Pensieve: All your data in one safe, convenient place

Hi Product Hunters! I’m Aaron, the other half of the Pensieve team. Renuka and I worked at the same couple companies over a few years, and things just went better when we were on the same team so we decided to “drop out of school” and see if we could make it on our own. While building Pensieve, we talked to loads of folks who feel the pain Pensieve aims to soothe, and one of the most consistent things we heard from them was concern that their data be kept secure. Data security is especially important for us since connecting to multiple services makes us an appealing target for hackers. To keep our users safe, we built our system from the ground up to require no user data or credentials stored on our servers or in our database. This means even if someone were to compromise our servers, they wouldn’t find any of your stuff there. If you’d like to talk more about how we think about data security, I’d be happy to chat. We also heard from people about the tools they use today, including cloud services where they search for things, and note taking tools, but we’re always looking for more. How many tools do you have to search regularly? Got one you use a lot that we don’t support yet (gmail, gdrive, dropbox, slack, evernote)? Tell us about it.

Reviews of Pensieve

Ed DeCaria

•1 review

I've been using Pensieve regularly for a few months now. The killer feature for me is being able to search all of my online accounts at once. I can never remember if I put something in Google Drive, or if someone shared it with me in email, or if it was in Slack, or in Evernote, or worse if it's somewhere I rarely go on my own but still have an account like Dropbox or OneDrive. So now I can just hit OPT+SPACE and find what I want right away. And because it's now my go-to place for search, I also now use Pensieve directly for quick notes-to-self, instead of Evernote or Slacks to myself or offline text files. It's just a much better way to keep track of everything.

I'm curious to see where they take it next -- seems like it could go in a lot of different directions from here. But as is, it's already very valuable.

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7yr ago

Ivan Shcheklein

DVC

•1 review

I’ve been usung it for a month now. It replaced the notes app for me as a way to capture all these information pieces along the work day. Pensieve is fast and flexible to capture unstructured stream of notes and help organizing them.

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7yr ago

Anandamoy Roychowdhary

•1 review

The features as they evolve should make this very compelling .. so much data is hard to search past a few days .. and the ability to index everything across all my different production modes is a huge time saver.

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7yr ago

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Dmitry Petrov

Neat idea! Could you please clarify how it works without storing my data? Purely through APIs? Btw… I also use InVisionapp. Can you find comments from there?

Aaron Feldstein

Pensieve

Maker

@fullstackml Thanks! Yep, we use the APIs provided by other cloud services to power our search so we don't have to index any of your data. From their site, it sounds like InVision doesn't have an API for this kind of search yet, but they say they're working on it so hopefully we'll be able to support them soon.

@ajprax Got it. Thank you. InVisionApp - it would be helpful to search through all the versions.

Pros:

Simple to use, lightspot that replaces notes and expands to all your external knowledge sources

Cons:

Integration with mac is not perfect, icon is visible in dock

Hey Ivan, Thanks for the feedback! The dock icon has been a bit of a thorn in our sides as well. Because we built on Electron we have somewhat less control than if it was an entirely native app. Removing the dock icon would mean removing the ability to switch to Pensieve windows with cmd+tab and would have some other subtle UX effects. It's definitely something we think about though, since we want Pensieve to be as low friction as possible.

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All your data in one safe, convenient place

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Reviews of Pensieve