Thank you for signing up for the beta, we will start rolling out invites soon! "Family planner" is exactly the kind of early user we want. Daily life involves so much information that goes beyond text, and we feel there should be a tool that can handle any information you throw at it in an elegant way without tediously configuring and managing it.
This describes me perfectly. I use obsidian to 'feel productive' but not actually do any work.
With just the map + calendar views alone you can address so many planning and tracking frustrations that simply aren't solved by the calendar invites and embedding Google maps into other information documents that we are limited to today.
Also many features like realtime live collaboration are incredibly difficult to do with a local-first setup, but provides a user experience that lets Visible pages be useful for families, friends, and communities.
We do want to make your data fully available to you via export, and we don't view or use the data in your pages for anything. We have basic event-based analytics to see how people (anonymously) use Visible, but that's just at the level of button clicks and seeing how many pages people create on average.
Until those services are inevitably hacked, as we've seen most of these companies play fast and loose with security.
I'm also frustrated by the typical notes apps inability to store data in a way that it's convenient to retrieve. One example: I'd like to be able to just tag some string (think a UUID or other opaque thing) as a "blob" and then be able to click the "blob" just once to copy it to the clipboard, to be put into other tools.
Your app looks much more up my alley and I'll be signing up.
Seems like there should be a general answer for this, as sometimes I'd like to put a geolocation and notes in a file, and some uniform way to parse this later, whatever the tool.
[0]: https://github.com/esm7/obsidian-map-view
[1]: https://github.com/valentine195/obsidian-leaflet-plugin
That is the intention. I don't want excitement with my note-taking, I want plain, boring, open-standards that will survive the test of time.
Chances are high that your startup will: 1) Fail 2) Get acquired and gets shut down 3) Aggressively monetize leading to poor UI/UX (i.e. Evernote)
The whole advantage of Obsidian is that it relies on an open format, and makes it easy to transition to a new platform
I want a system that I know 20 years from now I can still use (or can transition to a better one).
Maybe I'm in the minority but I've tried at least 10 different note taking apps over the last decade, and none of them have staying power because they all fall into the three issues I outlined above.
I think notes should use a database so it can effectively obfuscate data like the spatial relationships between objects in a note. An open specification and utilizing an open source database would be better. Plain text objects could still be used and easily exported, but you gain so much over simply plain text. Portability is important but it's not as important as having tools that meaningfully improve how you perform the task you're trying to accomplish.
I'm sorry but until you've experienced a startup shutting down the product that you built your whole knowledge repo around, you won't really understand the need for portability.
I could care less about the shiny features, because I know that in 10 years this product will be defunct, while markdown will still exist.
It is not hard to understand why portability is important and I do not need to lose anything to empathize with people that have. I think it is important but it doesn't matter how important it is if the tool you're using to secure portability is insufficient for the task you're trying to accomplish. That is backwards thinking.
> I could care less about the shiny features, because I know that in 10 years this product will be defunct, while markdown will still exist.
I'm not speaking in favor for this person's startup, I'm speaking in favor for better tools for note taking, thinking, brainstorming, and managing knowledge. Plain text is not good enough, in my opinion. This is coming from someone who uses plain text for all those things because there isn't an existing adequate alternative. If plain text is genuinely suitable for your needs, that's great. I just really doubt that anyone that uses plain text can genuinely say that they aren't held back by the limitations of the format at least in some way.
It can be accomplished in plain text, by hiding it behind a fancy interface. Which is exactly what Obsidian enables people to do with plugins. And with the new live-editor this allows a pretty well-made mix between plain text and rich content.
That's why I'm working on creating https://visible.page because I want a tool that isn't just for markdown organizational obsessives, but rather for organizing and visualizing ALL kinds of information the way regular people do. None of these tools handle things like dates, locations, numbers, and other data of various types well. With Visible if you add a date or a location to some content, that content is now accessible on a calendar and a map side by side with all the associated text and media you added to it as well. No worrying about what table column it goes into or what metadata row or plugin you need to render it well. Just add the location, and add a map view, boom done. Want more than one date associated with some content? Just add it, you don't have to figure out to add another "Date type" metadata section the way you do in Notion for example.
It is not offline first. It is not file based. It is not catered to the needs you see so often here on Hacker News but don't actually hear when talking to regular people who just want to plan a trip together or keep track of an apartment/house hunt without spreading information across a half-dozen tools.
Does no one else get frustrated that even Google can't show you a map of your week's upcoming event locations? That when you are doing research online you have to tediously copy and paste each address one-by-one into Google Maps and then copy an embed link for that into another tool, and even then the addresses are isolated with no relevant information like photos or notes attachable to them?
We have so many amazing internet powers that are simply unavailable in any of these note taking tools. I'm sorry but markdown and backlinks are boring. I want to see my information the way it was meant to be seen and in a way that my parents can understand it as well.