NotesHub

Stone -

Welcome to Episode #112 and what will be the last app review, at least for a while. On my 2.5 year journey, I've reviewed some amazing apps and this one is no exception. But first, thanks to the 27 of you who signed up recently.

😍
Thanks to Arun, Asha, Ashutosh, and Boss from India, serg from Mexico, jlw from Australia, siriki from Canada, Teguh from Indonesia, Jan from Czechia, Vivek from Singapore, Rana from Pakistan, Bee from Switzerland, Akshit from New Hampshire, Azalea from Louisiana, Cody from Florida, Glen from California, Matt from Wisconsin, Diana from Utah, Andrew from the U.K., Caio, Epitaci, and Beatriz from Brazil, Christian from Austria, "hr" from Iran, Sine from Croatia, and Alex from Belgium.

I'm honored that you took the time to subscribe and I hope that you find this and previous posts useful. Check out my sister site noteapps.softr.app which is a Web front end to a database of all of the apps that I've reviewed.

This is the longest I've gone without posting a review and a sign that it's time to close this chapter. It was almost 2 months since my last review. Why?

I started a new job within the same organization and it's taking a lot of my "discretionary time" – I heard that term used by someone in HR recently! I don't mind the extra work as it's really interesting and the outcomes will provide significant benefits to current and future generations including our granddaughter.

Oh, and I also took on a new hobby which I haven't had much time for: creating custom t-shirts with a Cricut machine and heat press. I've only made a few tees so far and made some hilarious mistakes! If you have this hobby, please let me know.

I'm older than the Internet t-shirt

I ended up with 2,354 followers across these sites. I'm sure many are bots or duplicates. It's more than I expected. I've included links to each social feed in case you want to see comments or conversations.

NotesHub

OK, let me tell you about an amazing app. It has very few downloads, hundreds according to Google Play but I expect it will take off once people hear about it.

Your second brain in Markdown

I heard about NotesHub from Gabe Pérez's comment on r/NoteApps. It's not the most beautiful app but it's super fast, local first, supports Markdown, audio recordings, inline images, linking of notes and to top it off it supports Kanban, Excalidraw drawings, and synchronization with GitHub. That's incredible!

There are apps for Android, iOS, Web, and Windows and the cost is less than a Starbucks coffee at one-time price of $3.99 USD. This is wild that you get so much for so little. Buy Alex a coffee if you end up using the app regularly as he so deserves it.

Adapted from the FAQ, here are the benefits of keeping your notes in Git / GitHub that you get for free:

  • Unlimited version history, and info on when and who made changes
  • Share notebooks with others: add anyone as a collaborator or viewer
  • Easy self-hosting with plenty of open open-source options, so notes truly belong to you
  • Better merge conflict resolution compared to traditional cloud-based file storage solutions
  • Create public websites/blogs from your notebooks

Many of you may have never heard of GitHub because it's mostly for software people. But, it's actually quite easy to use, it's free, and you get 1Gb of storage. Once you signup, create a repository (sounds like suppository but less uncomfortable) and connect it to the app, you don't have to do much else with GitHub if you don't want to. This is what GitHub looks like.

Read on for the ugly, the bad, the good, and the many great and awesome features of NotesHub.

Screenshots

Metadata

Ugly

  • Couldn't see how to export/backup local notes

Bad

  • Images from GitHub a little sluggish to load
  • No share option for local notes. For GiHub you can share the specific file
  • No search across notes
  • No images in notes list
  • No filtering of notes list other than favorites

Good

  • Text formatting: bold, italics, strikethrough
  • Bulleted list
  • Numbered list
  • Print a note
  • Dark mode
  • Code blocks
  • Markdown syntax guidance
  • FAQ
  • Toolbar
  • Quotes
  • Hyperlink
  • Attach image
  • Undo and redo
  • Indent and outdent
  • Find and replace
  • Folders
  • Preview mode
  • Notebooks
  • 9 fonts
  • 21 font sizes
  • 11 line spacing settings
  • Insert date
  • Sort by title or type of note
  • Favorite a note
  • Horizontal line
  • Highlight text

Great

  • Markdown support
  • Inline checklists
  • Inline images
  • Use iCloud drive
  • Export to PDF
  • Apps for Android, iOS, Windows, and Web
  • Mermaid diagrams
  • Math expressions (MathJax)
  • Callouts
  • ABC musical notation
  • Syntax highlighting for code blocks
  • Attach a file
  • Tables
  • Hotkeys
  • Command menu /
  • Drag and drop files into note (Web)
  • Separate font setting for code blocks
  • Recent files list
  • Tags in Kanban cards

Awesome

  • Extremely fast except for images
  • WYSIWYG editing
  • Offline first
  • Excalidraw drawings!
  • Embed tweets
  • Link notes
  • Add metadata
  • Inline audio recording
  • Sync to GitHub or Git
  • Kanban boards
  • Subtasks
  • Table of contents
  • Pasted HTML converts to Markdown
  • Inline video playback

Thank you!

A big THANK YOU 🤗 for riding along this odd journey of mine. I've thoroughly enjoyed writing these reviews, meeting some new people, influencing a few apps, and being distracted from the daily grind and life's challenges.

Please 🙏 stay subscribed in case I update reviews or find an amazing app. I'm not dead yet and I will post, just not regularly nor predictably.

🥳
Happy Mother's Day to all mothers out there and thanks for all you do for your children and partners!

Take care of yourself, your families, stay safe and here's to many happy moments that you can take notes on in the weeks and months ahead!

Best, Stone

p.s. "Stone" is a word scramble of "Notes" 😂