 So my note taking situation is a mess and it has been for a very long time And most of that is simply because I move between applications too often But also because I take notes in different places like I like to take notes on my phone I like to take notes on my computer every once in a while or at least when I had an iPad I took notes on an iPad, you know, so my note taking situation just has always been a bit of a mess And I'm always trying to find the solution, you know the One size fits all Solution that's going to make my note taking situation, you know, not a mess But I've never actually been successful and unfortunately the application we're gonna talk about today is also not the proper solution But I want to talk about it anyways So today we're gonna be talking about simple note now simple note is an application from automatic You might know automatic from the folks who make WordPress and they own tumblr And you know, they're kind of in the open source space, but also kind of not, you know They're a very weird organization. They like open source, but they also have a lot of proprietary stuff And simple note kind of is emblematic of that because it is open source Kind of right the clients are open source, but the server end is proprietary So it's a bit of a mess just like the rest of automatics, you know software is so Simple note itself looks like this So I'm gonna show you what simple note looks like and out of the box You can tell first of all it is an electron application so you can tell that right off the bat It doesn't follow GTK or QT theming at all. It does have a dark theme So if you were to open up the settings, which is done with control and comma You can go to display and then scroll down and change it to the dark theme But it doesn't I mean that looks like garbage to be honest with you It has the white bar up there at the top that doesn't seem to be able to go away Now I don't I don't think actually look that you can actually close that but I don't it doesn't seem to actually work I'm not sure that So it does have a dark theme preferably I would like to have dark theme be that the you know default But whatever Beyond the look and feel of it and it being an electron application the actual functionality a simple note is not Horrible the I do have many qualms with it, which is why I'm not switching to it but it does the most important part of a Cross-platform note-taking solution it syncs and it syncs for free So if you have a mobile phone it has applications for iOS and Android you can download it on your mobile device you can download it on your Linux or Windows or Mac and You can sign up for an account or use your WordPress account because you probably have one and then you can start making notes And they'll sync between devices you don't have to pay for anything like that and it does a very good job, right? At a basic note-taking level it does a good job of syncing those device You know notes between devices and it just works It's when you start wanting to have more than that where simple note kind of falls down now It does have tagging so down here along the bottom you can see you can add tags So this is a tag, you know, it works very well and you can search by tags So if I wanted to search for to-dos, you know, I get you can I can search for each of these tags or whatever So that's good, but it doesn't have projects or anything like that So if you wanted to have a you know a grouping of tags, you could you can't really do that as far as I can tell It doesn't have notebooks or anything like that So if you wanted to have you know all of your tags for all of your notes for work inside of its own You know notebook you can't do that As far as far as I can tell like I've been using this for a couple days I have not spotted a single place where you can create a notebook. So if it is here, it is very well hidden So that is a big feature that is available in a lot of other note-taking applications like Evernote and Notes Nook has notebooks and you can use Obsidian if you're going to use that that has notebooks and stuff like that So that is a big feature that is not here now I get it. They're trying to make this as simple as possible, but it's still it's a little bit too simple, right? So that's one feature that I would really like to see them have but that they don't Another one is that by default markdown is not enabled which just so by default you If you go up here to the three dots here You'll see this little check mark mark next to markdown. That is actually off So if you then try to do a heading, you know, and then Whatever, there's no preview up here because that's not actually markdown It's just a hashtag in front of a word You have to turn on markdown if you want to use it now That's not a you know that huge of a deal, but it confuses me like I just want that to be that should just be default I mean to me personally if you're note if you're gonna take notes You're gonna take them in markdown or at least it doesn't hurt anything to have that enabled by default I don't think so it really should be you know default also It doesn't automatically change into markdown once you've moved to another line Like it just stays into the raw markdown form if you want to see what it looks like You have to hit the preview button and then it looks like this up here, you know It's fine, but it adds an extra step, which I don't really care for all that much I want it to change automatically and just not met even bother with a preview mode another thing is the formatting itself so a lot of applications that support markdown and Use markdown have a lot of the markdown formatting tools in their format menu And I expected simple note to have that as well But they don't all the only format option they have is insert checklist Which you can do by the way with a markdown like this, you know Actually, I think it's like I can't remember it's dash and space and then bracket and then bracket just like that Okay, then it would change into a checklist now It does have the ability to link between notes if you wanted to do that so you could as you can see here use their auto fill thing that Sometimes pops up sometimes doesn't pop up to link between notes that exist And that is a good feature to have but again, it has been very hit or miss when it comes up So some I'm not actually sure like I think maybe you do Whenever you do the