Piece VS Trilium Notes

Some backstory of Piece in case you are interested:

This was initially a rewrite of one of my side projects during college years ago. It was originally implemented with Electron (https://github.com/PolarisChen/Piece), resulting a more than 100M size for such a tiny app. At that time, Electron just came out, and I thought the best way to get to learn something is by making something with it, which I still find legit. Anyway, the code haven't been touched for a long time, even though I used the app personally every day.

Months ago, I finally got some free time and decided to review the app, and concluded easily to rewrite it with Swift. There were some obstacles during the rewrite (https://twitter.com/polchen_/status/1433704888366604292), but eventually I made it. I tweeted about some comparison in terms of UI/UX, app size, memory usage (https://twitter.com/polchen_/status/1429224010852626440).

But I wanna make it more than just a rewrite, so I added some features that I personally needed, and just posted it on Mac App Store as a freemium app.

You might notice I mentioned "personally" several times. It's true. I'm not quite confident whether others would have the same need. Personally (again), I found Piece really useful in my daily life/work, as I can quickly bring it up with a global shortcut and write down anything in my mind, ideas, to-dos, random thoughts, etc; or use it as a outline prompter when I write, present or talk, since it's always floating-on-top, and I can quickly press the same shortcut to hide it when I don't need it anymore. It's a note-taking app, but don't get me wrong, it's not to compete with those branding note-taking apps like Notion. It's just a tiny app. I think what Piece to other formal note-taking apps is more like what working memory to long-term memory.

There are some other features like paste-to-app, copy-to-piece, clean reminder, additional themes and highlight syntax. But I would leave for those who are interested to experience them with the app.

I have a lot of ideas for future development. I even think about making an iOS version. But for now, I think I just wanna verify it and see if there are users like me. Thanks for reading the story and using the app :-D

Tried Obsidian for a while, loved a lot about it, but....mmm.

Obsidian out of the box is a bit limited; plugins are great and add tons of features, but then you start hitting issues with plugin maintainers abandoning plugins you rely on, or needing to make a decision between three different plugins that all do the same thing slightly different. Depending on your use case and expectations that may not be a big deal, but I really missed not having what I personally saw as core features not being officially supported.

(Also, FWIW, the sync service is a bit pricy for what it is. I get that it's how they're trying to monetise it, but...I would have preferred another pricing model, even if the total cost was just as high.)

I've personally switched to Trilium Notes which I'm finding nicer. One element I particularly like is that it has first class suport for notes being able to exist at multiple places in a tree simultaneously. I know it's a very personal thing, but for me personally being able to file notes in multiple locations "clicks" in a way that tags didn't.

Trilium Notes: https://github.com/zadam/trilium

A nice writeup on ways to use Trilium (although much of it applies to Obsidian too): https://github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Patterns-of-personal-k...

Then you come across Trilium and drop the mic

[0] https://github.com/zadam/trilium

I move between machines a lot and prefer an online tool; I'm self-hosting Trilium Notes https://github.com/zadam/trilium ; this looks a bit cleaner but without syncing (or server-side storage) it misses a bunch of potential use cases.

Try outline or trillium