I'm sorry but I don't think you should call this an Evernote alternative.
- No iOS client (Although the site does say coming soon)
- No Firefox webclipper
- No Web interface
- Large / heavy application
- No Drawing / Diagram support
- The app is not native, it's seems it's a web frame
It's interface doesn't feel very snappy, it feels like it's built with in a Javascript framework perhaps?
Evernote has been around for a long time and has grown to 110MB uncompressed / installed, this app is 100MB and it's only in its early stages and has hardly any features implemented yet - that's worrying to me.
Looking at OSX's power utilisation Turtle appears to often utilise one CPU core heavily under load where Evernote seems to thread processes more efficient and ends up using around 60% less power on my 2015 Macbook in the use I put it through which was common activities such as adding and removing notes, copy / pasting text, launching and closing the app etc...
What I do really like is that it uses Markdown, that's something sorely missed in Evernote.
I'm really sorry to be quite harsh, I really do love when people try to improve software by creating their own alternative and that's something that's sorely needed in the land of Evernote like apps, however I don't think this comes close to a possible alternative.
Thanks for the honest feedback! The app IS a web frame, both on desktop an mobile. TBH it's pretty much the only way I can maintain it on 4 (and soon 5) different platforms efficiently.
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.
Great response, thanks for taking the time to read it, I always feel really quite guilty when someone puts a lot of hard work and passion into something they care about and I feel I need to point out problems - I am constantly conflicted between not saying anything and speaking up, in this case I spoke up because I absolutely agree with the need for Evernote-like products.
Regardless of my technical opinions congratulations on launching your app publicly and I'm sure you learnt a lot along the way.
"The authors argue that the major problem in many negotiations is that people assume positions that are either Hard or Soft. They suggest that, rather than being either hard on the people and the problem, or soft on people and problem, it is possible to be soft on the people and hard on the problem. They call this approach Principled negotiation or Negotiation on its merits." Getting to Yes - Roger Fisher, William Ury
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."
To your credit, the feature you're adding is far more important to me than any of the minor Evernote features the parent mentions. So don't sell yourself short.
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.
My solution to this problem is to use LastPass. The crypto is about as good as you can get, the only problem is that its not Opensource. LastPass runs literally everywhere, every browser, every device.
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.
This is great feedback. I've tracked the DPI issue here: https://trello.com/c/55CRuNmY. Also, it's kind of dumb I don't have pricing enabled yet and I don't have a donate page. Should have thought of that =]. Thanks for checking out Turtl again!
"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."
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 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.
Have you tried Centrallo?
Centrallo 2.0 Global Productivity App Adds Evernote Import Wizard to Its List-Making Features and Adds Former Evernote Executive Heather Wilde to Its Team
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/02/prweb13198898.htm
TL;DR for parent comment: "It's not as mature as Evernote, and it has a bigger footprint." Therefore your comment is unfair: if provides a less complex evernote function that many could use.
Neither of these is unfixable over time, as the product develops, and some may be a function of the increased security implementation. None of these criticisms stops the app being usable, as far as I can see.
In a start-up? Absolutely not true. This is the first version. I would suspect, as many go that route, that the "website in a frame" is replaced by native. That's typically the direction everyone goes in until they're already an expert at a specific platform and want to start on one instead of multiple.
Stuff gets rewritten all the time when it makes sense to do so. That's rarely a big enough issue that you decide you'll never do it.
Just like the new macbook pro's, which are thermalthrottling as soon as you look at pictures of cats. You could say they never going to perform well, but then you could always throw it in a cold bath.
Not from what I've seen, after hosting a bunch of NodeJS based web-apps I can tell you it doesn't perform well on the server-side or on the desktop. It's a decent rapid prototyping language / tool - but it's taking what should (or perhaps shouldn't) be in a web browser, wrapping it up and hosting it somewhere that the designers of products often don't know much about the landscape.
For the majority of users, it performs well enough. Step out from behind your own lens. For instance, the number of times I've heard someone complain about Slack's performance (that isn't a developer) is precisely zero.