brackets, it shows you Videos or it shows you notes that you might want to link to but that can also be annoying if you're just Wanting to do a link. This is a link, you know like this and you know HTTPS, you know the The Linux cast or you know That's technically a link and if you you know previewed it then it would show you the link But but the fact that those two things have the same functionality You know, this brings up, you know The auto fill for linking to between notes and then it is also for links And I don't know even know if like if you don't have marked outs if you don't have marked out enabled does that show up It does so that's really weird because the whole linking functionality That you're seeing here the you know brackets and then parentheses is actually marked down but I don't have marked out enable now it but it still shows up so it's it's really weird and Not at all consistent and I just wish markdown was More of a first-class citizen when it comes to this application, but it's not that big of a deal the notebook thing the lack of a notebook Functionality is a much bigger deal than the markdown being, you know, not front and center now in terms of settings It has some is really what I'm saying is the best thing that I can say, you know It has you know a few different note display options So comfy condensed and then expanded so you can actually see the whole note if you wanted to or a good portion of the note You can change the line length so that it's you know, it looks different that way You can change how your notes are sorted and you can change how the tags are sorted It has a light and dark theme and it has the menu bar hard automatically, which actually I wonder if you actually it's not Automatic you just have to press the alt key. Nope still doesn't work. Maybe you have to close it We'll open it back up. Yeah, okay So if you want the ugly white bar to go away You have to close it and open back up and then press alt and then that's much better That makes it looks much much better. So good. Okay, so Honestly, that's all there is to this application You if you want to create a note you hit this button up here and then this is a note and then here's something really weird It I Automatically assumed that the best way to go to the next line would be to click But if you click down here like anywhere, it doesn't do anything. You actually have to enter which is you know Not intuitive for me at least I thought it was going to be a click down here into the next section But you have to enter This is technically the title right of the note But you can't click down into the body of the note you have to enter no to go It's so it's not intuitive for me at all. So that's that was really weird Another thing is like I said the mark down not being default. So you have to I have to click that back on Now it does have a public note functionality. So if you wanted to publish this to a Like a link so that you could share it you could do that and supposedly there is some collaboration here I'm not sure how that works. I haven't tried that out So if you wanted to collaborate you could technically do that add people via email and then you could collaborate on notes So that's really cool The fact that they have that though and not notebooks is really confusing to me, right? Notebooks seems like a you know an actual front feature that people would want in a note-taking application Before they would want collaboration, but maybe I'm wrong about that Maybe people think collaboration is more important than notebooks in a note-taking application Either way they have collaboration. They don't have notebooks as far as again. I can tell so honestly that is all there is in terms of Things about simple note. I did try out the mobile application as well And it is similarly lacking in features But it's well-designed. I will say that it has all the things that you'd expect You can there's a preview mode There is an option to see history and trash and collaborators and all that stuff You can add tags in the in the mobile application and It works fine. I It's very simple. Let's just put it that way it's not something that you would say is full featured and That's honestly the most disappointing part is it just it feels like there's so many features here that are just not there And on top of that the desktop client being an electron just You know, I mean, it's not it's not my cup of tea Now I do use electron applications all the time But the electron apps that I use put some effort into it right and to make it not look like an electron app But if you the first thing you notice when you open up simple note is that it's an electron app It looks Exactly like an electron app is supposed to look it looks like they just hit they took it and just took the default template of an electron app And then put their stuff into it You know, I mean it just that's the way it looks and that's a little bit disappointing to me So the look and feel not that great uber simple lacking features Could be better and again Here's me looking for another note-taking solution that disappoints me So that is it for me if you guys like or have comments on simple note You can leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. Also just to pause here I'm messing around with the cat the camera trying to make it look a little bit, you know better So I zoomed in a little bit. I'm not sure if I did a good job. It makes me look like I'm not looking at the camera It looks like I'm looking off to the side. I I don't know it's gonna it's gonna take some tweaking So I'll I'll get there Anyways, thanks to everybody who does support me on page on a page on comm slash Linux cast you can support me there or on YouTube or Libre libero pay those links me in the video description you can support me or you can follow me on odyssey and on Mastodon while I totally f that whole ending up, but anyways who cares All those links in the video description. You can check them out Thanks, everybody who does support me on page on YouTube you guys are all absolutely amazing without you the challenge It's not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thanks very very much for your support I truly do appreciate it guys are awesome Like I said just totally send all my appreciation to you guys. So thank you for your support. Thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next time