Supernotes – Notes & Journal 4+

Excellent App with best use of ai I’ve encountered

This is a profoundly well thought out app that superbly and beautifully handles note creation and links notes together. I use it as a knowledge web for my work and also to store recipes, boring but important information, everything really. The recent introduction of ai has been very cleverly implemented. It makes suggestions so you can learn to improve notes but nothing is changed automatically. Automatic ai is simply outsourcing your thinking…the royal road to dementia, in my view.

Supernotes has powerful search capability, tagging, links, can handle image files, is fully markdown featured. It is a small dev team of two guys who are growing the product carefully. They prioritise quality over speed of feature release. Personally, I’m okay with this but everyone has to make their own arrangements. Others may be frustrated that the features are not released more quickly, but I prefer features that work and don’t destabilise the product or bloat it disproportionately. I’m also a fan of not too much choice, which just overwhelms my mind. There’s enough here though to satisfy a tech savvy knowledge worker (not me). I’m in for the long haul and the features will come. If it all went south tomorrow you can export everything as markdown and import it somewhere else. But something tells me this product will gain traction.

Developer Response ,

Thanks so much for taking the time to write such a comprehensive review! We have an in-depth article about the use of AI which will be published soon on our blog – looking forward to sharing this and more updates with you 🙌

Couldn’t do without it!

I’ve used this app almost daily for three years, for my PhD and for personal notes. Powerful, fast, simple, flexible. Open to being used in different styles. One key difference is the paradigm of notecards also being like conventional folders, so notecards can be stored inside other notecards.

Great to see how it has become better and better. The Supernotes community page is also active, friendly and helpful. The founders, Connor and Tobias, are really responsive and are always adding features on the basis of community suggestions.

Pretty rubbish

Simple layout but also a simple app. No better than any other notes app and worse than many. You can’t create any groups or collections of notes. Yes, you can tag but that is cumbersome and annoying (tags have their place, of course, but a decent notes app would offer both). Nesting cards inside other cards is just confusing - the nested card does not actually go inside the parent note. They both appear in the list like other notes (with just a tiny number on the parent card).
All in all, very, very disappointing. The developers make a big deal about this being a new way to take notes. But, actually, it is just a poor, over-simplified notes app that needs a re-working to be as useful as the developers claim it is.
I hoped this would be a game-changer. To say it is a huge let-down is an understatement.

Developer Response ,

Hi Big Tram,

Thank you for your feedback, and we're sorry to hear that Supernotes hasn't lived up to your expectations.

It's worth noting that Supernotes does indeed allow you to organize your notes into groups or collections using parent cards. To access this feature, simply double-tap on a card's title to open it as a 'parent' card, where you can view all the 'child' cards within it. We understand that this functionality may not be immediately intuitive, and we are committed to making it more user-friendly in the future.

Our approach to nesting cards is designed to provide a higher level of flexibility compared to traditional folder-file structures. With Supernotes, a card can have multiple parent cards, which means you can organize your notes in a more versatile manner. For example, a card on 'Aqueducts' can belong to both 'Roman Empire' and 'Architectural Marvels'. This structure allows your Home collection to display a consolidated view of all the cards you have access to.

We take pride in offering a unique approach to note-taking with a focus on collaborative short-form notecards, featuring a multi-parent hierarchy. As far as we're aware, this sets us apart from other note-taking apps. We are continuously working on improvements to enhance the user experience, and we hope to have the opportunity to win you back as a satisfied user in the near future.