Show HN: I made a Note-Taking app for people who keep texting themselves

This somehow seems to be a solution in search of a problem. The reason people use self texting is that they _don't_ want to use another app. Not because the existing apps are somehow missing features.

> I often defaulted to dumping notes into chat apps like Slack or iMessage

What makes you think people think differently about this app?

If people wanted all these features they would already all be covered by Apple Notes (Including the quick note feature, included in the OS when you mouse into the bottom right corner of your screen) but for free, encrypted and synced to all devices.

This is really cool stuff, OP. Congrats on the launch! I like that you've taken an actual problem or use case you have and turned it into an app.

I love seeing how other people solve similar problems. I've seen this other project [1] that is similar in idea, but the author there has opted to go for something that looks literally like a texting app. Yours looks more Slack-like, just going by the Mac version.

Likewise, I also wanted to create an app for keeping track of short notes, but I thought it would be neat to give it the UI of something like Twitter or Tumblr, so I built Minders. [2] I have to admit that not all the design ideas in my particular app work quite well together yet (such as "hearting" and replying to your own posts), but I do end up using it regularly for journaling and keeping track of interesting links.

[1] https://zhenyi.gibber.blog/gibberish-is-now-available-on-tes... [2] https://minders.ussherpress.com/

My number one problem with notes apps is that they all take too long to open a new note, and try to sync themselves when opened, often slowing everything down. Especially if you have a slow / choppy connection (fully offline is usually ok, but barely online is the worst).

I have a literal supercomputer in my pocket, yet not one app let's me open and start writing a critical note in less than 500ms.

To this day I still use plaintext editors on my desktop to dump short strings or notes into, because they load faster than any other app. And don't try to be clever with smart quotes, fonts and butchering my code snippets.

Telegram's Saved Messages (essentially self-texting) is also commonly used for saving info, somewhat recently they even added tagging and the ability to view messages that you forwarded into there per chat (so you can see all messages that you ever saved from some group you're in). Of course it all lives on their cloud and is not local.

This sounds like memos[0] with the asterisk that I must pay the apple corporate overlords to use it, trust you with my data, and ultimately lock myself into what you allow me to do with my data

memos is FOSS, and I run it on my machine, without the need to trust you. it also has a nifty API around it

[0]: https://usememos.com/

Or just send those notes to your own XMPP account where they'll show up as "Note to myself" (in Gajim) or something similar in other clients. You get all the facilities your clients offer on whatever platform you happen to be using at that time - web, mobile, desktop, etc. Your data is as safe as your XMPP account is, you can (but are not required to) run your own XMPP server - prosody or ejabberd or something else - on your own hardware on your own connection at home. Cross-platform, free, there are many different clients, standards-based. End to end encryption through OMEMO which works across an ever widening spectrum of clients.

Yes, this is similar to the Telegram "Saved Messages" feature which is another way of doing this. The advantage of using XMPP is that you can run your own service using free software. Also, should the EU "Chat Control" abomination become reality this is one of the ways to avoid having the EU spy on all your traffic.

I read through the comments, here are the "core" issues/features an app like that has to meet:

- 1. Fast startup - 2. Fast adding an extra note - 3. Editing - 4. Sync - 5. Crossplatform - 6. Easy to forward messages - 7. Stable/Trusted/(Encrypted?)

2, 4, and 5 are the main ones probably

- Telegram lacks 1 (fyi I use telegram) - WhatsApp lacks 1 and kinda 3 - Discord lacks 1 2 and 6 (I don't remember discord working well offline) - All other note apps lack 2, 4, and 5 (core features) and focus on markup instead.

Feature 1 - fast startup seems to be the only problem with existing messengers. The best solution would be a custom crossplatform telegram client or similar that piggybacks off existing trusted messengers for sync etc.

I made a web app with a similar goal, but with one additional feature: the text field is also the search field, as you type a new note, the existing notes get filtered based on the text of the new note: https://thinktype.app

Personally I love this concept! Looks really well done and I would pay for it once in a heartbeat, but the subscription requirement is an immediate deal breaker for me. This looks like a $2.99 - 9.99 one time purchase. I also don't understand the name.

I like it a lot. I currently mostly use Simplenote for quick note taking, but that often takes too long and I have to come up with a "note title", which I do not like. I just want to jot something down, quickly.

