Subscribe
Sign in
Clover — Work visually with the all-in-one notebook for creatives.
Clover is the all-in-notebook designed for creatives – featuring a powerful markdown editor that can explode traditional, linear documents into a "surface" for a more intuitive, visual way of note-taking, brainstorming, mind-mapping, and managing tasks.
63
Replies
Best
Robin Good
I am a bit surprised that for a tool that has many positive votes and reviews that there is only a waiting list available, no free trial or possibility to test it.
*If I was PH grandmaster I would not allow listing of tools that are not publicly available for testing, trying or buying.
Look forward to be able to test and try, otherwise why did you list yourself here?
Report
Share
@robingood Hey Robin, as I'm sure you know, finding early users is critical for a startup. Being able to show off a product in an early state to connect with potential early users is very valuable for both the startup and the community, in my opinion. The startup gains a pool of early adopters to release the product to and the community gets to have a real effect on the development of the product. Happy to chat at some point!
@attasi That's all fine and good Tom, but my experience as an early potential user of your tool is a pretty negative one to start with. I read the profile of the tool here, I see positive review and comments but when I click to check and try it out there's nothing I can actually see, test or have a feel for.
I respect your strategy but I just wanted to politely share my disappointment with not being able to try what you promote.
@robingood Fair enough. We're cranking hard, so hopefully we can get it in your hands soon! Thanks for the feedback.
Hey there fellow hunters of product!
We're Clover and we're building a new notebook specifically for creative folks like you.
We've been building design tools for most of our career (Apple, Macaw, InVision) and have always wanted a tool that combined the fluid, expansive nature of a design tool with the power and capabilities of a markdown editor. So, we built it!
Our aim with Clover is to unlock the power of visual thinking for more intuitive – and fun – note-taking, brainstorming, mind-mapping, and task management.
Here are some of the features we're currently working on:
• Traditional and Surface docs - Clover is built on a new type of text editor. It's a streamlined markdown editor that lets you work with traditional linear documents or with our fancy pants surface documents – which allow you to arrange text and images on an infinite, zoomable canvas.
• Agenda - A blank document for every day. Fill it with tasks, meeting notes, journal entries, or anything else that's date-related. It's a great way to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.
• Quick Capture - Ideas can strike at any time. We added a Spotlight-like command line that can be pulled up with a simple keystroke so you can quickly jot down ideas or schedule tasks without rummaging around through the app. It'll even parse plain English commands to help with scheduling and organizing.
• Customization - Notebooks are a personal thing and we believe you should be able to tailor it to fit you. Clover's style engine lets you fully customize your experience – colors, fonts, icons, etc.
• Nested Pages - Build out your own hierarchy by nesting documents within other documents.
• Document Outline - Quickly jump to major sections of your document or to pages nested within the current document.
We're currently in alpha and hope to open the beta to our waitlist soon. We'd love to have you help test and shape the product.
What would you hope to see in a product like this? Let us know in the comments!
@latimerart Hey Jared! We're focused heavily on nailing the individual experience first though we've built it such that we can deliver a multiplayer experience similar to that of other collaborative notebooks when the time is right.
This could be a really powerful tool, I think implementing some templates for things like Eisenhower Boxes and Tim Lee lists would be great for managing your day in a glance. From there you can flesh out the work on the space
@attasi A few other features I would be looking for:
- Tags for quick searching
- Smart copy/paste controls (i.e. Dropbox Paper recognizing when you paste a Paper URL and automatically renaming URL link to Paper title)
- Hover previews of docs (desktop)
- Collaboration with others (comments)
- Multi-tasking (allowing docs to open in new windows)
- Smart embed links for different media types (MP4, YouTube, PowerPoint, Figma, Word, Airtable 😀)
- Text formatting (really needs to support bulleted/numbered lists & bold/italic/strikethrough for optimal note-taking, otherwise it's too rigid)
- Share links for specific docs
- Ability to add a new doc to a category by right-clicking category (Evernote is terrible and requires you to open the "notebook" to be able to add a new note)
- Easy drag & drop reordering and nesting of docs
- Doc templates
@ryan_stone Thanks for all of this! I'd love to chat at some point if you'd be interested. Learning from other folks with strong opinions about these products is invaluable to us!
This seems VERY exciting.
- iPad app or decent web app with full feature parity, please. Pencil support would be a bonus, but nice to have, particularly for this kind of visual way of working.
