Looking for recommendations for a multiplatform note taking app. Needs to support Windows and Android. Some things I'm looking for:

• Markdown support
• offline/local support (should be stored in an easily accessible and movable format e.g. markdown)
• is free or only a one time fee
• Syncing (either a one time fee via app dev or built in support for GDrive or OneDrive)
• Mind mapping functionality (including linking between notes)
• flexibility to be both a knowledge base and a place to keep todo lists and general small notes

Obsidian hits most of these features but without paying $8/mo, syncing is a huge pain in the ass. I got it to sync between machines if I store my vaults in Google Drive, but I'd prefer to have them locally then synced. I don't mind paying for software, but I'm trying to avoid another monthly fee on top of everything else I'm paying for. I'm open to staying with Obsidian if I can solve the syncing issues, too.

Hi everyone, I'm struggling with contact management and was wondering if anyone could recommend some good solutions. My Google Contacts and iOS contact management has become unmanageable and I personally find them very awkward to use.

The recent PKM thread had me thinking about what folks are using as journaling app/portal. I do use Obsidian for my second brain right now and genuinely love it. But I find the mobile app on Android to be a bit clunky, if I'm honest. Seems slow to open even with very few plugins. For jounaling I've used DayOne for years. I started back when it was iOS/MacOS only, but then switched phone to Android and haven't been back. But now they have an app and web app for that. What I don't like is the somewhat goofy format it saves in and it's on their servers. They used to allow you to at least leverage your own Dropbox, but no longer.

For the past several months I've tried several FOSS options. Main criteria is that I could host it myself, supports offline entries stored in an open file format (preferably MarkDown), and had either multi platform app or a decent web app. That lead me to try these:

Memos
Pros:

• Great persistent web app
• Slick UI that is light and snappy
• markdown support
  Cons:
• Stuffs the .md inside a database file so can be a bit cumbersome to export data
• No offline support. There is a 3rd party app that hopes to implement it

Flatnotes
Pros:

• Incredibly simple
• Another easily deployed app
• Flat Markdown files
  Cons:
• Web app on mobile is almost unusable as in it doesn't scale well to smaller screens
• Very early development, but very likely to stay as minimalistic as it is now.
• No offline and very unlikely to ever have it

Joplin
Pros:

• Multi platform apps that perform well
• End-to-end encryption supported
• Could replace both DayOne and my To-do solution (Google Keep)
• Offline support
  Cons:
• More database stuff instead of flat markdown files

One solution I've been testing lately is using IAWriter to write to a 'Journal' folder within my Obsidian vault on Google drive Obsidian Vault > Journal > 2023.... for example. This works surprisingly well. Of course IAWriter is a bit spendy at $29 for Android and then more $ for other platforms as they're sold separately.

So I'm curious what other people are using for just simple daily journaling, random thoughts, etc. If there's an approach I've missed I'd love to hear it. Joplin is so dang close but not having the structure of plaintext files is a no go for me as I don't want to be trapped by any one product should something happen to the development down the road. Doesn't have to be free, but I want control of the entries either on my own server or cloud storage.

It seems that Obsidian is a very popular note-taking software within the community here, so I would like to know what plugins you use for your daily workflow in Obsidian. I will start:

• Advanced Tables: Very useful for adding and managing markdown tables using simple intuitive keyboard strokes.

• Callout Manager: I tend to abuse the callout function (in my academic vault, I organize any kind of information inside a callout with the source of the info as the title), so it is good to have control of the colors for different kinds of callouts.

• Minimal Theme Settings: Nothing much to talk about. Just some eye candy to make my notes easier on the eyes. Plus, the focus mode is very good for study sessions.

• Obsidian Matrix: Allows me to organize some mathematical LaTeX code properly.

• Reading Time: Useful to grasp the length of a longer note at a quick glance.

• Recent Files: Helps me set myself around my files.

• Style Settings: Complement of "Minimal Theme Settings" to achieve maximum eye candy.

• List Callouts: I use it only in my personal projects vault. It helps me give particular emphasis to specific topics within my lists.

• Table of Contents: Useful for longer, heavily-structured notes.

Aside from that, I also have four CSS snippets:

1. Align: Aligns my linked figures to the center of the page.
2. Callout: Specifies the size of callouts (useful, as I mainly structure my notes inside callouts).
3. Hide: Hides my "resources" folder from the Obsidian explorer (this folder contains files such as figures and PDFs that I link into my notes).
4. Justify: Justifies all the text in read-mode.

I've been organizing my personal collection of ebooks (epubs & pdfs) lately so I've been thinking of possible "best practices" to employ and wanted to open a discussion on it.

There are sources for free ebooks online which are trustworthy such as https://archive.org/index.php and https://www.gutenberg.org/ which provide DRM-Free copies in multiple formats.

These are great but a few of my ebooks are from less trusted sources so handling the security aspects should be considered as well. (Example: An interesting PDF from Hacker News or Reddit)

General:
For general organization and management, Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/) has been very useful so far. You can use Calibre to handle converting, meta-data, reading, and organization of your library.

Security:
From what I can research the epub and pdf formats can be both vulnerable to malicious but the potential is much higher for pdf. As you then might expect, pdf exploits are more common.

A few precautions you can take include using your browsers pdf viewer versus a standalone alternative, using an up to date and secure pdf reading with JavaScript disabled, or relying on a cloud service such as google drive that allows online viewing.

An offline e-reader is another easy solution as the malicious code would require a much more specific attack vector.

