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Raindrop 5.0

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70 points by kfdm 5 years ago · 38 comments

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poletopole 5 years ago

I’ve used raindrop for a year and sadly it’s been a horror story. To begin with it’s a complete maze just to subscribe to it. Second, a serious bug was released that replaced all my bookmarks with some random spam video. Third, the ultimate deal breaker which happened a few days ago, was that the iPad app is so buggy that it deleted all my bookmarks when I tried to simply move a folder to a different folder since the navigation is so broken I was left with no choice. A years worth of bookmarks went “poof!” in a second; words can’t express my rage.

My advice, drop raindrop before it drops your bookmarks.

  • haswell 5 years ago

    Thanks for sharing - this is very timely information. I've been trying to get my bookmarks under control, and I decided to start evaluating Raindrop.

    My biggest issue up front was how slow and somewhat clunk it felt. For something that manages bookmarks, it needs to be fast an unobtrusive. It shouldn't feel like a chore to create a bookmark.

    Maybe I was using it wrong.

    In any case, I'm glad I'm ending the experiment early.

    I truly hope they can sort these issues out.

    • mthoms 5 years ago

      This very release is supposed to sort the speed issues out. Hopefully it does, because that's been my only complaint.

      If you otherwise liked it, it might be worth taking a second look.

    • FalconSensei 5 years ago

      > It shouldn't feel like a chore to create a bookmark.

      I feel that this is the problem with any bookmark manager, as they are going to be an extension, and you can't drag'n'drop to your navbar, or even see the bookmarks there.

      On the other hand, I think their web-clipper (both extension and bookmarklet) works very well, considering you have more (optional) information to input, like the tags.

      If I compare creating a chrome bookmark vs raindrop, without adding tags, just folder, I have the same number of clicks. So I'm not aware how they would make it feel less of a chore

  • NetOpWibby 5 years ago

    I can’t imagine, damn. My condolences.

    F

atombender 5 years ago

I've been using Raindrop for about a year. It's just a much better bookmarking app than what's come before.

It really comes down to UX. The browser integration is fantastic, and there's a really smooth native-feel Electron app that has an integrated browser.

One of my favourite uses is creating a temporary "project-oriented" collection. For example, let's say I'm researching places to travel. I can create a collection about this, bookmark things (destinations, discussion threads, Wikipedia entries, etc.) as I go along, and then use the built-in browser to go back and forth between each bookmark as I make notes or whatever. Normally you'd use browser tabs for this, except the Raindrop way means I'm not consuming lots of browser resources, and the collection stays persistent even if I close it.

The same workflow works for tech projects I work on (where I may want some documentation, papers, etc. "scrapbooked" in a temporary place), and many other things.

Safari is the only browser (that I know) that has a similar kind of bookmark-oriented browsing functionality, and it's just not very good.

Overall it's much nicer than the older services such as Delicious and Pinboard, not to mention the atrocious built-in bookmarking features in modern browsers, which have been ossifying since around 1998.

ffpip 5 years ago

All their apps are open source. If anyone is interested -

https://github.com/raindropio

  • samtimalsina 5 years ago

    I checked out the repo for the desktop electron app, it talks to a local server. I don't think the backend is open source. Electron is just a wrapper in this case, I would not consider this project open source.

    • ffpip 5 years ago

      I didn't say the project was open source. The apps are.

      You are expecting too much. It's a commercial venture. There is no reason to open source servers.

  • shirakawasuna 5 years ago

    But not a server, right? Assuming it's based on a server-client architecture.

  • unknown2374 5 years ago

    This was my first question, thanks!

xipho 5 years ago

When I click on the link, then I read that raindrop-io is fast intuitive and smart, and at the very bottom I see a link to tell me its an extension. I like fast, intuituive and smart extensions, I'm looking forward to buying pizza with this ;). In otherwards what does it do!?! :)

hs86 5 years ago

I am unsure between this and Pinboard.in.

Raindrop certainly looks better, but Pinboard seems to have better integrations across other services. Those permanent archives are nice to have, but it does not feel that permanent without a local copy and a perceived bus-factor of 1 on both of them.

I requested an Archive Backup in my Pinboard settings, but I am still waiting for a download link three weeks later.