I'll be trying this over the next couple of days. My immediate worry is that the app will not find its business model and will get neglected and then disappear in a year or two…

This looks great! I use Signal's "Note To Self" quite heavily. I also use it when I want to have some pictures/files/links transferred between my phone and web browser (mainly for image uploads) without going through airdrop/dropbox.

Love that this is exactly like that, but with ability to organize as well.

Quick thoughts:

- This is a good fit for how I manage to-dos: a stream of actions that I can tag and process. But with no simple way to remove a tag or mark a thing as "done" I can't filter the tag streams and see only undone items

- £14.99 to use Apple's iCloud syncing which a) I already pay for and b) is free to you feels a bit much.

I used a journal app that worked like this for a little while. I ultimately stopped for a couple reasons.

1. It didn't allow editing of past posts. It was on the roadmap, but never came. To fix a typo or something, I'd have to copy the note, paste, fix, post again, delete the bad one.

2. I was always worried about putting anything important in there, as longevity was always a question. There was an export option, but if I remember correctly, it was in JSON. Which is fine I guess, but the idea of having to write some kind of parser to take that and turn it into something I'd actually want to put into whatever solution I might have in the future kind of annoyed me.

Does your app allow for editing past posts? How is data stored, markdown in a folder I can simply browse, or some kind of DB?

I like this a lot. It's very close to something I've wanted, basically a Twitter that no one else can see but me.

I could see myself using this all the time, and making it my primary note-taking app.

But I won't.

Here's why. In order to make an app a trusted and regular part of my daily flow, I have to trust that it will always be there for me. This has a subscription model. That means that if the company who makes it goes away, I can't trust that the app will still be there for me. I'd happily pay a one time fee to own it forever. But a subscription model is a deal-breaker for me.

Best of luck, hope there's an ownership-based version someday, I'd love to use it.

It looks great! I'm building https://histre.com/ and I find that some people do prefer to use a chat app they're already using. I built a Telegram bot so that they can keep taking notes on Telegram and not have to switch, but still get all the benefits of a real knowledge tool: https://histre.com/features/take-notes-with-telegram/ Perhaps you could build something like that to ease the transition?

The whole point of self texting is that its easy, quick and just works. If I don't have an apple product, I already can't access this app. Cool idea but not very useful when the labor is there.

You will take self-texting from my cold, dead hands.

I'll narrate my user journey trying this out, just for constructive feedback.

I did not understand what it is, from the post or the website. It sounds strange enough to get me to try it though. Using the hotkey popup entry box, immediately I hit a bug where the chatlog doesn't auto-scroll properly (I don't see what I last entered, unless I manually scroll). I think my Macbook is pretty stock, not sure what's causing it. I see "All Notes" in the main window, and a search box. So I can filter to messages that match my search. Okay, so it can do what Telegram or any chat app does - basically a chat room of just myself. I don't see any other buttons of features to try in the window or menu.

I kinda see the appeal for the very narrow niche of people who want (1) a hotkey entry box and (2) enjoy taking notes as a chat log and leaving them that way.

I am not (2). While I do take all my notes to a chronological inbox space at first, I need to be able to quickly triage and organize it, delete things that are done/obsolete, move things to categories and order by priority or due date. It doesn't look like this app has any abilities like that. I do like (1) but I already have many solutions for jotting down notes fast using hotkeys and such. Alfred/Tasker scripts, personally.

I've been searching for a tool that allows writing without any pressure, and strflow seems to be that choice. It has no unnecessary features, just simple and practical. Currently, the only feature I'm missing is font size adjustment on macOS. Before this, I was using Notion, but creating a new page to record "trivial thoughts" felt too heavy. Continuously adding records to a single page made it very difficult to search. Even with Notion AI enabled, it was still challenging to find the recorded content. I've subscribed to strflow to see if it can change my habits.

This is awesome! I truly want to continue texting myself, and push the texts to searchable note apps since iMessage query experience is 1/10 imo.

I found phonetonote [1] and they provide a textable 310 number which pushes to kinopio (which is how I found it), roam, logseq, zapier, etc. I think they have a telegram bot and chrome extension but I haven't tried them yet.

