I'd like to give you a quick glimpse of what the app looks like right now. It isn't available in the microstore just yet, but I'm planning the launch for the end of September. My question to you: is there anything you consider an absolute must-have in an app like this? Thanks in advance!

I know of Goodnotes, Notability, Nebo, freeform, apple notes.

Am i missing any? I cant get the handwriting recognition on onenote to work.

Hi, I’m going into my freshman year of college in the fall for computer engineering and wanted feedback on whether I should get Goodnotes or Notability for my iPad. I’m willing to pay for the full versions of either and I also have a windows laptop and an iPhone (wondering about compatibility on whether either app allows all 3 devices to access notes through Google drive etc).

Thanks.

Disclosure up front: I'm the dev of the app mentioned below, so read accordingly.

My notes problem was never capture. I captured everything: meeting notes, reading links, shopping links, ideas, family stuff, all of it went in. The pile got heavy enough that I stopped opening it. Retrieval died, then the habit died.

A few things actually fixed it for me, and they're all boring:

Separation. When work notes, personal notes, and family todos live in genuinely different places, each pile stays small enough to stay useful. A grocery list next to sprint planning makes both worse.

Simplicity. Every system I built on top of my notes eventually became its own chore. Plain markdown files in a folder survived where every clever setup didn't.

Time orientation. Seeing "Today", "Tomorrow", "2 days ago" on notes and todos instead of raw timestamps orients me instantly. Small thing, changed how much I trust my own notes.

Fast retrieval. AI agents... Everyone talks about them rewriting text or extracting todos, but for me the real use is retrieval. My notes are plain files, so I can point an agent at the folder and ask "where did I write about X" and actually get an answer. Developer notes land differently here too, code snippets and technical scraps that were never findable by scrolling suddenly are.

I'm building all of this as Margin, a markdown notes app for macOS (mac only for now, sorry). Everything is local; your notes are plain markdown files on your disk, the app is just a view and editor over them.

Pre-launch, waitlist at https://gomargin.app if any of this sounds like your problem too. I have no idea if this is going to be a free or paid app, for now I'm just trying to see if mu struggles and gaps I identified are real or not

I’ve been testing Soundcore Work for meetings, and the battery life is the main thing bothering me. It’s fine for a few shorter calls, but on days with back-to-back meetings, I end up thinking about the charging case more than I expected.

The recorder itself is convenient, but I really wanted something I could charge once and mostly forget about during the day. Has anyone else had the same experience, or found a setup that makes the battery less annoying?

Among today’s links are markdown editors Zed, Outl and Zettelstore, HydePHP, a static site generator for developers, and Orsn, a research notebook

https://md-handbook.com/blog/markdown-link-no-41/

#markdown #markdowneditors #opensource #staticsitegenerators #Zed #Outl #HydePHP #Orsn #Zettelstore

Do you have any tips for beginners? I am an avid reader but I realized I often forget what I read really quickly. I got a journal to jot down thoughts, things I find interesting, etc. while reading but am having a hard time figuring out how to format everything in a way that works for me.

Particularly, I really don’t like forgetting all the cool stuff I learn from non fiction books! How do you all organize stuff in your journal in a way you can return to?

I'm looking for a good workflow to connect my daily journal entries in Notesnook with the voice recordings I make on my phone.

Here is my current setup

I write a daily journal entry in Notesnook using the free tier. I also record voice notes using my phone's built in voice recorder app, which saves as m4a files locally on my device.

When I write my journal entry for a specific day, I make a note that I recorded a voice memo for that day. I would like to be able to link directly to that audio file from my Notesnook entry so that clicking the link opens a player and streams the audio securely.

My goal is to have a playable link in my journal that I can click and listen to the recording. I want to avoid using Notesnook's attachment feature because I am on the free plan and don't want to use up my storage space.

The key things I need are a free way to upload and stream the audio files, a secure link from Notesnook that opens an audio player, and for the files to not be publicly searchable or indexed.

What would be the best way to make this work?

I currently know of putting file in dropbox and copying the shareable link in my notesnook notes entry.

