Regardless of my technical opinions congratulations on launching your app publicly and I'm sure you learnt a lot along the way.
*Edit: Typos
And my personal motto as a system tester: "It's my job to show that stuff is still broken and tell in it such a way that my head won't be chopped off and people stilltalk to me."
I currently find myself stuck syncing text files using SyncThing or ownCloud or making notes in my KeePass database just to get the level of privacy I want in this.
I saw Turtl before and this makes Turtl highly appealing to me, I'll definitely be trying it out more thoroughly as it looks like mobile support has matured since last I tried it.
One thing I seem to remember having an issue with was DPI scaling support, I use 4k screens at home and at work, but everything was blurry as the apps didn't support DPI scaling - any chance this has been addressed?
Another issue I seem to remember was self-hosting, I'd most likely self-host it (though I'll definitely chip you a donation if it's all working), but I didn't see any way to configure the server used - did I miss something or has this been added now or would I need to recompile to do this?
Thanks for all your hard work.
EDIT: Just tried it again - DPI scaling on Windows is now working and there appears to be a button to change the server. Sweet. I'll be moving in to this tonight if all goes well. Thank you again. This looks like an excellent product.
I noticed your page doesn't have a donation link though and since I intend to self-host I can't send you anything, any chance you can put one up?
EDIT2: Hmm, noticing something strange here - I thought the DPI scaling was working when I saw the notes in the main screen looked very sharp, http://i.imgur.com/BfSDcca.png but when I view notes expanded it seems to lose its sharpness. See http://i.imgur.com/gpJ7zsC.png
I'm not sure what the reason for this is but I've noticed similar problems with Atom and other browser based solutions so perhaps this is unavoidable for now, in any case it's much better than it was before.
Markdown support in the notes would be quite nice. The UI could be improved for that usecase as well.
I really like having only app for those use cases.
I really like that I can use my Yubikey for 2f authentication over NFC.
So I haven't looked at the code yet but there are many ways to make a web / JavaScript app feel snappier. There is the basic "do everything async" so you, more frequently, release the thread back to drawing / changing the DOM. Some others including:
- Making sure you got rid of the 300ms delay on mobile devices (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12238587/eliminate-300ms-...)
- Making use everything is minified, combined and loaded up front to ensure initial loading is quick
- If you're using a front end framework look into whether there exists optimizations for speedup otherwise if you profile and find a lot of time is being spent in the framework you may want to work directly with the native DOM APIs
I won't keep going but I've seen a very small, handful of html / javascript mobile apps that have felt practically native in speed so it's possible. But I certainly agree that when first starting up it's a great way to go. React Native may be another good stepping stone.
That said, please post updates -- I'm on the lookout for Evernote alternatives, now that its demise seems imminent.
I don't use any of the fancy evernote features, so if you're interested, this is what I'd require at a minimum:
- Save and sync text between OS X and Android
- Button to take a picture and insert it into a note
That's really all I use.
I will say this: Turtl will queue encryption/decryption in background threads so it does utilize cores while doing heavy processing. As far as how it utilizes cores in the main UI, that's really up to the underlying javascript engine, which most likely will be single-threaded unless instructed otherwise.
> I'm really sorry to be quite harsh
Not harsh at all. Turtl is a start, a goal. Evernote has so many features and so many use-cases for so many people. I agree saying it's a viable alternative right now isn't entirely true, but for those who value privacy over features, Turtl is worth a look.