[1]: https://phonetonote.com/

Haven't heard of self-texting before, didn't even know it was possible. But I've been having a similar idea to this based off-of writing in a physical notebook. Basically my notes there end up sequentially, and I was missing this with my digital tools. My idea however was more of a "book mode" for a regular note-taking app where notes would be placed one after another on a long scrolling page.

I've been look for exactly this! (or planning to build it)

I abuse the telegram "Saved" channel to send myself thoughts, notes, reminders, pics, etc as if I'm chatting to the me who's back at his desk.

I wanted to get away from that and not rely on telegram.

Unfortunately I'm an android user so I'll probably have to keep using Telegram for the time being. Is there an android client in the works?

Very interesting app. I wish there existed more "timeline-based note-taking" apps. Are there any plans to let the user "aggregate" these notes in some form over time?

cf. "Fold" idea in https://github.com/srid/chronicle?tab=readme-ov-file#folds

Haha, love this. I use WhatsApp though and am able to organize/categorize ideas using a community that only I'm a part of :)

A bit late to this but I am working on https://tetr.app which serves a similar UI but also adds reminders, calendar sync, summaries and other features into the list. For a more native, Apple-centric experience, this is well done!

There's also the "Defer" app which works both on iOS and osX with a nice UX for quick todos https://apps.apple.com/us/app/defer-task-inbox/id6480421520?...

This is awesome! I use the iOS notes app in a kludgy/txt way. This is so much better. Great work getting this out there!

Just wanted to chime in and say that I LOVE Strflow. It's the only app that solves a specific but major pain point I've always had regarding digital note-taking.

I've been using it since it first came out and it's remarkable.

As someone who NEVER takes long or extensive notes, every note-taking app I tried left me with a bunch of note documents with just 1 or 2 lines of text.

Document-based note-taking apps simply don't meet my needs, and yet almost ALL note-taking apps out there treat a "note" as a single document. I get it; it's like notes in real life, but it doesn't work for me digitally.

Strflow's chat-style UI is flawless for this specific style of note-taking. There's nothing else like it in the market.

I love that it's minimalist and feels so lightweight. It just makes jotting down quick notes throughout the day so much easier.

Apologies for the self-promotion, but as several people here mentioned Telegram already...

From a similar motivation of minimizing friction when taking notes, I created a Telegram bot that saves all messages you send it into a Google Spreadsheet. Hashtags can be used to split the text into columns, if so desired. Besides jotting down quick thoughts, this is very handy for short-form journaling such as tracking expenses, workouts, mood, period, etc., with the added bonus of easy charting and summarization from within the spreadsheet. It also supports pictures and other attachments that are uploaded automatically to Google Drive.

Feel free to check it out, all feedback is appreciated: https://t.me/gsheet_notes_bot

Thank you for building this! I've been looking for something like this and even tried to build some for myself. As a non-developer, I've only been able to port some existing services and use very rudimentary structures. What I like about the chat-style interface is that I can always write little pieces that are easy to send, but hard to edit afterwards. It forces me to keep writing and sending, rather than stopping at a sentence and rethinking the wording and getting halted. I'm actually writing thesis and scientific papers this way. I'm curious about the data storage: I noticed that you mention data is stored in SQLite database. Can you share the path?

I just create a super minimal version using React with the help of Claude 3.5. It is a static site hosted with Github page. Currently it just supports basic channel creation, sending messages, export and import. No sync, no search. It's light weight and fast. Once the website loaded, it can work without internet. https://luvata.github.io/static/note-chat/index.html

Maybe rethink the name? People who text themselves can't even think of the Notes app, which is what they are literally making, let alone "StrFlow" which will definitely not be top of mind.

TxtNote? NoteChat? Note2Self? TextMe? Txt2Self?

There’s maybe some value in branding as ‘stream of consciousness note taking’ instead of ‘replacing texting’, to which it just adds more steps for the same thing.

To replace texting can I text a phone number that feeds into this app?

The key aspect of self texting is frictionlessness. On that note, has anyone used Notational Velocity? I've been looking for alternatives for years and haven't found anything that comes close.

One more app? I'm skeptical. https://xkcd.com/927/ is about standards, but it could easily be about apps instead.

