Comment by danpalmer
2 years ago
Hey! Nice app, I've always had scratch pads around for things like this and never had a particularly good solution for them. Soulver is nice but too maths focused, a tab in VSCode in nice but it's a pain to manage multiple buffers for different languages. I like the feature set here.
A few bits of feedback for potential improvements or clarifications...
- I couldn't find the shortcut to change the language until I hovered over the status bar element for it. It should have a menu item with the keyboard shortcut on it.
- Toggling light/dark mode doesn't live in the status bar in any other app I know, probably best to put it in settings.
- Doesn't respect the system light/dark mode, it should by default (but perhaps with an app specific override as some people like that).
- Check for update doesn't live in the status bar either in any other app I've used, this could be in settings.
- If there's not enough stuff to put in a status bar, maybe drop the status bar? It feels like things have been scraped together to justify having it.
- The green branding is ok, but it's quite a strong personality for an app to have. Do you want the app to have a strong personality? (Nothing else about it suggests so). Perhaps consider a more neutral palette that fits in with macOS more, or perhaps several choices for accent colour including a neutral option.
- 427MB is huge. Thankfully it's not particularly memory hungry at least with small documents, but damn that's a big bundle for what it is. Why is it bundling ffmpeg? Does it really need GLES? Is a base Electron framework really >300MB?
- Options for a keymap, but after deleting the initial content I've lost the actual keymap! Would be great to have a help reference in the app, or at least a docs page on the website that the help menu links to.
- Would be great to be able to change the font.
- I don't understand the saving model. Where is the data saved? Can I control this? Is saving necessary? If not, how often is the data persisted? Can I put it in cloud storage so it syncs across machines, or if it does this already, can I opt-out of that?
- Not personally a fan of putting the name of the app in the icon. Most apps don't, I'd suggest something more subtle.
> I couldn't find the shortcut to change the language until I hovered over the status bar element for it. It should have a menu item with the keyboard shortcut on it.
Noted. Will fix!
> Doesn't respect the system light/dark mode, it should by default (but perhaps with an app specific override as some people like that)
The light/dark toggle has three states. Light/Dark/Whatever the system is set to (default). If it's set to the third mode, it should respect the system mode. Otherwise it's a bug!
> The green branding is ok, but it's quite a strong personality for an app to have. Do you want the app to have a strong personality?
I do like the design (though I'm sure it could be improved ofcourse).
> - 427MB is huge
Yes, unfortunately that comes with Electron.
> Would be great to have a help reference in the app, or at least a docs page on the website that the help menu links to.
Yeah, goo point, will fix!
> Would be great to be able to change the font.
Maybe :)
> Where is the data saved?
The whole buffer is stored in a file called buffer.txt located in the user data directory (varies depending on platform, on Mac it's ~/Library/Application Support/Heynote, on Linux ~/.config/Heynote). It's saved as soon as you edit with a small debounce.
The data location is currently not configurable, and Heynote currently doesn't support reloading changes from the disk (except on startup), so at the moment it wouldn't work well to synchronize through a file syncing service if you were running Heynote on multiple machines. This is something I'd like to fix though.
> The light/dark toggle has three states. Light/Dark/Whatever the system is set to (default). If it's set to the third mode, it should respect the system mode. Otherwise it's a bug!
Ah ha! That's it. I must have toggled this to forced-light inadvertently when testing. I think it could be clearer.
Thanks for the explanation of the persistence. This sounds absolutely fine for where the app is at right now, but would be great to explain it (in less detail perhaps?) somewhere. In the future, being able to set a custom path for it might be a quick way to enable hacky syncing. I realise symlinks could probably achieve this, but I think that's less discoverable.
Thanks for the reply and best of luck with the app!
Sync between devices (windows <> mac <> iphone) is the only thing more I'd want out of this. Great work!
I agree re the app icon - it would look great and still unique by simply removing the name.