Stone's note-taking week in review #1
I've been excited to write this review for two reasons. First, it's my 50th app review! Even though I've tried close to 100 Android note-taking apps, this is the 50th full review that I've written. Second, Notesnook could be one of the best apps but it needs a few fixes. I really enjoyed testing it this week and to learn that they're going Open Source during the same week that I was doing my review was simply bonus points for them!
Before I get to the review, a few things to share about my hobby and my adventures in note-taking land this week. It's a long post this time and I hope you find some value in it.
It's fun for me to see the throw away email addresses and the names people come up with. I respect the right to be anonymous and I do something similar when I sign up for newsletters: create an email alias with the service name as the account e.g. someservice@noteapps.ca so if that email address ever gets onto another list, I know where they sourced it from.
My revenue has been steady for the past few months at $1/mo which exceeded my stretch goal of $0/mo. This is a hobby and the sheer fact that one person out there – other than my sister – was willing to give me $ is appreciated. That said, I've re-enabled a paid option for new subscribers.
Does this affect you? not at all. Payments for the site are still optional and anyone can subscribe for free with an email address and see the reviews.
This is just preemptive in case the site grows (wishful thinking?) at which point my Ghost fees will go up to $25 per month. That, plus the one-time costs that I've been paying for apps that I installed and then don't end up using, makes it hard to justify as a hobby. I'd like to include comments using Commento so that I can get feedback from you on my reviews and that also requires the next level Ghost subscription.
This week I continued putting more people into my personal Obsidian notes that I nickname "(pro)files" and I've been normalizing the metadata – data about the data – across the Markdown files. I now have "files" on 230+ people mostly note-app founders and software developers. Yeah, that sounds creepy! I added a few attributes including skills and tech-stack so I know what technology they use. I even shared a couple of the profiles with the individuals and they thought it was pretty cool.
I've been thinking a lot this week about converting the data from my ego networking tool called HAL which I built off and on over the past two decades – yes, that's the definition of insanity: continuing to build something that only I use. My thought is to export all of the 3,600+ contacts to plain text, atomic Markdown files and that's a massive project.
mysql> select count(*) from person;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
| 3627 |
+----------+