Hi HN! I created Unforget out of years of frustration with Google Keep and the lack of alternative that met all my needs. I hope you find it useful too!
Features include:
- import from Google Keep
- offline first including search
- sync when online
- own your data and fully encrypted
- Desktop, mobile, web
- lightweight, progressive web app without Electron.js
- markdown support
- programmable with public APIs
- open source [1]
In addition, I'm thrilled to announce the opening of our software agency, Computing Den [2]. We specialize in helping businesses transition from legacy software, manual workflows, and Excel spreadsheets to modern, automated systems. Please get it touch to discuss how we can help you or if you wish to join our team.
There's an appeal to it, basically using the web purely as distribution, and the browser as the runtime. But I'm concerned with the fiddly-ness of local storage and such like that. The "out of site, out of mind" nature of it. The data not being in a "~/.app/app.dat" file, etc. The idea of it potentially just up and vanishing with a browser update. And, heck, just the complexity of dealing with the schema versioning in the native web model.
As well as the portability of data (say when you copy over to a new computer).
The idea of simple web distribution is compelling. Now you need nothing more than a github account, and off you go. No server, no nothing.
But I still feel (perhaps ignorantly) that the data situation is still on shaky ground. (Discounting the whole lack of something like SQLite, etc.)
And, the idea of bundling something like SQLite as a webassembly blob just makes me itch.
Just curious how that's worked out.
Having said that, indexeddb has been very reliable. There are some annoying limitations though. For example, if you want to create an index on a store using multiple keys, you can't specify which key should be ascending or descending.
If you add the PWA to your home page, i.e. install it, then the browser must not clear indexeddb on an update or something. And as far as I can tell, browsers do respect that.
My overall experience building PWA has been mixed. I think it really depends on what app you're making. For a note taking app, where the data can be backed up to the cloud encrypted and synced, I really think a PWA is the best option. But if you want tighter integration with the platform e.g. accessing the file system, then I would stay away from PWA.
Another issue is ios safari which is missing a lot of features for PWAs and I think unlikely to support them in the future. E.g. background sync, offline push notifications, etc.
Are you considering PWA for any particular app?
So, I was considering a PWA. I don't need tight local integration per se. I do have a conceptual problem not being able to save a file or read a file, even if it's just chosen by the user. I THINK I can do that. I THINK you can pop a file chooser to read a file, but not necessarily just open any file you want. If you can read/write a file as directed by a user, that would be fine. I can see the rest being stored in the IndexDB. And that gives the option of an export/backup if it becomes necessary for peace of mind.
Then there's the whole x-browser game, I'm not really looking at mobile, just desktop, but I'd like to support FF/Chrome/Safari/Edge.
It's not rocket science stuff by any means. But I don't want a user to call up and talking about how their data suddenly vanished because they went to get the latest, and I did something innocent/ignorant (or not), or THEY did something (deleted their PWA icon, copied it, moved it, etc.), or the browser did something.
I have no experience with it, so for now, I'm not comfortable because I don't have my "hands" on the data.
If I can export it, then the comfort level goes way up. Inform the user to back up "just in case", especially early on when we're all still bumping in the dark.
To be clear, I don't want a server side, I have no interest in standing up a service component. I have less interest in maintaining a service component. I'd like the code to be local and "standalone" as practical.
But I also want something a touch more than "git clone app; cd app; ./build".
This creates Unforget.app in ~/Applications which appears to work. I've also successfully used this with Tana in the past. Did you run into trouble with that or have you not tested it?
Another similarity half-baked plan is for a PWA to regularly post (encrypted?) data to a service I'd host that simply forwards the data to the user's choice of cloud storage. It would require initial setup and probably regularly refreshing token, but should be workable.
Anyone writing applications in the browser should be very cautious to note that many browsers will jettison some types of their website storage if disk space is low.
This is frustrating at the best of times, but if there's no server-side backup then frustration would be an understatement.
