notes VS mockttp

Plume is actually based on my open source note-taking app Notes[1]. You can already get it on Flathub, Snap Store etc. Notes uses just a simple plain text editor while Plume has a completely revamped block editor that I built from scratch. That parts of Notes used in Plume will remain open source (per the MPL license) but the rest of the code will be closed source. At least for the time being.

[1] https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes

Plume is built on top of my open source note-taking app Notes[1]. Since Plume is based on Notes, I'll of course comply with the MPL license and release all existing files that were changed (and must stay MPL licensed).

But I recently discussed my reasoning to go close-source with Plume[2]. I've been working night and day (every day) converting 4 cups of coffee into code for the last 4.5 months to create Plume. I don't want to risk not being rewarded sufficiently for it. But, I'm 99% sure that I'll either open source the core block editor or the entire app in the future.

[1] https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38584960

2. Each note is just a simple plaintext in the underlying data (although currently stored in a database, but in a future update we'll convert the database to an arbitrary folder).

So you can create beautiful and advanced notes, easy. In a non-proprietary format (when that future update arrives). All while using a resource efficient and fast software that is cross-platform.

[1] https://www.get-plume.com/

[2] https://www.get-notes.com/

My Noets app[1] editor is built on top of the Markdown syntax of QOwnNotes.

My new app Plume[2] is built on top of Notes but features an advanced block editor and a new design.

[1] https://www.get-notes.com/

[2] https://www.get-plume.com/

Indeed, I want this feature badly myself to create wikis and such. There's an open issue[1]. We'll definitely implement that some day.

[1] https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes/issues/431

I mostly disagree. Like you said, Qt is the best native GUI toolkit available today. And that is a hard achievement. There are many tradeoffs (some you pointed out) but the open source community seems to find a way around those limitations. There are thousands of open source libraries you can plug-in into your Qt app to overcome many of its limitations (although some remain, like how can't we still not easily change caret/cursor color of QTextEdit??).

Unlike you, I like the direction where Qt is taking. I think QML and Qt Quick are great. I just implemented a feature in my note-taking app that turns Markdown text into Kanban board using QML and the experience has been great (https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes/pull/574). I'm planning to continue transition from QWidgets to QML/Qt Quick.

I do worry of the continuous friction with open source development and hate the online installers as well. I can recommend this useful tool https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall that allows you to easily download prebuilt Qt binaries. I hope they can revert their approach on that.

I beg to differ, QML is great. I'm implementing a feature that converts all tasks in Markdown editor to a Kanban view (written in QML) and it's been so easy to do. Work in progress GIF here: https://imgur.com/a/sZNHnp6

And it's even crazier that most of it compiles to C++. It's so fast to develop with it, and runs so fast.

BTW, source code here: https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes/pull/574

Thanks! Even more awesome features and improvements are coming soon (:

We're on Github here btw: https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes

Interesting how the world has changed since the 2000s here - nowadays the ecosystem is far better, so it's much easier to set up tools to mess around with this, but the use of HTTPS everywhere makes it more difficult in more advanced cases (e.g. you'll often need to fight certificate configuration in individual clients).

In part because of that, browser extensions have become the main way to go for this kind of local web modification, but now there's new restrictions slowly coming in there too.

If you want to mess around with HTTP-level rewriting for yourself though, I maintain a Node.js library for easily writing tiny custom HTTP & HTTPS-intercepting proxies that makes it very easy: https://github.com/httptoolkit/mockttp/. Others have built more specific tooling on top too, like this web page modification proxy: https://github.com/OnkelTem/wmod-proxy

There's a walkthrough for setting up a quick local proxy & rewriting your own browser traffic here: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/javascript-mitm-proxy-mockttp/

> What did the first iteration of this product look like? Was it more or less similar, or substantially different from the spirit of httptoolkit today?

Technically, the first iteration was https://github.com/httptoolkit/mockttp - an HTTP integration testing library for JS. Not a desktop app at all. I'd originally built that for testing uses, but as it matured I realised that with a UI and automated setup tools it'd be useful as a complete product (but Mockttp still powers all the internals today, and you can use it directly to build your own custom intercepting proxies too).

For the first real product, the very first public 'launch' was literally a landing page with some demos of the potential UI and a signup form, just to test interest and check it wasn't a terrible idea. The results looked promising, so that was followed a few months later by a very basic but usable free version (entirely read-only, and only supporting Chrome interception) with the freemium features on top appearing a few months after that.

> How did you go from (some semblance of a product) to first sale? / acquiring first customer?

Once I announced the paid version (a blog post to my tiny set of newsletter signups, plus a little response on HN/Reddit/Product Hunt etc) I got a handful of paying customers (but certainly less than 10) within 24 hours. Nice but not a meaningful income, and from that wild peak it dropped back down to maybe one new customer per week or so afterwards, so it was quite slow going at the start.

However, those paying customers (and the mere fact of offering a paid service generally) resulted in _much_ better feedback. Rather than "this is cool" all of a sudden I had real demands for specific features, from people with concrete use cases and money in their hands. The initial paid features were just made up off the top of my head, and honestly didn't create a particularly compelling paid feature set. It's very hard to really know what people will pay for! That feedback was incredibly unbelievably useful to fix that.

