In Settings -> Data, if the data server is “hub.stacksdrive.com”, you’re perfectly fine. You don’t need to do anything. You can ignore the rest.

If the data server is “hub.hiro.so”, you must export all your data, create a new account, and import the data.

• Go to Settings -> Data -> Export All Data to export your data
• Sign out and choose Sign up to create a new account. Your new account will use the new data server automatically. Please make sure to save your new Secret Key safely. You must not lose your Secret Key.
• On your new account, go to Settings-> Data -> Import Data to import your data.

The old data server provided by Hiro will be decommissioned by 31 May 2025. Please do migrate immediately. If not, you might lose your data.

Also, two related features will be malfunctioned and removed:

• Sign in with Stacks wallet: Leather and Xverse always use “hub.hiro.so”. Signing in with these wallets will not work after the old data server is closed.
• Multiple accounts per Secret Key: The only way to create multiple accounts per Secret Key is through the above two wallets. As signing in with these wallets will not work, this feature will not work either.

If you’re still using “hub.hiro.so”, you must migrate now. Please get in touch with us at support@brace.to or support@justnote.cc if you have any questions or need assistance. 🙏

PS. To restore the subscription you purchased on your new account, go to Settings -> Subscription -> Restore Purchases.

• If you purchased via the App Store or Google Play, please use the same device or App Store/Google Play account when restoring.
• If you purchased via Paddle, please provide us your new app public key. We’ll bind it to your subscription.

2024: Focus on Stability and Performance

This year, our primary focus was on under-the-hood improvements. Here’s a rundown of what we accomplished:

• Bug Fixes: While we were fortunate to avoid critical bugs, we tackled many minor issues. For example, we ensured the navigation bar in Android dark mode was also dark, creating a more polished user experience.
• Server Enhancements: We undertook a significant effort to upgrade our server infrastructure. This significantly increased server capability, ensuring a more stable and reliable user experience. No more overload errors.
• Technology Upgrades: We successfully upgraded our tools and software dependencies, such as React Native, to the latest versions. This ensures we leverage the latest technologies for performance, security, and new features.
• Performance Boost: We invested significant time in optimizing performance across the board. Moving links or notes is now noticeably faster, and the list name popup utilizes screen space for improved usability. We successfully reduced the bundle sizes of our web apps, leading to faster loading times and quicker first rendering.
• Docs and Status Pages Release: We released documentation for both Brace.to and Justnote. While we’re not quite finished, we’re on our way to providing comprehensive and helpful resources for our users. We also launched Brace.to and Justnote status pages, which keep our users informed about the current status of our services.

We introduced a few new features this year, such as bulk pinning and tagging. We aim to focus and release more new features in the next year.

Looking Ahead to 2025: Continue the Effort

Admittedly, we still have plenty of to-do items. We would love to complete all of them, including several new features. Next year, we plan to:

• Further Enhancements: We will continuously improve the stability and performance of our apps.
• Continue Documentation Efforts: We’ll complete our documentation, adding more articles and tutorials to provide comprehensive support for our users.
• Release New Features: With a stable and performant foundation, we’ll focus on developing exciting new features such as advanced search.

We have always been committed to protecting our users’ privacy and providing the best user experience. We’re grateful for our users’ continued support and look forward to more exciting times together in 2025. We’ve received many valuable feedback and excellent suggestions. We ensure that we are always actively listening, learning, and improving. Happy New Year, and as always, keep in touch!

Free your mind to a steel vault.

• Justnote is a secure notes app that protects your notes with industry-standard end-to-end encryption. Only you have access to the keys required to decrypt your data. Write and store all your notes securely and seamlessly access them across all your devices.
• Other note-taking services cannot prevent employees and governments from reading your data. Justnote killer feature — only you have the keys required to decrypt your data — protects your data against hacks, breaches, government access, and employee access.

100% of your data

• Never worry about losing your data again. Automated backups and secure cloud sync ensure your data is safe and sound, even if your device is lost, damaged, or stolen.
• Justnote is open source; your notes are saved in an open format, so you’ll always have access to them.

Shape-shifting privacy policies and unauthorized access by big tech and other non-encrypted services can lead to leaks, doxing, financial fraud, identity theft, loss of control over your information, and other existential harms to you. Safeguard your private data with an open, transparent, and end-to-end encryption note-taking app by Justnote.

We are here to prove that it’s possible and practical by proudly presenting what we’ve done and achieved so far that you can see, touch, try, and verify.

Here is what we said:

1. End-to-end encryption with only you have access to the password required to decrypt your data.

All your data is always encrypted before it leaves your device, using a password no one in the world knows but you. We can’t see the content inside, so we can’t sell your data or make targeted ads. Even if someone forced their way into our servers, your data would be complete gibberish to them.

2. No personal information is required or collected.

We won’t ask for your name, email address, phone number, or any other details that could be used to identify you unless necessary. We do our best to ensure that you remain anonymous. We strictly collect only the essential information required by laws or regulations, e.g., for payment processing.

3. Open

We’ve made all our code open and available, so it’s clear how your data is handled at every step. We promise end-to-end encryption, and we open our code for transparency. Everyone can always verify every step of every process.

4. No tracking and no ads

We strongly oppose intrusive tracking tools that gather and analyze your browsing history to sell better advertisements. To sustain our business, we utilize a subscription model. You pay a couple of dollars annually to unlock extra features and support us.

Good and enough information helps make good decisions. It empowers potential users to decide whether our app is the right fit for their needs. With comprehensive and accessible documentation, users can understand the app’s features, benefits, and limitations, weigh the pros and cons, and ultimately choose the best solution for their specific requirements.

