undefined | Better HN

0 pointssupertron2y ago0 comments

Evernote originally inspired me (back in the day) as to the value of having some sort of personal knowledge management tool.

More recently Obsidian inspired me in terms of showing me what a non-enshittified, open/portable format note-taking experience could be like. And the beauty of simple Markdown notes!

Through the Obsidian community I discovered the concepts of Zettelkasten / Second Brain etc. and was further convinced of the usefulness of regular note taking and storing/synthesising of reference knowledge.

But I found Obsidian slightly mismatched with my requirements. Primarily because there was certain functionality I needed which can only be achieved with plugins, but I didn't consider their plugin security model to be sufficient enough for storing my most confidential data - even with everything being local files. (That and the lack of open source was enough to make me nervous).

My app is written in pure Javascript, heavy use of web components, running in Electron. No Node.js (apart from what Electron is precompiled with) - so no third-party dependencies as part of my code, and Electron is heavily locked down. I have a lightweight build step using Esbuild (a single rust binary).

Being 100% native JS - no frameworks - and quite lightweight, the app is indistinguishable from a native macOS app in terms of responsiveness! Knowing that may not always be the case, I'm also eyeing up Tauri as a potential alternative GUI "wrapper".

As a .NET developer by day I would have liked to have built it in MAUI but found that to be quite lacking for my purposes.

I've started to write a blog article about it with some screenshots - I"ll eventually get around to publishing it!!

How about you? What did you write your backend in and did that escalate into the front-end too?

The CalDav idea is very interesting... you've got me thinking about that.

0 comments

vineyardmike2y ago

Ah obsidian... I feel it's a very common tool. There's a whole pile of clones/related projects too (LogSeq, Roam, etc).

What kind of functionality were you looking for? I've found that once I controlled my notes, the amount of things I wanted to dump into it kept growing.

> How about you? What did you write your backend in and did that escalate into the front-end too?

I started using TiddlyWiki, and really like their approach to content (small notes, composable content, the "river" of notes as you click through links). You can add metadata (KV style) to the notes, which you can use in the markdown, which is quite powerful. The tool is meant to be "in browser" and you're supposed to save the whole HTML source when you make an edit. For me, I wanted a traditional CRUD interface to a server. They support that, but the developer isn't really focusing on it. So I wrote my own because I had a few weeks and wanted to play more with Golang.

My only gripe, and the reason I'm considering writing a new front end (which will be a big learning activity for me), is that TW doesn't support 'lazy loading'. very well, so if you have a massive amount of notes, it gets a little wonky. I discovered the issues with this when on plane WiFi and getting issues with overwriting instead of editing notes.

But once I had a CRUD API for my notes... I started going crazy. I can import photos, and link to them (pretty basic) but I can also push emails, calendar events, etc. I set up a browser plugin that lets me automatically take notes on any webpage, and adds tags/metadata to the note. The limit is now the front-end which is where I'll probably spend 2024...

I also had the idea of integrating with HomeAssistant, so the device's history was viewable in a 'note' about the device (dynamically generated from a template instead of static text from DB). Possibly with camera events as their own entry... Lots of things are possible once you control where the data comes from.