NoteApps.Info provides a browsable, screenshot-rich directory of note taking apps. Does the world really need a web site just to catalog note taking apps? It seems a little excessive, no? There can't be that many note taking apps to sort through?
--- Meanwhile, back in the Twittersphere --
And so a purpose is born: to help fix what seems to be a growing tyranny of choice between all these damn note taking apps.
The data provided by NoteApps is collected by a professional researcher who is contracted on behalf of Alloy.dev. Since one of Alloy's products is Amplenote, it stands to reason that if our app is good, we'd have a lot to gain from an objective and transparent accounting of similar-seeming note taking apps. However, we recognize the challenge to objectivity inherent in financing the collection of this data. We've tried to be as thoughtful as possible about creating principles that we hope will maximize the objectivity (= utility) of the data collected. If you have ideas on how we can update the site to improve transparency or objectivity, drop us a line at hello@noteapps.info?
The website design, implementation, and maintenance are currently handled by Alloy staff in our spare time.
linkNoteApps Guiding Principles
The long-term success of this project depends on whether it remains regarded as objective, transparent, and useful. These are the specific principles we believe can maximize our success across these domains:
[Objective]
linkDescribe features with sufficient precision to minimize "judgement calls"
Having a non-employee collect this data forces the feature spec to become precise and specific, so features can be judged unambiguously, regardless of the evaluator. For example, "The note app provides editing tools that allow an image in a note to be cropped (e.g., to remove the left half of it)" is specific enough that we have yet to find a note app that possesses it. 🤣
When a user or note app maker disagrees with NoteApps assessment of a feature's availability, we take that as signal that either we screwed up (in the earlygoing, the most likely explanation--we'll fix it!), or the language for the feature was too ambiguous. When it's the latter, we can seek to amend language or split the feature to maximize how precisely it can be described.
[Transparent & Useful]
linkCreate a process by which users can vote for the inclusion of additional features and apps
To start, we've created two publicly visible voting boards: one for which apps should be added next, and another for which features should be added.
[Transparent]
linkProcess in place to adjudicate disagreements
If any note taking app featured on this site submits evidence to argue on behalf of a feature's availability, and NoteApps' researcher can not come to agreement on the availability of that feature in spite of a good faith effort, we will use an icon to demarcate that there is disagreement about the feature's availability. If this happens, it will be taken as a strong signal that the feature's description is probably too vague and should be split or otherwise amended.
[Useful]
linkNot a popularity contest
There are 101 other sites built to let you (and your bots) upvote the heck out of whichever app you think is best. It isn't an area of need. NoteApps is intended to be a source whose value derives from its objectivity, and deciding which reviews to include is inherently subjective, so it's out.
[Objective & Transparent]
linkHand it off
Within the next few years, we will know we have succeeded if we can hand NoteApps off to a competing note app to maintain. If we succeed in this, we will (save a lot of cash and) take it as proof that transparency has increased in the note taking space vs what it had been in dark days of 2020.
linkWhat won’t we cover?
Apps that don’t bill themselves as note taking apps. There is a growing set that bill themselves as "idea generation tools," and similar, but that’s not exactly what we’re trying to capture. There will be more than enough apps to browse if we just stick to note taking apps, with the occasional "business productivity tool" sprinkled in for good measure.
In general, the foremost factors that will influence whether an app gets added: 1) how much time our researcher has to add new apps on top of maintaining the features in current set of apps 2) how many votes the app has received on the leaderboard
We go into much more depth in our FAQ if you'd like to understand what we're looking to achieve and how we intend to achieve it.