My note taking takes place either classically via email with mutt in a terminal, not with these gargantuan desktop "apps", or with existing apps like Blitzmail on Android, or Joplin. Joplin just needs a WebDAV server to store notes and is available for multiple platforms, so I can easily swap notes between mobile and desktop/laptop.

Wow this is pretty cool! I'm gonna give a try. For me, this is actually what most of my slack usage is. Just writing notes to myself and then occasionally messaging others.

Congrats on your launch!

Simple and effective capture (ideally as few clicks and taps as possible) from mobile can be a huge enabler to capture those random thoughts that aren't.

I’ve been in the habit of emailing myself a lot, I’m excited to give this a try! I had thought of building this myself, so I’m glad I don’t have to :-)

Congrats on the launch!

The app looks simple and good but I struggle with the idea that I need to use yet another app for this. The reason for self-texting is that I am already using that app and now I can send quick notes to myself for later.

The odd thing is, I use most and all the messaging apps for this for some reason. My quick notes or links or text snippets I want to store are in multiple apps I already use.

Not an app for me but good luck!

I‘m sending emails with notes to my own gmail account since years (I have a filter that moves emails to myself to a notes folder). It works from everywhere, costs nothing, support all kinds of attachments. I can read them with every email client on every OS out there. No note taking app comes close to the flexibility and usability of emails.

I actually like saving stuff on Telegram but the only downside is the absence of markdown.

But it's not actually that big of a deal. Telegram supports tagging messages, saving files and more.

This is why I was creating writedown.app, to have something where I can quickly post my notes like Telegram but not have it turn into another app accounting for Telegram's lack of markdown.

A couple of questions. The notes seem to be markdown, which is good. But where are they stored? Are they just markdown files stored in an accessible folder? How easy is it to "export" the notes?

I use "self-texting" on WhatsApp for temp notes that I know I won't need beyond a couple of days and don't mind losing and Obsidian for others.

What I personally do is just send them to myself in SimpleX or Telegram, and they are available immediately on other platforms.

My girlfriend doesn't even self-text, she just texts me random stuff on whatsapp followed by "ignore that". When I told her about this app, she said it sounds great and she'll check it out.

I personally think there is something there. The app-switching problem is real though; maybe it would work better as a Whatsapp/Telegram bot.

Like any good yakshaving programmer, i built/use my own note taking / TODO app. Now I want to implement a feature where I can send a SMS to my app, and it will save the text/media to my database. Seems like a lot less friction than using the UI on my phones browser if I just need to save a quick note.

I use a variety of note taking systems, but one I use for quick notes is Signal. It's always there, syncs to my devices, I trust the encryption and privacy stance, and it has a reasonable search implementation. As a bonus, I can easily forward notes from other conversations, like reminders my wife sends me.

Looks good! I like the idea of not taking based on a timeline like this. Something to consider in the future is the context of the notes. It would be great to automatically have photos and locations added to a note. Tags and hashtags for people and themes would also be great.

Looking forward to seeing this evolve!

I like the format, an idea to take unstructured data and try to turn it into a plan (could be a paid extra?) would be for a language model to take a stab of taking the data and turning it into a live contextualised overview per notes.

That's then taking the pain away from trying to organise the unstructured thoughts

There is something in it. I find myself often sending notes to myself on various social media messaging apps :)

This is just what I wanted, with one exception — there’s no obvious way to export all the data in a machine-readable way. I’m not going to journal in something I don’t know I can move on with if the app dies or I move to a platform that doesn’t support it.

Currently I use a personal Discord server for this. Will give this a shot, seems really useful.

This looks really cool. Out of curiosity how long did it take you to build the application

MacOS and iOS already have the Notes app which already syncs across your devices....

Samsung screen off memo with a stylus has been the best note taking app for me. There’s an option to digitise the text and make it searchable. The big issue is it’s not cross platform.

Pretty cool, but I think I'll stick to using Matrix for the same purpose (in particular as I'm not an Apple user).

But I admit a custom app would be nice, still using Matrix for storage.

I made something similar, except by recording audio memos: https://whispermemos.com/

This sounds like exactly what I'm looking for, it sounds and looks great. Unfortunately, don't own an iPhone. Any plans to make an Android version?

do people not know about the built in dedicated note-taking app, literally called Notes, by default on the first page of their home screen

I created a note with a tag. Then I deleted the note, but the tag remains visible under 'Tags' in the left slide panel. fwiw

This is super interesting to me, and I am definitely going to check it out. It’s worth emphasizing that I am interested in this because it’s _simple_ and deliberately designed for this (unlike a discord message to yourself or channel or emailing notes to yourself or something).

