We have just launched our app, it stands on Elixir šŸš€ what do you think?

Hello everyone! We have just launched our app (for desktop), and I got the idea to post it here because it stands on Elixir :rocket::muscle:

What do you think? Any feedback would be very much welcomed! :heart:

Website: smarkup.com

Technical

Itā€™s a custom text editor with a custom CRDT collaboration engine, all from scratch. We have a Phoenix Elixir back-end system with a Postgres database. Electron.

Short product pitch

We call it a ā€œproductivity-focused app for multitasking ninjas.ā€ Itā€™s for notes, to-do lists, meeting agendas. With no visual smog.

Smarkup helps you quickly write down new ideas while letting you stay where you are. Without breaking your focus - thanks to tabs! :rocket:

Itā€™s a desktop app. You can also use the web app at app.smarkup.com. But itā€™s not so great for productivity as the desktop app. No support for mobile yet.

Power feature

Tabs!!!

10 Likes

Why is it an app? Or is there a web version I cant see from iOS?

Looks promising, curious how you will fare against the de facto incumbent Notion.

Congrats on launching!

Hi Oliver, thanks!

Thereā€™s no support for mobile yet, unfortunately :see_no_evil:, so no iOS / Android just yet. Just for the desktop. Iā€™ve added this to the OP to make it a little more clear, thanks!!

Iā€™m curious, any reason to go for CRDT? instead of OT?

Looks nice but only for mac & windows, will it be available for Linux Desktop user?

Congrats on your launch!

Seems interesting. Some observations.

  • Looks like the registration process isnā€™t working right now. I get to the place it wants the code for email verification, but the email isnā€™t being delivered. Tried three times over 30 min. Verified the email address is receiving email from other known working third parties. Also the failure advice to check spam is good, but you tell me to keep the verification page open while I waitā€¦ but no advice as to what I should do if the email never arrives. Do I just try again? The code expires ā€˜soonā€™, but how long should I wait? Is the email sent immediately, every 1 minute, 5 minutes? The page gives me no expectation for how long I should give it before I try again.

  • The application isnā€™t signed on Windows:

    image

    If youā€™re doing a commercial desktop app for Windows, youā€™ll definitely need to resolve this. I appreciate that itā€™s early days for you and that jumping through such hoops is a pain/expensive/etc, but the message above will encourage many to ā€œDonā€™t runā€. Iā€™ve gone ahead and installed, but of course canā€™t do anything without having created a workspace and canā€™t do that without the registration process working.

I do wish you the best of luck. Launches can be hard.

3 Likes

Looks good - congrats! :023:

In case you havenā€™t seen it and are looking for an alternative to Electron:

3 Likes

In this space, I have been using standard notes app and have been considering skiff, which both aim to be open source.

1 Like

Hi! Thanks!

Linux Desktop - we were thinking about it. But we didnā€™t want to put much resources into it yet, so we didnā€™t make it. Would it be a big deal for you?

Regarding CRDT/OT, my colleague @mirrec will better answer this, he was the choosing between the to some time ago :slight_smile:

Oooops, thatā€™s embarrassing :see_no_evil::sweat_smile:

Thanks for pointing both things out, especially the signing the app on Windows! Weā€™ll definitely get that done.

And the emails - yeah, we hear this a lot. It should arrive instantlyā€¦ mostly it does, but sometimes it doesnā€™t. Itā€™s on our list too. But itā€™s weird that you did not get it at all, so I guess something is up.

Thanks much!

I did a bit more digging. The email issue may be email provider specific. The domains I use for business email purposes are all directed to my Microsoft Office 365 account. I tried signing up again today, and again no sign-up emails received to any of the domains that I use: inbox/spam/etc. However, today I tried with a Gmail account that I have and that one arrived pretty much instantly, as you suggested it should. Gmail worked without issue with multiple attempts.

So I think your systems are in fact trying to send emails to me and something between your systems and Microsoft is dropping them. To the best of my knowledge I donā€™t have anything in place in my Microsoft accounts that would filter out emails like this, so itā€™s possible that Microsoft is rejecting them more generally. Given how absolute it is now over a couple days, my shot-in-the-dark hunch would be Microsoft is rejecting the sending host for some spam related reason on their sideā€¦ but that is pure speculation.

See this thread a few month ago for email delivery problems:

1 Like

Iā€™m curious, any reason to go for CRDT? instead of OT?

The main reason we chose CRDT is the easier mental model. For example, you know what character was marked as bold and it doesnā€™t matter if the character position moved (there was some insertion in front of the character), or the character was deleted, etc.

But it comes with a price of more memory requirements :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Wow, this looks great! Your landing page/product site is also gorgeously designed! I can see this being quite popular on mobile if/when you decide to move in that direction, I know people who would definitely use and benefit from this :blush:

2 Likes

Hello everyone! We have just launched our app on Product Hunt today. It stands on Elixir :rocket::muscle:

Iā€™ve posted about it before, since then we have added collaboration.

If you like it, your upvote and feedback would mean a world to us! :heart:

Link to Product Hunt page:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/smarkup-notes

Thank you! :slight_smile:

4 Likes