- It’s been suggested elsewhere, but +1 for tags and/or cross-linked blocks. Double bracket wiki-links with auto-completion— would that even be possible here? Do these blocks have titles that can be referenced like that?
- Would be good to be able to easily get things into and out of this. Web clipper for easy online capture. Would OPML imports be too much to ask? Solid referencing / deep linking to specific blocks— I’d love to be able to integrate this with apps I’m already using.
- When you turn on collaboration features, things will could get really interesting. When that happens, version control, please. ;)
Looking forward to the beta to be able to offer more focused feedback/suggestions. Looking good thus far, though. Good luck for future development.
@jsamlarose Thanks for the feedback. This is great! Would love your help testing as we roll out.
I am a day late to this party, but like what I see. Two things that are missing in the demos (might be there in the app itself):
First, a visual way of connecting ideas. There's so much interest in Roam Research and other tools that help people connect their notes with wiki style links and backlinks, but it would be great to see a visual way to do so - perhaps dropping one note (or even word!) on top of another to link the two. Many visual applications I like and use such as Milanote deploy arrows for that purpose, but the arrows are primarily for connecting images.
A visual way to connect text would be an interesting technique to create a story or build an argument.
Second, there should be a visual way to string together a series of notes to boil them down into a linear document - which is still the default mode of professional communication unfortunately. In other words: explode into a network of notes while brainstorming and then connect them in a sequence to create a linear narrative. Doesn't even have to be everything in the brainstorm.
Signed up and I am looking forward to getting my hands on the app.
@rkasturi Love these ideas! We've been discussing ways to build connections across data and think we have a few interesting things that you'll appreciate. Connecting things back into a linear fashion is a really compelling idea. There are some UX wrinkles to iron out there, but we'll see what we can come up with. Thanks for the feedback!
This looks so clean and perfect for my day-to-day UX note taking. I mostly depend on a mix of Evernote, Apple Reminders, and Figma right now, and this looks like a combination of all three.
Will it include push notifications for to-do's? That would be a major factor for me jumping on board.
@ryan_stone Thanks Ryan! Notifications are something we're working on. How would you like your notifications surfaced? How often? When?
@attasi Good questions. Both in-app and native push notifications would be most effective for me. I prefer to set notifications for specific dates, times, and recurrences, and wouldn't expect them to go off outside of those settings. Otherwise, I would get annoyed at my lack of control over the notifications and likely stop using the product.
How do you guys anticipate to position yourselves next to Notion (for personal users?). This looks really great; the command line idea is something I've been thinking about for a while now, but I wonder if Clover is something I can use in tandem to Notion
@maximgeller Great question. While there's certainly some overlap with Notion – which is an incredible product – Clover is solving different problems in some pretty different ways. Here's one way to think about it: We think some people will prefer Clover because of the visual, more lightweight workflow, while others might prefer Notion because of how it it handles complex, relational datasets. There's probably no reason you couldn't use them together, but I assume some folks will just pick the one that fits their needs and style of thinking.
@maximgeller Oh… would love to hear any thoughts you had about the command line too! What would you hope for?
@attasi makes sense; RDB's are by far the most powerful feature behind Notion. It's not too shabby as a notes app either but that's definitely not the finest use case for it. However, when you already have lots of records tied up in a database, it's easier to just make notes there rather than another platform
@attasi re. command line, I love the idea of being able to type a todo/calendar item/meeting/anything actionable and be able to push a button and have it be sent to or created on whatever platform I want it to go onto
Hey, this looks slick! Just 2 questions to understand how it works:
1. Can you nest a page under 2 or more different "parents"?
2. Surface and liniar - are views on the same document or distinct types of documents?
@adrian_boncan Great questions.
1. No, docs live in one spot right now to keep things as simple as possible.
2. We have the ability to make it a toggle, but we're concerned the UX may be strange when moving back from surface to linear. It's something we're experimenting with!
How would you like those things to work?
@attasi 1. Having one parent for a document is exactly how folder system works. The hierarchy starts shining when there are multiple parents possible. Strongly recommend to implement this.
3. How is (inter)document linking implemented?
I signed up for the early access but didn’t receive any confirmation email. Not in spam either. I’m confused and eager.
@victoria_teasdale I didn't get one either, but when you sign up you are added to a Mailchimp mailing list. We probably won't get an email until the app is in early access
@victoria_teasdale Sorry for the confusion! We'll send you an email as we start letting folks in. If you'd like to confirm that we have you on our list, you can email us at hello[at]cloverapp[dot]co. Thanks!