Reading:
https://us.norton.com/internetsecurity-emerging-threats-is-it-safe-to-download-free-ebooks-online.html
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/epub-javascript-security/

Screenshot

I posted a few days ago about a notes app I was working on called Notementum, and I'm happy to show you the first release (0.1.0). Installation instructions are available on the Github repo: https://github.com/IvanFon/notementum

There's still lots of things I'd like to add, both big and small, and definitely a few bugs here and there, but I've been going for too long without sharing it, and I find it's best to release as early as you can to start getting feedback, and perfect it later.

One things that's missing is documentation. I'd like to start on this soon, but I'm probably not going to share this anywhere other than Tildes just yet, so this comment will do for now :)

Right now, the app only runs on Linux. I'd like to add Windows support, and it almost works, the problem is that WebKit2Gtk, the embedded web view I use to show note previews, doesn't support Windows. I'm going to explore some other options in the future, whether that's figuring out how to compile it, or allowing other preview methods (user's web browser, PDF, etc.).

The app is also very much in alpha, so you shouldn't use this for anything important, there may be bugs that can cause you to lose some of your data. If you do use this for anything, make sure you backup your notes database.

If you want to use it, here's a wall of text on usage:

Like I said, the app still has a few bugs that need to be fixed. If you find any problems, it would be great if you could leave a comment here or open a Github issue (or if you have any feature requests).

I am working on an app called Percent Done that is a combination of goal setting, time tracking and habit tracking.

I like setting time-based goals for myself every day, such as “write for an hour” or “work on Percent Done for four hours.”

I also like Seinfeld’s “don’t break the chain” method. For example, Apple Watch shows you how many days you have completed your exercise circle and tells you that you have been keeping at it for x days.

Percent Done is a marriage of these two concepts. It allows you to set goals and track the time you spend on them, as well as how many days in a row you have consistently completed them. For example, you can add a goal that says “write for an hour every day,” and Percent Done will notify you every day to write for an hour. You will be able to tap on this goal and Percent Done will start counting back from one hour. You will also be able to see how many days in a row you have written for an hour.

Here is a demo GIF.

You can also add one-time goals to Percent Done with or without time tracking, so it is a task management tool as well.

You can play with the design prototype here: Percent Done design prototype

I would really love to get your feedback on this. If you are interested in being a beta tester, feel free to reply to this topic or e-mail me at "hi at evrim dot io."

By the way, this is almost completely a self-promotion post. If it is against the rules, I'd be happy to remove this.

I have discovered hackmd.io a few months ago and started digitalizing my massive mess of handwritten nodes together with all the terrible notepad/word mixed notes into one big personal "wiki" of knowledge. But I ran into a problem. HackMd can only handle ~50k characters before starting to lag and 100k characters is the limit per note, this doesn't even fit my one summary/tips note on one programming language. Do you know any alternatives? I really like markdown, since all of the notes look clean and organized, I can insert pictures and link to websites easily, but also love to work with them online, since I have to switch between 3 computers between university, home and my laptop.

For me, I have a huge collection of bookmarks in Firefox that are super unorganized. I have some semblance of folder system but...it's quite messy. I'm sure many people have a similar problem. Share your ideas on how you keep your bookmarks organized, what's your system?

Mine are a bit of a mess, with decades of accumulation and lack of maintenance resulting in a forest of poorly organized folders and completely inconsistent filename schemes.

I'm interested in hearing about things like folder hierarchies/taxonomies, naming conventions, and techniques for efficient access. This goes for everything from personal documents to projects to pictures to media collections.

Online/digital bookmarking and excerpting is something that really interests me because I think most if not all existing options for it fall very short of the functionality I wish existed, and that I think could exist.

One of the first online bookmarking services I used was Delicious, and for a few years it was irreplaceable for me. However it languished after it was bought by Yahoo and then resold, and since then I’ve observed its slow and steady decline from afar.

The purpose of this post is twofold:

1. I want to know the current state of online bookmarking for you. I’m curious to know if it’s as much of an unmet need in anyone else’s life as it seems to be in mine.
   • Were you once a bookmarker and gave up due to the seeming futility of it?
   • Have you never been interested in bookmarking and/or don’t see the point of it?
   • Are you an active bookmarker, and if so what tools or workflows do you use, and what kinds of content do you bookmark?
2. I thought I would share some of the research I did into Delicious’ various design iterations over the years via the Internet Archive. It’s a cool birds-eye survey of how the service’s ethos, goals and design changed over time. Beyond the value it provides as a case study, I think there are greater lessons and insights that can be gained from observing the rise and fall of what was once such a beloved online service.
   • del.icio.us | 16 September 2005
   • del.icio.us | 20 December 2005
   • del.icio.us | 11 October 2006
   • Delicious.com | 11 May 2011
   • Delicious.com | 27 November 2011
   • Delicious.com | 12 May 2012
   • Delicious.com | 30 August 2012
   • Delicious.com | 14 October 2013
   • The period between 2013 and 2016 seems to be one endless loading screen from the archive’s perspective
   • Delicious.com | 15 March 2016
   • At some point in 2016, they went back to their original domain name – del.icio.us | 14 May 2016

As a sidenote, I also found this explanation of Delicious' approach to tagging to be very interesting: del.icio.us/help/tags | 21 February 2006

I hadn't realized that Delicious was actually the first to introduce the concept of user-controlled tags for bookmarks:

When Delicious was first launched, it was the first use of the term "tag" in the modern sense, and it was the first explicit opportunity where website users were given the ability to add their own tags to their bookmarks so that they could more easily search for them at a later time. This major breakthrough was not much noticed as most thought the application at the time "cool" but obvious. – Source

Edit: I hope it's alright to edit a post this many hours after having submitted it. There were a few important updates that I really wanted to include here.