trolling. After a couple of minutes playing with the site I just failed to see a value proposition. Perhaps I'm just too old/dumb/curmudgeonly.)
Hey thanks for your input. My main aim was to make a platform for developers to create formatted notes easily and be able to access them from anywhere. It sounds like your IDE already does this which may mean it isn't right for you - however, some features I am working on is the ability to share notes and view/vote on other users notes and then save them to your own notes collection. Again, thanks for the message!
Suggestion: Make the description field for notes optional. I think in most cases the title should be pretty much self explanatory (for me at least)
Question: Is there any kind of server-side encryption? Just to keep eventually sensitive notes secret in case of a server breach? Better yet, some kind of client-side encryption would be good on a folder level. Everything should then get encrypted/decrypted on client side (yes I got really paranoid during the last months, and I'm not putting anything that is even remotely sensitive on any server that I have no control of.)
I guess some people might use this to document their server/network infrastructure, and (god beware) they might even put sensitive passwords there. Maybe you could sell then this kind of encryption as a "pro" feature ;)
Overall it's quite nice, but so rudimentary that in its current form, I can see no advantage whatsoever over some general-purpose, well established alternative such as Evernote.
If it's primarily targetted for (learning) developers, it'd better have some specialized, dedicated features - eg. easy management of code excerpts, with syntax highlighting etc.
Regarding the UX, I also can't grasp why the dashboard seems to fetishize statistics so much. "Average Daily Notes", "Notes Breakdown" (and the pie chart), why on Earth would I care?
Hey thanks for the reply and feedback! The site is still new and in beta and not all the features are out yet for what I want to be the official release. In regards to code highlighting and excerpts I feel the site already does this (check out the support link) however if you had some other feature in mind I'd love to hear it. With the UX and dashboard statistics, I put them in there as a way to engage the user more and make it more of a fun process to always actively be adding notes, however I would love to hear what you think should be in it's place. Thanks again for the feedback!
My question is what assurance do I have that I'll be able to pull my notes out if/when StackNotes goes under or gets acquired? I've been burned a few times by services provided by startups (or not even startups, like Google Reader) going under, and I've learned to be careful of what I trust to a third party service.
More specifically, my question is why I should use StackNotes instead of an emacs org-mode file stored in a git repository?
Good and very fair question. Firstly, I don't understand why a company would not allow you to pull your data out before closing/be acquired but rest assured if that ever happens to stacknotes (i don't plan on it), I will provide a way to pull your notes out. If enough users wanted it, I might even provide a way to 'backup' or download your notes collection at will. Secondly, i can't answer that question as I haven't really used emacs org-mode (didn't know about it until then) but my main reason would be because of the features which we plan to implement (note sharing, voting etc. https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/32bjsx/a_...) which I feel will be make us a great alternative.
Again thanks for your message! If you have any other questions don't hesitate to ask!
Hey thanks for your message. I understand your hesitation and security is something that I will definitely be working on. However, if you are like me, you won't ever "shake the worry" that something isn't entirely safe and even if we did have the worlds best security I would still recommend against putting extremely sensitive information in there or any site for that matter.
If the proliferation of nanoservices like this goes on unfettered, I will have to be signed into 173.58 services before the first window on my desktop opens. What am I saying, “desktop” has of course been replaced by “browser”, unless I also subscribed to a “desktop” service.
Look to reduce friction wherever possible. Create a folder for me to start with, start me at a blank note... Let me name it later. Compare your flow to creating a Gist on Github. Every click and decision I must make takes an increasing toll.
We have a 3 people dev team and are usually squandering around finding some function that we previously wrote but did not document. Going to go ahead and register and start using this.
Are there some sort of plugins that link the source with the notes? If there's no direct link between these, how do you remember you made some notes on a particular snippet?
Trying https://www.stacknotes.io/sign_up results in a certificate error, stating that their cert was issued for *.herokuapp.com. :-(