From there, building out the key features people asked for over the following 6 months boosted things very significantly, and started to get things moving for real, and then you get into a virtuous circle, where more users => more feedback => better product => more users => ...

> did you spend anything on marketing/distribution?

I tested advertising at a small scale for a few months, but it didn't really work great. I think largely because it's very very freemium - 99% of users pay nothing - so the acquisition cost for a paying user doesn't make sense, and also honestly I don't have much experience with ads and I'm not sure I'm any good at writing them.

Content marketing meanwhile has worked great, keeps passively returning dividends, and cost nothing. I've tried to fill the blog (https://httptoolkit.com/blog/) exclusively with detailed & high-value original content (detailed breakdowns of a recent HTTP security vulnerability, not "top 10 HTTP libraries for Python") which shares well on social networks for an immediate burst of traffic, and then (in most cases) provides both a long-term SEO boost and constant incoming traffic on related topics that converts into users. That starts slow, but again steadily builds up over years, if you keep working at it. Content marketing + SEO are pretty much the only marketing channels I work on right now.

> why would I prefer this to mitmproxy?

Compared to mitmproxy, HTTP Toolkit:

- Has fully automated setup for most browsers, docker containers, Android, all Node.js/Ruby/Python/PHP/Go applications run from intercepted terminal windows, all JVM processes, any Electron apps etc etc. Some of these automated setup steps are very difficult to do manually (e.g. intercepting Android devices, where you can't normally install your own certificates nowadays, or intercepting Node.js, which completely ignores system proxy settings) so this can make a huge difference in non-trivial case.

- Supports targeted interception (intercept just one app/container/browser window) whilst all mitmproxy's manual setup steps are generally focused on helping you intercept your whole machine at once. Intercepting the whole machine means very noisy interception and means that rewriting traffic interferes with all other usage of your machine. Targeted interception means you can do neat things like run two HTTP Toolkit instances independently at the same time, and means you don't need root privileges or permanent configuration settings.

- Has generally friendlier UI & UX (imo). For example, mitmproxy uses a unique custom syntax (https://docs.mitmproxy.org/stable/concepts-filters/) of special characters to define matching & rewriting rules, or requires you to write a full python script. HTTP Toolkit lets you click 'new rule' -> 'GET requests' -> 'match regex ' -> 'then reply with ', and then immediately start injecting automated fake responses. From HTTP Toolkit you can then build named groups or these rules, and import & export them (as JSON) to build libraries you can share with your colleagues.

- Provides lots more background information automatically: e.g. built-in documentation for all standard HTTP headers, body autoformatting for lots more formats, syntax highlighting, code folding, regex searching etc of request & response bodies, plus 'this is how and why this response could be cached' caching explanations, OpenAPI-powered docs for recognized endpoints on 1400+ APIs, etc.

- Includes advanced features to do things like exporting requests as ready-to-use code for various languages & tools, or automatically testing the performance of different compression algorithms on a given response body.

- Is more easily scriptable for automation & end-to-end testing, because all the HTTP-handling internals are usable as a standalone open-source JS library: https://github.com/httptoolkit/mockttp

That said, mitmproxy has been around longer, it's definitely more mature, and it was a big inspiration in many places. It's a great project! It does have some advantages of its own:

- If you strongly prefer a CLI interface, mitmproxy is very focused on that, and HTTP Toolkit is not. HTTP Toolkit could support that too in theory (the backend & frontend are independent) but it definitely doesn't right now, and it's not high on my todo list (contributions welcome though!)

- Mitmproxy is primarily scriptable in Python. You can build automation around HTTP Toolkit's internals using mockttp, but that's JS, and it's mostly usable standalone right now, rather than integrated into normal workflows within the app. If you want very complex scripted rules, mitmproxy has a few more options right now, and lets you do things in python instead of JS, which some people will prefer.

- WebSocket debugging - this is coming for HTTP Toolkit soon, but it's not available today. WebSockets get passed through fine, but they don't appear in the UI, and you can't set up mock rules for them.

> I'd be interested both in why I'd prefer the open source httptoolkit and pro?

There's a list of Pro features at https://httptoolkit.tech/pricing/. Note that it's all open source, even the Pro code, everything.

The general idea is that everything you need to intercept, inspect and manually fiddle with traffic is totally free. Anything optional that most users don't need, but which is helpful for advanced usage or enterprise use cases, requires Pro.

HTTP Toolkit works on Windows, Mac and Linux. Head to https://httptoolkit.tech website and download the relevant package to install it.

I think MITM should provide a lot of features for that please checkout mock http https://github.com/httptoolkit/mockttp

Same with Telerik Fiddler recently. Good piece of software for debugging network requests on Windows.

Was free for as long as I've known it existed. Telerik recently bought by 'Progress' (ironic), software re-written in Electron and now charges a subscription to use it.

Glad HTTP Toolkit is now available free for most standard tasks - https://httptoolkit.tech/

HTTPToolKit has been my go-to for sniffing out packets from mobile apps in recent months.

I'd highly recommend https://httptoolkit.tech/ for that explorative GUI phase. I found it recently and the rule configuration, UI and interception setup is significantly better than Charles/Fiddler/Proxyman.

Do they want open source versions to get more popular? Because this is how you do that. HTTP TOOLKIT seems pretty decent, does anyone else have a recommendation?