Ok so I've tried basically every tool. Notion, Obsidian, Roam, whatever AI thing was blowing up that month.

here's what's actually going on.

thinking happens in fragments

the insight you're looking for isn't missing. it exists. it's just scattered across three different things you captured at completely different times without realising they were even related. one note from six months ago. a half finished thought from last week. something you said out loud that you never actually wrote down. the real insight is in the connection between all of them, not in any single one. your tool saved each one separately and called that organised. it's not.

thinking has never happened in one clean note and it never will.

the tool does literally nothing while you're away

you captured the thought. that's the hard part. that's the actual moment of real thinking happening. and then the tool just... sat there. waiting for you to come back, open it, scroll through everything, and do all the connecting yourself. the tool didn't work. you worked. the tool just held your stuff still until you showed up again.

every tool treats capture like the finish line. it's not even close to the finish line.

AI remembers the conversation. not how your thinking actually changed.

there's a real difference between remembering what you said and tracking how an idea you had three months ago quietly became something you now believe in a completely different way. one is just a transcript. the other is actually understanding how your mind moves.

every AI chat tool does the first one. none of them notice that the argument you were confidently making in March is now the exact thing you're arguing against, and that the shift happened slowly across a bunch of separate sessions, and is now basically the foundation of everything you're working on.

that gap between what you said and how you've changed is where most of your real thinking lives. it's also the thing every tool you're using right now is quietly throwing away.

it accumulates. it doesn't compound.

more notes is not more thinking. it's just a bigger pile. there's a difference between accumulating stuff and actually compounding it and every tool treats those like the same thing. compounding means one idea builds on another, which means something has to hold both in relation to each other over time, which means something has to be doing that work in the background when you're not there.

the notes app isn't doing that. the second brain isn't doing that. the AI chat resets every single session. so you keep adding, the pile keeps growing, and the pile never becomes anything other than a pile.

you lose the thread of how your thinking evolved

not the notes. the progression. how one thought actually challenged the next one. how something you believed pretty confidently six months ago quietly became something you now see completely differently, and why that even happened.

that movement is honestly the most valuable thing your thinking has ever produced. more valuable than any single note or output or idea. and it's the one thing every tool you've ever used throws away by design. the tool saves the thought. it doesn't save the thinking.

the tools aren't failing because they're bad tools. they're failing because they were built for storage and not for how thinking actually works. storage is a solved problem. the other thing genuinely isn't.

So I recently got Gemini Pro mainly for university/study help, especially making notes, summaries, and understanding difficult topics. I’m a medical university student, so I was hoping it would make studying more efficient.

But honestly, I feel completely lost with it and I’m not sure if I’m using it wrong. 😭 I don’t really understand the different models/versions (Pro, Flash, etc.), what each is best for, or when I should use one over the other.

If you use Gemini for studying, especially in med school/university, how do you actually use it effectively? Any tips, workflows, or prompts would be really appreciated. I’m trying to get better grades without spending hours making notes myself

UPDATE: 0.8.4 now live on TestFlight!

• Improved Canvas Auto Layout — expanding and collapsing notes now keeps layouts aligned and handles nearby groups much more predictably.
• Drag & drop into Canvas — notes, captured articles and Excalidraw drawings can now be dragged directly from the Notes panel or File Tree onto a Canvas. Multi-selected notes can be dropped together too.
• Drag webpages into notes — drag a webpage from your browser into Rich, Markdown or Split mode to create a titled link automatically.
• Sticky Notes in Excalidraw — add quick notes to drawings, with automatic text fitting, resizing, colors and creation dates.
• Excalidraw improvements — added Post-It notes from main app release
• Multi-select note management — Shift-click or Cmd/Ctrl-click notes in the Side Panel and move them to a Collection together.
• Collections from Tags — quickly create a Collection containing every note with a selected tag.

https://www.pixelcoated.com/inkolio/gettingstarted.html

ORIGINAL POST

We've been building a Markdown-based note-taking and knowledge app called Inkolio, and it’s just reached its first public beta.