I am not sure if this caveat applies to localStorage but from experience it does to IndexedDB — seemingly even in Electron applications (??).
oh fun! I haven't run into that. But if you're using electron or any platform's local webkit wrapper, then it makes a lot more sense to forgo the browser's storage and directly use sqlite + server-side backup if possible.
It works pretty well with the only downside being the user needs to re-select the file/directory to use each time they use the app and there is no way to force the file picker to start in a specific directory other than the "well known directories".
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/persistent-permissions-for...
It is possible to do this now in chromium based browsers. Refer https://developer.chrome.com/docs/capabilities/web-apis/file...
(Although, I don't have experience with SQLite, so that file might be as volatile as `localStorage`.)
[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/better-sqlite3
[1] https://github.com/computing-den/unforget/blob/master/src/se...
Also, wanted to mention that Unforget doesn't use browser's localStorage. LocalStorage has a low limit and the browser can nuke it when it wants. Instead we use IndexedDB which has much higher limits and persistent.
As far as I know, it’s using some caching library at the HTTP level (as opposed to handling its own persistence at the application layer), and in falls apart every time I have a poor connection, remaining broken (even after fully going offline) until I’m back online.
* Is this a bunch of titled markdown docs organized (conceptually) into folders/hierarchically?
* Is this a bunch of untitled/title optional “cards” organized by tag?
* Is this a long, markdown document, which you append to?
These are similar to different mainstream and less so note taking systems, and would appreciate understanding what workflow you’ve designed and optimized around.
Saying you started as a Google Keep user is helpful, buy I’ve only used other systems (Homebrew textfiles, Simplenote, obsidian, etc), and have some concepts around what Evernote and OneNote are like, so giving a couple more signposts on usage would be helpful.
To answer your questions quickly, I usually keep very small notes just a few lines or todo checkboxes. One note per idea. But sometimes an idea grows over many days and that note gets much larger. There's no limit to how large a note can get.
You can always set the title of the note using # which is standard markdown, or leave a blank line after the first line and it automatically becomes the title.
There's no concept of tag per se but you can write #someTag and then literally search for #someTag. The search feature is just substring search over all the notes (no stemming or anything fancy).
* You have a big chronologically ordered list of notes
* By default, all notes are in view
* You can make a title (instructions in demo), but significance of title is only internal to note (not for ordering/management)
* Big list of notes is union of two disjoint sets: pinned and unpinned
* Can view either all notes, pinned notes, or un-pinned notes
But not sure if I have that right. FWIW appreciate some of the design decisions I’m seeing, just haven’t had time to poke around to understand.
2. Nit - on the demo page: Priavcy --> Privacy
3. Why does one of my browsers raise the error, "Your browser does not support service workers. Please use another browser."? Can this be worked around, or is the use of service workers essential to the distinguishing characteristics of the app? Genuinely curious.
I'm curious which browser are you using?
I don't know much about service workers. But, after some searching I found out they apparently aren't supported in private / incognito mode.
I do 95%+ of my browsing in incognito mode, so this makes a lot of sense.
Tor Browser
> Well without the service worker it wouldn't work offline any more and that's one of the key features.
Thanks, that definitely seems worthwhile then!
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This reminded me of Joplin. What's the direction you're looking to take this in?
For example, the workflow didn't seem very fast to me. For example, open the app, then at most after one tap you should start typing immediately, enter multiple todo items without going to menus or pressing any other buttons. On desktop, it should all be keyboard driven anyways. In other words, I want the UI to get out of the way. I think this is something that many note taking apps miss.
As for the direction, I'd like to make it easier to migrate from other apps. There's already a Google Keep importer but there should be many more.
Also, with the public APIs, I'd love to see some Emacs, vscode, vim clients/integrations :)
Other than that, it pretty much covers all my needs at this point.
Since it's a JS application, have you considered supporting Mermaid diagrams? While heavy, Joplin is my goto for notes these days because Mermaid syntax has been a game changer compared to simple markdown.
https://mermaid.js.org/
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.eu.thedoc....