That said, the single most important factor that determines whether this stays or goes for me is going to be whether it is faster/easier at capturing information than an email (which is how I currently send myself stuff).

This type of thing sits at the top of my personal knowledge funnel. For a tool like this it’s job (to me) is to cast as wide a net as possible and capture everything even tangentially related to whatever I happen to be doing at the snapshot in time when I decide I want to take a note, and then later if I decide that it was important after all I will go back and clean/curate, and move the information to another system like a wiki that has a better format for long form searchable information.

But the critical factor for me is the ratio between work required to capture information at the top of that funnel, and the amount/quality of information captured.

A classic example is recipes. If I search for baked chicken recipes, I am probably doing something like:

1. Search google 2. Open 5-10 tabs 3. Flip through them and pick one that looks good 4. Leave them open for a few days in case the one I try doesn’t end up being a keeper. 5. If I find one I like, move it to my KB under the recipes section

(The same workflow happens when I am looking for movies to watch, or checking out different ways to do something for work, etc)

So, there would be a lot of value for me in something that could make it easier to dump those 5-10 links into a note, intuit some tags, automate some metadata, and if I don’t come back to it in a few days, archive it but keep it searchable.

It’s possible to do this with existing tools now, but that gets us back to the original point: if tool A is faster/easier at it than tool B, tool A replaces B and becomes the incumbent.

All that aside, neat tool - I’ll be keeping an eye on this one!

I love the concept. As someone keeps everything on browser, I can see a demand for the web version.

This is neat but I can't seem to get the desktop version to sync - I even upgraded iCloud.

Kind of reminds me also what Google Wave could have been, if it wasn't killed.

I loved Squarespace Note, and this seems like a close relative. Downloading now.

Looking forward to trying this when I have a phone that runs iOS 17+.

Requiring a subscription for iCloud sync feels like rent-seeking.

Sounds great, I would use this. Will there be an android version?

Clever idea! Well done.

I just use google keep and apple notes, works fine for me.

whatsapp's and slack's text-myself was such a killer-feature for me! however, i think that was because i was already inside those apps constantly.

In telegram it's called "Saved messages".

So, I'm a bit of a to-do app collector. Any chance this will ever make its way to Android? I saw that it's written in Swift, so not holding my breath, but the idea is novel enough that I'd love to try it out.

I slack myself for this purpose.

E2EE?

This is cool, nice job

Built in electron?

> Not FOSS

> Only Apple ecosystem

> Paid tier for local service

:| Seriously?

I like the simplicity, and good job for shipping it.

“Privacy. Always. We promise”

This kind of stuff always gets me thinking. Why should I trust random app developers? I don’t even trust giant corporations with this.

I have seen Chrome extensions bought out and silently changed. And I have sold iOS apps myself!

Capitalism and Competition and Closed source Centralized software distribution just makes me always worried. Whatever promises are given (“open”AI!) can be either false already or enshittified tomorrow.

And then who is foolish for trusting it? https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-im...

Why not use open source?

Actually, the main reason is The Web. It doesn’t have an effective way to guarantee a file at a URL will be static, the way, say, IFPS does. And same goes for the App Store. Telegram struggles to tell you how to do verified builds.

I think we may need a “trusted app” with IPFS based distribution, and various auditing agencies publicly signing software updates. It doesn’t need to use a blockchain because code only ever accumulates, so it’s a crypto CRDT essentially. But it could be replicated across many networks including DHT based ones like IPFS, Bittorrent and Hypercore.

That at least reduces a user’s Trusted Computing Base to the OS and one app (like a crypto wallet or an authenticator or browser) that they trust. There should be a way to never update that app via the app store.

Frankly, I think privacy will never get better than that because the manufacturer can technically always exfiltrate stuff (as Windows already does and touted with Recall).

But for running TRUSTED PROGRAMS, at least, I feel there can be blockchains and other decentralized networks. Trusted programs (ie smart contracts) are valuable for communities to trust code, even if it doesn’t enforce privacy.