You are right. It's good enough for many apps. I probably have several nodejs/electron/js desktop apps running and I have no complaints. It is the most cost effective way to target multiple platforms and the development experience is fantastic without having to get into .net win forms or xaml/wpf on Windows or the monstrosity that is Xcode/UI builder or God forbid Java or the worst Dev ecosystem that is android/eclipse.
So let's be practical here. If I am doing a startup or a side projects I am definitely going with JavaScript on the client - I have more freedom on the server and will probably pick either elixir/Phoenix, rails or .net
I think my lens is actually quite large, I have 15 years of production experience hosting, building, deploying applications and build pipelines, currently I'm working across 20~ end user facing products in their various application life cycles, backed by hundreds of services running across many hundreds of instances. They scale from applications that turn over only 3-5RPM up to 8000 RPM throughout the day. We host and deploy Python, PHP, Perl, Ruby, JS, Erlang, Go and Java apps. I can say without a doubt that the JS (in our case NodeJS) apps are by far the worst to work with, not just in regards to performance but also in regards to community quality.
This is biased hokey.
JavaScript is very fast for what it's built to do, and it keeps getting faster and used for more applications.
Another problem is many JavaScript programmers actually don't know how the language works. They think they know how to use it because the barrier to entry is so low.
It is long past time that people start recognizing JavaScript as a real language and not some browser add on.
> I'm sorry but I don't think you should call this an Evernote alternative.
Everyone has to start somewhere. Being a new company, calling yourself an Evernote alternative says to me that you're either available everywhere or you will _eventually_ be available everywhere. Maybe not being available everywhere right now is too much of a down point for you but it may be fine for others.
This strikes me as an MVP and it looks like a good start. Saying Evernote took forever to hit 100MB and this app just starting out at 100MB doesn't mean anything but you're implying it'll only balloon further. When they get a revenue stream and / or funding and go full native I would suspect that size would go down considerably.
I think your points are fair but I think you're looking at this company as something far, far more than what it really is.
I'm seeing about 80% less power on a mid-2012 Macbook Air with a 2GHz Core i7 for Evernote vs. Turtl. I'm guessing more parallelization is even more beneficial on lower speed multi-core processors.
If it is a JS app of some kind that would make sense, I've been ranting a lot about JS apps recently so I won't go into it here - needless to say they're anything but efficient in my experience.
Edit: Also, I should note that I have many hundreds of notes in Evernote, where I created 15-20 in this app, I would have expected Evernote to need more resources to search such a large number of notes.
~/Library/Application Support/com.evernote.Evernote % du -sh .
608M .
Turtl stores all notes in what amounts to Chrome's IndexedDB engine (encrypted...no plaintext data is stored on disk). So it really comes down to the efficiency of IndexedDB's storage engine when translating notes to disk space.
We do utilize multiple core when encrypting/decrypting, but things like indexing and searching all take place on the same thread the app runs on.
This is something that could be improved in the future.
I don't see drawing/diagram support as a needed thing - at least not in my use-case. My ever-note is entirely full of text.
But I agree that speed is critical. The most important features of a note taking program for me are speed and durability (in the database sense - no worries about data-loss). If it's long to navigate to the last viewed spot in my shopping list or my workout log, I'm annoyed.
- No iOS client (Although the site does say coming soon)
- No Firefox webclipper
- No Web interface
- Large / heavy application
- No Drawing / Diagram support
- The app is not native, it's seems it's a web frame
It's interface doesn't feel very snappy, it feels like it's built with in a Javascript framework perhaps?
Evernote has been around for a long time and has grown to 110MB uncompressed / installed, this app is 100MB and it's only in its early stages and has hardly any features implemented yet - that's worrying to me.
Looking at OSX's power utilisation Turtle appears to often utilise one CPU core heavily under load where Evernote seems to thread processes more efficient and ends up using around 60% less power on my 2015 Macbook in the use I put it through which was common activities such as adding and removing notes, copy / pasting text, launching and closing the app etc...
What I do really like is that it uses Markdown, that's something sorely missed in Evernote.
I'm really sorry to be quite harsh, I really do love when people try to improve software by creating their own alternative and that's something that's sorely needed in the land of Evernote like apps, however I don't think this comes close to a possible alternative.