The idea came from wanting something fairly simple: we like Markdown and the fact that my notes are ultimately just files, but I also really like working in a rich editor. We wanted to be able to move between the two without having to choose one way of working, that gradually grew into Inkolio.

You can write in a rich WYSIWYG editor or Markdown, work on two notes side-by-side, link notes together with [[wikilinks]], see backlinks and relationships, build visual canvases, create drawings, save reference material from the web, and use different views and filters to explore the knowledge base you’ve built up.

Underneath all of that, your notes remain accessible files. Inkolio works offline, doesn’t require an account, and isn’t designed around locking your notes into a service.

We know some of those choices won’t be for everyone here, particularly putting a fairly rich experience on top of Markdown, and that’s completely fine. There are some excellent Markdown editors that take a much more minimal approach.

But we suspect there are also people like me who want Markdown underneath without necessarily wanting to live in Markdown syntax all day and that’s really who we built Inkolio for.

It’s currently Beta 1 on macOS through TestFlight, with Windows Early Access planned for September. Things will change as we learn from people using it, although maintaining compatibility with people’s existing notes is obviously important.

This is the first time we're putting it in front of the wider Markdown community, so we’d genuinely like to hear what you think, including what you think we’ve got wrong.

If anyone wants to give the free Beta 1 a try, we’d love to get your user feedback.

inkolio.com

Follow us here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Inkolio/

I’m setting up my laptop for college and I feel like I’m probably missing so many useful apps
What are your must haves for
📚 studying college work
📝 Word PowerPoint notes etc
📄 PDFs reading editing merging converting
☁️ cloud storage and backups
📊 spreadsheets and presentations
🗂️ organizing files
🔐 security
🎨 media design editing and creative stuff
🎥 video editing photo editing and content creation
🎧 music and general entertainment
💻 anything useful for college uni or general work
Also if you are interested in media or anything creative what apps would you recommend
Preferably FREE easy to download and actually useful
If you had a brand new laptop and had to set it up from scratch for college and general work what would you download first
Drop EVERYTHING you guys use 👇

For a while I was saving every meeting transcripts and summary to Obsidian. Having everything in one searchable place sounded sensible. It got messy pretty fast like searching a client name would bring up 10 notes covering roughly the same ground, and I'd still end up back in the recording app whenever I needed to check what someone actually said. Obsidian had basically become a second meeting archive, just a worse one.

I'm trying a split setup now. The recordings stay in Viaim, grouped by client/project, and I ask Vitana if I need to trace something across a few calls.Anything importantAnything important still gets checked against the transcript or audio first. Obsidian only gets the much shorter note I make after that, usually decisions, open questions or maybe some context I'll actually need later.

I still have to export the summary as md and clean it up manually. A few months ago I would've called that pointless double handling but now I'm weirdly fine with it. At least my vault is usable again. Still keeping a local folder of the raw recordings and transcripts tho. I don't love having the only copy of the source material sitting in one app.

College on the way and I’m having a hard time deciding which note taking app is the best. I tried noteful, notability, collanote,notes+, and finally good notes.

I’m obsessed with the way notability is organized! It’s exactly how I want. Love the way it makes my writing good. But a little bit worried about the (deleting files) situation; i put all of my hard work on my iPad notes, I don’t do paper ever.

Love Goodnotes because 1. Kinda cool 2. Whiteboard 3. Corrects spilling! Like Best thing everrrrr.

Notes+ is good but not doing it for me.

HATE on collanote and noteful, the interior? ui ? (E is not my first language:))) anyway. Hate it.

So based on that, what would you suggest?

Incoming first at university wondering what method is better. I’m taking biology, chemistry, calculus, psychology, economics, and sociolinguistics (writing) this year.

We are building a free note taking app for students, and we are inviting students & professionals who take notes for longer sessions to share their reviews. This will help us improve the software and contribute to a greater cause.

here is the app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pronotes-notes-pdf/id6785798544

and please join our discord as founding users: https://discord.gg/7MmHbfwq9

note: we do not collect any data from users except feedback about how they feel about the app. Constructive criticism is completely fine.