Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Website: https://beavernotes.com/
Price: Free!
Blurb: “Welcome to Beaver Notes, a privacy-focused note-taking application for Mac OS, Windows and GNU/Linux. With Beaver Notes, your notes are securely stored on your device, ensuring complete privacy and control over your data.”
And the first thing it does is try to go to a dodgy domain… “Beaver-notes is attempting to resolve redirector.gvt1.com“
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/what-are-these-suspicious-google-gvt1com-urls/
I’m going to be straight with you. As far as notes go, I want something that opens like greased lightning, has the basics for typing, and saves my work – even if I did not. Other people want more. My workflow is open app → type, type, type, CTRL+s, type, enter. Usually it is an idea, a web address, an e-mail address, or a story synopsis.
Once or twice I have added a meeting audio recording to a note-taking application, but that was when all we had was evernote. I watched one of the creatives at work, use his note-taking application to pop pictures into, and steal ideas from there. Oh wait, these days they call it machine learning, my bad! My ex wrote documentation directly in her preferred note-taking application. So note-taking applications are different things to different people. Let’s talk about the application first.
I looked in the Github repository and this is definitely an electron application. Electron has come far since those first days, where you would click on the icon, finish a coffee and a fag, and pray like hell it didn’t drain all your battery… Or… It could be that I have a SSD now. Either way, it opens in a reasonable time, not fast, mind you. Because electron tries to hide the fact that it is Chrome, the back button is hidden, so if you click on ‘new note’ or CTRL+n by mistake, you cannot go back to your previous note immediately. Beaver note fixes this with a “notes” button, but more on that later.
The layout is neat and sane, but like most electron applications, the font choices are poor and they cannot be changed. You have your four main buttons along the left, add a note, edit your notes, list your notes, and archive. At the bottom you have another four, export, import, light/dark theme, and the main settings.
The application is more geared at writers, the flow being top to bottom. I tried to mimic the creative type and import and re-arrange images, but you can only have them vertically. One can however, resize images on the fly, which is nice, but not drag and drop reorder. You will need to overwrite or delete an image, making it a bit counter-productive.
If you have not typed any sentences and only pasted pictures for your ideas, (If you were a visual person), the note would display “no content” in the notes tab, making it difficult to find your note if you were storyboarding.
Though one can use a mouse just fine, the application is geared at keyboard warriors. There are a lot of shortcuts, all with either the CTRL or SHIFT key as modifier and some both. There is supposed to be an ALT+arrow left to go to your previous note, but it did not work for me. (Probably clashing with XFCE workspaces.)
Once you get your fingers around the keyboard short-cuts, the application has a full screen “focus mode”. This is probably the best productivity booster.
The images, video’s, links, and tables all work as expected and all-in-all it is a capable note-taking application. Once you have a table in, you can right-click on your table and get table tools.
On the flip side, the search function did not work, even searching for words like “the” that I know for a fact is there, was invisible to the search. I was able to double-click a word and then click on highlight, to highlight it, but not search for said word and highlight it that way. Since the version number was 3.4.0, I was not expecting to find these issues.
Since it is open source, it gets a pass.
On the funny side, the application takes Apple OS images and re-uses them to mimic Apple settings (I hope it changed enough to avoid lawsuits). Oh yes, and the settings button is drag-able, they may want to tie that down. The “advanced settings” button also seems to activate platform nine and three quarters only.
The light and dark theme switcher button on a prominent display is something all applications should adopt, post haste! Having your eyeballs phosphor bombed at night for no reason is criminal.
As to the “password” settings – I cannot figure out if the notes get encrypted or not, as I could not find them. I suspect it's just a browser password. The other thing you may not notice, is that the archive button is not visible, unless you hover your mouse pointer over a note. I only realised this when I wanted to bookmark a note.
If your goal is to whack out a few notes quickly or even write a quick story, these Beaver notes will work just fine. If you are a bit more arty-farty, and things have to be “just so”, you will be disappointed. This would make a nice replacement for the official apple notes, which always rub me up the wrong way, for some reason.
With videos and tables, it offers more than some other note-taking applications, but it is not a desktop wiki and should not be compared to those.
If you are in the market for a note-taking application, that is more than Leafpad, but less than Cherrytree, you may as well give this a whirl; just remember to block it in your firewall, as bleepingcomputer says the URL could be bad.
For Ubuntu, the application ships as a .deb-file of 77MB, with no dependencies, or as an AppImage of 110MB.
If you think we were unfair, misc@fullcirclemagazine.org