Clear and concise guidance helps users quickly learn how to complete tasks in our apps. Users can learn how to use the app effectively. Whether trying to complete a specific task or explore the app’s capabilities, they can consult the documentation to find step-by-step instructions, saving time and frustration.

Furthermore, documentation will help users find and solve issues that may arise. When users encounter problems, they can find solutions or workarounds in the documentation, reducing the need to contact and wait for support.

Building app documentation is also an opportunity to demonstrate our expertise. By providing comprehensive and well-organized documentation, we show that we are experts in this area and committed to providing our services so that users have the best experience.

In conclusion, app documentation is an essential investment that benefits users and us. By providing clear, informative, and easy-to-use documentation, we can empower our users to make the most of our apps, improve their overall experience, and strengthen our brand.

Introducing Justnote, a privacy-focused note-taking app that puts you in control of your account and data. Built on the Stacks blockchain, Justnote offers a simple, fast, and secure way to take notes across any device.

“I want a simple and fast note-taking app without annoying ads. I also want to ensure that my account and data are truly my own, which is why I built Justnote on Web3 technology from Stacks.” said the creator of Justnote.

Critical features of Justnote include:

• Simple & Fast: The WYSIWYG-rich text editor provides essential formatting tools for quickly jotting down ideas, to-do lists, reminders, and more.
• Privacy-Focused: Your account is cryptographically generated, and all your data is encrypted. Only you know your secret key, so only you can decrypt your data. No one else can access your information.
• Secure & Decentralized: Powered by the Stacks technology, your account cannot be locked, banned, or deleted by anyone.
• Ubiquitous Access: Justnote is available on the web, iOS, and Android, allowing you to take notes and access your information from any device.

Don’t just take our word for it. You can learn more, see what real people say about how Justnote has transformed their note-taking experience, or try it now and experience the power of a privacy-focused note-taking app.

About STX Apps

STX Apps builds apps on a better, user-owned, decentralized internet utilizing Web3 technology from Stacks to provide the best user experience. For more information, visit stxapps.com.

You can save a link and quickly move on. The app also has tags and folders, letting you organize bookmarks. All saved links are end-to-end encrypted to protect your privacy and automatically synced to all your devices.

And yes, you can easily export all previous bookmarks from a browser or another service and import them into Brace.to.

Our ability to read is also negatively impacted. Everyone loves short-form content — just thirty seconds, and we’re lured to something else. What’s becoming increasingly rare, and we need to reclaim, is the capacity to sit quietly and direct focused attention for sustained periods to read things thoroughly from start to finish with an open mind.

Making the right decision, reacting wisely to a situation, and knowing to wait for more information is not just important; it’s essential. We know what we know and don’t know and decide based on that. We do our best in each situation and improvise based on feedback. We wait and see if it’s necessary.

We must design our environment to navigate this digital world to regain control of our attention, emotions, and self-awareness. To navigate this sea of distractions, fake information, and mind-controlled content, we must create affordances that promote focus, privacy, and safety.

Turning off notifications by default and on only for essential tasks is a good start. Using privacy-focused services that provide end-to-end encryption is worth the hassle. Last but not least, telling algorithms what to show us in the feed is inevitable. We must block somebody and mute some words to safeguard ourselves mentally.

The digital world has good and bad parts. It depends on us to filter noise and let signals pass through. Doing this well will prevent bad experiences, enrich us, and make us happier.

Bookmarking apps do one thing: store links to everything for you to visit later. This differs from read-later apps, which focus on storing articles to read later in the app, and note-taking apps, which aren’t primarily designed with saving links in mind.

What makes the best bookmarking app?

• It lets you save links with one click. Ideally, it should provide a browser extension, a mobile share-to feature, and a URL path for adding a link.
• It allows you to organize your links easily. Lists and tags are great; even better, you can pin items at the top.
• It’s available on as many platforms as possible. You need to be able to save a link on one device and visit it on another seamlessly.
• It focuses on your privacy. End-to-end encryption — and only you know the secret key to decrypting your data — should be a must.

Brace.to ticks all the boxes above. It is also extremely simple and open source. Brace.to is all about simplicity. The user interface does not use much color or graphics — the focus is entirely on links. Its source code is open for transparency, allowing easy inspection to make sure it does what it says it does.

With simplicity, privacy-focused, and feature-packed, Brace.to can be one of the best bookmarking apps. Plus, with a reasonable price, it’s worth considering if you’re looking for an app to save links to visit later. Try it out; you’ll know that Brace.to is designed and built to be one of your go-to daily apps at your fingertips.

To build a better internet, we must develop different incentive models, and it would be great if it remains free to use.

One prominent incentive model is freemium. Users can still use a service for free with limited usage or functionality. They can pay for more usage or unlock extra features.

This model has pros and cons. Everyone can access and utilize the service, a vital aspect of a more inclusive internet. If designed well, people will pay more for more convenience or more usage worth paying. The bad part is that the model requires revenue from paying customers to also cover the costs of free users. With this requirement and technology limitation, users are usually forced to pay a lump sum, such as purchasing an expensive yearly subscription with too much quota usage or unused features.

Micropayment will help improve it. With innovations like blockchain and cryptocurrencies, payment processing fees can be much cheaper. People can buy things for 1 or 2 cents at a negligible cost. They can pay less with a lot more often, thus no need to spend a lump sum in advance. A freemium model will be more flexible. Users can pay for only what they need now, giving them more control over their internet experience.

We continue to find the best incentive model to provide our service at the highest quality, lowest cost, and sustainably without renting, selling, or sharing your personal information. We’re using a freemium model, which can evolve when new technologies like micropayment emerge and mature. The benefits will go to everyone.