1. My confidence in the continued existence of Hackpad is falling by the day and it saddens me as it is where I keep all my stuff.
2. I really would like to get access to the Dropbox Notes beta to see if it is a direct continuation of Hackpad. Seems it is almost impossible to get access to it though.
Notes is really good. It just saddens me that Dropbox does not base those systems on top of Dropbox but somewhere separately. I wish I could just get .md files or something similar in my Dropbox from what's on notes.
Writeily Pro is an awesome Android app, and open source. It can save its files to any directory on your SD card, so as long as you get that directory syncing, you're good to go. ie. it's sync service agnostic
nvAlt never played well with Dropbox for me. I tried to use it at home and at work, sharing my notes/documents via Dropbox and I had all kinds of sync issues unless I was super dliligent about closing the client on one machine before opening it on the other (something I didn't always remember to do and once I'm at work, I can't close the home one and then can't use it all day etc)
DB Notes is clearly a spiritual continuation, and some things are directly continued (fonts, limited styling, minimal composition area), but it's also got features that are distinct from the original HackPad, like sidebar comment threads (somewhat like Medium's comments).
It definitely shares a lot, but it's not just "hackpad with the dropbox logo"
Notes has a Hackpad importer that lets teams migrate their pads into Dropbox Notes, so you don't have to worry about losing a place where you can lee your Notes.
The Hackpad import on DB Notes works really well and they have an option to redirect all your old Hackpad urls to the newly imported notes, which is pretty nice. The only catch with Notes so far is there is no way to back them up / export them from the DB Notes interface.
I really wish that, someday, I could click on a cool link on Hacker News for a service that's personal document storage and syncing and, near the bottom of the page, would read the text "host this on your own server using [these instructions]."
You should give https://sandstorm.io/ a close look. I would describe it as a personal server platform. You can host it yourself or use a cloud provider. You can install ported apps or write your own. I'm using the cloud beta right now, and it's really cool. They claim that porting apps to Sandstorm is pretty easy, and I think their live demo proves them right: there are some useful apps ported already (https://sandstorm.io/apps/).
1. My confidence in the continued existence of Hackpad is falling by the day and it saddens me as it is where I keep all my stuff.
2. I really would like to get access to the Dropbox Notes beta to see if it is a direct continuation of Hackpad. Seems it is almost impossible to get access to it though.