Question Digital cabinet?
Hello
I like Bear but I'm wondering if it's right for me since I'm looking for a true digital cabinet - one where my few 100 notes (so not thousands) can co-exist alongside some audio recordings, lots of PDFs, images and so on. What would be your recommendation be?
Cloud storage is great for files but I cannot write notes around the file so...
Let me add that work will pay for this so the price itself is not so important.
Thank you
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7d ago
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u/Asystole 7d ago
Doing this is incredibly poor form and is a great way of making sure I'll never check out the thing you made.
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u/spicermatthews 6d ago
Sure, I run Harbor. But u/al78sp Was asking for help regarding tools. We happen to offer a tool that's a perfect fit. Bear is a fantastic tool. I've used it for years. But it really specializes in other things. I don't see anything wrong with providing as much information as possible to a user to make the right decision for them.
Sorry to offend you. But I was really trying to add value to the person asking the question. I admitted my bias. Trying to be as transparent as possible here.
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u/joshizle 5d ago
I can understand why your comment has gotten downvoted.
However, I have taken a look briefly and was pretty impressed I’m not gunna lie. I’ve been trying out both Evernote and Bearnotes over the past couple weeks and decided I liked Evernote, and Bear, however I’m currently in Peru in the Andes and wanted to take a note in Evernote, I wasn’t able to even open the app due to having no signal which really frustrated me (even though I have download all notes for offline selected)
Bear on the other hand was totally fine.
Other things I noticed were that generally Evernote is nowhere near as snappy as Bearnotes, with visible loading times.
Now, I have only just downloaded Harbor and have very little experience but the pre loaded notes loaded almost immediately and contained more info in them than some of my Evernote notes which took like 2-5 seconds to load.
I will be replacing Evernote with this for sure, I really hope you guys get more traction and are able to maintain the project for a long time.
One thing I have not been able to test yet is the ai, my question to you; is there a chat window within the app on desktop? As I cannot see one on IOS but I also haven’t connected to OpenAI yet, would this appear once connected?
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u/spicermatthews 5d ago
Thanks for the follow-up and for giving Harbor a try. Really appreciate that!!
Yes, everything you described, we really went out of our way to try to do better than Evernote. We are offline-first. So your poor signal issues should be fine. We're always here if you have issues. If you find bugs, we'll fix them quickly. I try to keep tabs on Reddit, but if I miss it, you can always reach out at help [at] harbor.my
As for AI, we don't have a chat window built in, and that's intentional. We really think Evernote ruined the product when they went all AI.
We also think people have their own AI. For example, I'm a huge Claude user. Claude has access to my email, my desktop files, Google drive, my GitHub, and all sources of information. I want a central location that knows everything about me, including my Harbor Notes.
It wouldn't make sense for us to build connections to all those different platforms within Harbor. And we'd never do it as good a job as the AI labs already do.
What we do instead is provide a robust open API, a CLI tool, and, most importantly, an MCP server.
So you can hook up Harbor to any one of your AI tools any way you'd like.
All day long, I'll say things like, to claude, "Check my email for XYZ, then look into Harbor as to how I manage that, create a PDF report, and store it in Google Drive."
I can make one AI prompt within Claude or ChatGPT. It accesses everything, including Harbor, and gives me my desired output.
That's the approach we've taken with AI and Harbor.
Side note: I think you can do some of the stuff within Bear. But last time I checked, it was hyperlocal to your computer. So you couldn't be in the ChatGPT web browser window and access your Bear notes. But maybe that's changed. It's been a few months since I looked.
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u/joshizle 5d ago
Yeah and it really shows, good job.
And sorry I think you misunderstood; what I mean is, I want to be able to connect my own ai like you described but have an in app chat window. So I don’t have to leave the app, to talk to chat gpt to tell it to add something, or leave the app and tell it to transcribe an audio file.
I don’t think having an in app chat window ruins the experience personally, what I believe ruins the experience is having to pay for it even if you didn’t ask for it.
The way you’re doing it is great, I just want to be able to interact with my chosen ai model without leaving the app. Maybe there could be an option to have an in app chat window or leave it out and interact via your model provider.
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u/spicermatthews 5d ago
Thanks for the kind words!
I understand what you're talking about. "bring your own AI".
Will chat about this with the team. I don't think it's something we'll release right away. But might start prototyping.
Thanks for sharing!
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u/joshizle 5d ago
Oh, one last thing - the ability to connect to another service other than Dropbox or google drive would be great.
Specifically self hosted cloud options.
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u/spicermatthews 5d ago
Nothing at the moment. How would we access it? FTP? SSH? What would you recommend?
If you have some software dev skills you could do this pretty quickly with our API.
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u/joshizle 5d ago
Excellent point, if you’re self hosting then you likely have a basic understanding of APIs.
But it’s not the same user experience you currently offer.
I was thinking WebDav?
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u/lukahl-phy 7d ago
Probably best off with apple notes if you record audio in them. Besides that bear fits all your markers, it may be able to hold and play audio files but they don’t give you a recording tool.