This looks exactly like what I am looking for. I signed up but am curious when I'll be able to try it?
@joshuar We still have a few big things in motion, but are hoping to start releasing to our waitlist within the next couple of months.
Thanks for answering. Well, I was hoping for a toggle, but I realize the implementation is complicated (tbh, I was hoping for magic, really :).
The thing is, you have to have a way to go from one to another...you start in diffuse mode (surface/canvas/spatial thinking/map making/joyful drag and drop), which works incredibly well for the creative. But then you might need to switch to focus mode (liniar, outline, structure, the satisfaction of everything in its place), especially if you need to show your work.
If not a toggle, maybe drag and drop (seeing the surface doc and the traditional one side by side and dragging blocks) or maybe a toggle with the possibility of adjusting with drag and drop in a second step.
Just guessing here, when designing Clover how did you guys saw the relationship between surface docs and liniar docs?
Are you integrating voice (siri, google, other) into this? Will this be integrated into calendar? Could there also be a way to do snippets from email, web, social, etc?
@charliebateman1 Voice isn't something we've really considered much at this point. What would you like to see there? Calendar integration is something we have played with actually. We see potential there, but we've bumped it down our roadmap.
As an app geek and artist I’ll admit i was asking myself ‘how is this different from others’. But then I saw ‘happy little trees’ and you had me. I have no shame.
Hi there, it is a generally great product. I've signed up as a Beta tester even before when I just stumbled upon your product on Twitter, back before when it had its Notion-like, condensed sidebar UI.
But to my surprise and disappointment I was given a Beta invite access, a week before it's real launch. To a completely different UI than I signed up for (but with the same webpage that's showcasing it's old UI, that later got updated with the new UI)
It's all good I think, product launches go through a lot of design choices. So I gave it a shot. Here are my thoughts :
- Completely misled by the webpage interactive demo that switches between Notes & Whiteboards. That is really not possible on the product right now. Upon creating a New Page, and you can choose whether to make a "New Document" or "New Surface". You cannot switch between both after the fact, or turn your "Document" into a "Surface" whenever you like it, as it's imposed on the webpages and the marketing introduction video.
- The Text blocks turning into a Timeline blocks (from the screenshot 2) isn't even possible right now. It's completely animated concept. Even with Frames and Text blocks. Completely bummed when I found that out.
- I don't know really how Frames works back then or right now, and how are you able to Group blocks inside them, but I tried it myself and I cannot imitate the Groups blocks in Screenshot 1, with Auto-resizing height as you add more Text lines. I just can't. Frames more like acts like a link or boundaries, to show a point on your "Surface" to someone. I cannot make it associate with a certain block, that's why moving a Frame, doesn't move the blocks above it. I don't know what I am doing wrong about that. There's not even a documentation on the Help Center about it.
- Two column layouts (from the Screenshot 4) only available right now manually with the Surface whiteboards. Not possible with Document mode.
- Please be aware that the sidebar UI isn't what it looks like from the Screenshots above anymore. It's gotten a downgrade and imho made it worse, navigation-wise.
- We would appreciate an ability to mention an exact Time on a Todo list block, and it'll remind you about that Todo at the exact time via a native Push notification (both on Desktop, Web and Mobile). Not even Craft or Notion can do it, this would be a great opportunity for Clover to one up it's direct competitors on a longstanding feature missing from Todo features from these fellow block-based documents workspace tools.
- Just remove those misleading and inaccurate promises of features and behaviors from your Product, and we'll be okay now. That's what I suggest.
I'm a fairly regular Miro user, and they seem to be at the top of the market right now for non-linear note-taking and collaboration tools. From what I'm seeing of the beta for Clover, it appears to operate in a very similar fashion. I'll be looking forward to checking it out through the beta process to see what differentiations rise to the surface that might make Clover able to compete. Great work so far!
Somethings I would like:
The ability to pull tasks from the macOS native mail app. With a keyboard shortcut, you will auto-populate parts of the email into the task field(s) and include a link to the email for reference.
Having the ability to export pending and completed the task in a simple HTML for emails to convey to coworkers where I currently stand in my process. Also so they can see the multiple steps involved with that said project.
Having a (temporary) link to a semi-wiki reference page to forward the workflow guides that I create for myself and coworkers assisting me.
@creativewang Thanks Allen! We put a heavy emphasis on a fresh, clean, and lightweight UI so you can better focus on your work.