Thankfully, those bookmarks.html exports and imports seem to be very reliable across different bookmarking services.

heavymark 5 years ago

I've dreamed of a great bookmark system that works everywhere. Instapaper has been my favorite, but then it was sold then it was bought back and little growth in features, and more importantly it seems on borrow times, which is the issue with most all of these that the point of them it save data that you can reference later on, sometimes many many years. Like how I can reference emails from over decades ago. But other than things like Gmail most services don't stick around. Which is why I hope eventually it's something that is offered natively in iOS. They have reading list which is the start of that, but it only has about 1% of the needed features, and so far has seen little to no attention from Apple. Open source self hosted options can solve some of those problems, but typically then don't integrate with countless services as much as premium ones do, and requires a lot more ongoing maintenance and don't have the polish or the native apps like the premium options. Having said all that, since there is no ideal long term solution, using something like this in the meantime maybe worth it, but 100% would require being able to export all the data at anytime.

jiveturkey 5 years ago

I want to love raindrop.

But it's run by one guy, in another country. No thanks.

I wish there were a bookmark manager like this that didn't require the *aaS aspect.

sleepybrett 5 years ago

No thanks, i'll trust pinboard, he's a down to earth guy and while you might have some features that he doesn't have. They aren't worth it for another delicious shutdown or evernote going to shit.

  • crossroadsguy 5 years ago

    It doesn't even have browser add-ons anymore.

    Extensions page has (and since a long time)

    - a dead Firefox add-on url

    - a long abandoned Safari extension (Safari 5)

    - I have never tried Chrome extension and the link is not yet dead so I assume it might still be working.

    Oh yeah, there are some bookmarklets.

    I think I will move mine to something self-hosted with browser add-on support for Safari and Firefox, at leat Firefox.

dchuk 5 years ago

I just signed up for this because it looks pretty neat, and installed the chrome extension. Now I can't for the life of me figure out how to get back into the chrome extension settings after having gone through the initial sign up wizard. I'll admit I have a head cold so maybe I'm just dumb today, but how do I get back to the settings for how the extension itself works?

zikani_03 5 years ago

I've been using Raindrop.io for some months and can say I am a happy user. I will agree with others that it's mostly about the UX than anything else. I really appreciate the effort the developers of raindrop.io put into their product. Kudos, keep it up!

krick 5 years ago

Good bookmarking app is something that I would actually pay for without hesitation (and I'm not very generous with software subscriptions and such). But what I'm absolutely not going to use is bookmarking or note-taking app, storing my data on remote servers while not being fully e2e encrypted with something that cannot be broken in 50 years with all quantum-computers of the future and whatnot. This is ridiculous, especially when compared with all the fuss around "highly-secure" remote password managers, that you use to store a bunch of passwords (which will expire after a year) for some bullshit throw-away accounts (everything important has 2fa anyway). Heck, I'm not even always changing some passwords after I accidentally send them via messenger, because who cares. I wouldn't want to accidentally send to somebody the full collection of my bookmarks/notes.

ccktlmazeltov 5 years ago

I used to use pocket a lot, but the UI is bad, reading offline articles wouldn't work all the time, and I ended up actually not revisiting pocket much, piling up a lot of articles that I would never read. Should I give raindrop a try?

jgoewert 5 years ago

I installed to try to use it to prune through all my bookmarks.

I figured at the worst, import/prune/export back to my bookmark bar.

Exporting and syncing isn't a feature and won't be a feature, so uninstalled. Glad that part worked fast.

ultrasounder 5 years ago

One of the few indiehacker/solo founder app that I use daily and wouldnt mind shelling out for PRO features. Excellent execution. Came from chrome native bookmarking and never going back.

mglass3000 5 years ago

I used Raindrop for a while but ended up moving to Bookmark OS. I find the UI easier to use https://bookmarkos.com

yborg 5 years ago

Not encrypted? No thanks.

I miss Xmarks.

vamega 5 years ago

Is this something that is similar to pocket?

throwawaysea 5 years ago

Does Raindrop save the content in a way that is accessible? For example can it create a local backup of all the webpages I bookmark organized neatly? Is there an option for it to take my existing bookmarks, and import them all, and archive all of them?

  • spondyl 5 years ago

    There are regular HTML exports as well as support for daily exports to Dropbox and Google Drive

adolph 5 years ago

Seems nice.

1. Needs more blockchain for versioning/authenticity

2. Needs additional knowledge management beyond collections and tags

  • vxNsr 5 years ago

    > 1. Needs more blockchain for versioning/authenticity

    Are you serious about this?

    why not just git versioning? what does blockchain offer over any other versioning system that doesn't require a ton of useless math solving?

  • spidersouris 5 years ago

    > 2. Needs additional knowledge management beyond collections and tags

    Penny for your thoughts.

  • FalconSensei 5 years ago

    knowledge management for a bookmark manager?

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