7 ms·

I recently released an open source note taking application called gthnk (http://gthnk.com http://gthnk.com). It's based around markdown-formatted text files, i

by idm 11y ago

I recently released an open source note taking application called gthnk (http://gthnk.com http://gthnk.com). It's based around markdown-formatted text files, in part because I do not want to commit my thoughts to a proprietary format that may not be readable in a decade or a century.

Tomte 11y ago
How do you handle Screenshots? I never thought it was important. Now I'm screenshotting a lot.
- idm 11y ago
  my workflow is like this on OS X: 1. use hotkey to capture screen or portion of screen 2. screenshot is automatically stored as PNG on Desktop 3. click-drag PNG onto gthnk attachments target 4. done. now it is stored with that day's entries Updated to add: the PNG itself is stored in a SQLite3 database. However, each night gthnk exports the database to the filesystem because, for future retrieval purposes, I think it will be easier to retrieve items from a filesystem than an obscure database format.
  - hackuser 11y ago
    > each night gthnk exports the database to the filesystem because, for future retrieval purposes, I think it will be easier to retrieve items from a filesystem than an obscure database format. In 20 years, how do I know which binary blob goes with which text file, and also with what point in each text file? I want add: It's so wonderful to hear a developer concerned with these issues. Almost always, future-proofed data is an accident or afterthought, which means I can't depend on it being implemented well or being supported in the long term. It puts gthnk on my shortlist.
    - idm 11y ago
      I will need to document this, but it's an important question. - All attachments are named using the datestamp, so the first attachment today would be called 2016-01-19-0.pdf or whatever. - The entries are also named using the datestamp, so we end up with a text file like 2016-01-19.md. - The markdown itself contains an explicit link to the attachment; it is automatically inserted during export. - However, datestamp acts as a primary key so that entries and attachments can be paired using another technique. Finally, attachments are linked to days. It is not currently supported to associate an attachment with a specific entry on any given day.
- reitanqild 11y ago
  """handwritten notes Bridge the physical divide. With gthnk, your timeline can directly import handwritten notes, whiteboard sketchers, and other physical media.""" Not a direct answer but it seems to accept images.
  - idm 11y ago
    Yep. It imports anything imagemagick can handle.
WorldMaker 11y ago
OneNote's format is an open specification, under Microsoft's open specifications promise for Office: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd924743(v=office.12).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd924743(v=office.1...
- idm 11y ago
  I appreciate that Microsoft has taken to publishing their file format specifications, but what do you make of the changelog? It indicates to me that the format itself is volatile, potentially changing multiple times per year. Further, the changelog highlights the proprietary nature of the format; Microsoft owns it and may change it at will. We have also been down this road before. Projects like LibreOffice/OpenOffice and pandoc have tried in earnest to match the specifications published by Microsoft, but it is always an imperfect implementation of either the reader or the writer. Because it seems to be virtually impossible, in practice, to implement Microsoft's document format specifications, I do not think the publication of the specifications alone makes a file format suitable for archival purposes.
  - WorldMaker 11y ago
    I think the issue here is orthogonal end goals: 1. An organic/"rapidly" changing format does indeed make it harder to "keep up" if you are building a contemporary "competitor" application. 2. However, for archival purposes it shouldn't matter how rapidly/organically the specification changed in the lifetime of the document, so long as you have an adequate specification snapshot from somewhere around the last modified state of the document. (Or presuming, as you should be able to even with Microsoft's standards, a standard that maintains a heavy bias towards backwards compatibility in document reading, only the final specification.) Admittedly, we can't entirely anticipate the headaches of future cryptarchs, but an open specification I do feel is sufficient for archival purposes.
    - idm 11y ago
      > we can't entirely anticipate the headaches of future cryptarchs First off, I love the term "cryptarch". :) That's basically the user we're talking about here. My concern is that archival media may become skewed from the media reader such that the media cannot be rendered with high fidelity (i.e. lossless). > so long as you have an adequate specification snapshot If the reader implementation itself has been lost to the ages, or perhaps the implementation is not runnable on contemporary hardware, then I worry that the specs alone may not be sufficient to reimplement the reader. > a standard that maintains a heavy bias towards backwards compatibility On the topic of archival, I'm concerned that ASCII will be a readable data format in 50 years. With that perspective, I am pretty skeptical that a spec as complex as the OneNote spec will maintain backward-compatible coherence across the same time span.
howeyc 11y ago
I'm the same way. I can read my ascii files from the early 90's. Old msworks, corel, etc files... not so much. Maybe you'll be able to read your OneNote files created today in a decade or two, I don't know. I've actually been shifting personal files (less Excel if I can, as an example) to more text-based, or at least much simpler file formats when I can because I worry about this sort of thing. I'm a little different that way, perhaps I shouldn't be, and I should be fine not being able to read a file I created over a decade ago. Perhaps the newer cloud-based apps will always "auto-upgrade" your files/documents for you now (MS Office is pretty good at backwards-compatible files, and reading older versions, but Microsoft seems an outlier in this regard, to me anyway)? I guess we'll find out.
- idm 11y ago
  Bit rot, in one form or another, has been causing trouble since we started doing this computer thing. I have nightmares about my thoughts being stored on a punchcard but having no punchcard readers to read my own thoughts.
  - PhantomGremlin 11y ago
    my thoughts being stored on a punchcard but having no punchcard readers to read my own thoughts A single punched card?[1] That's only 80 chars, very low density, not much room for any nuance in any given thought. As to information retrieval, punched cards are very easily decoded by hand, without a reader. I used punched cards IRL as a student, and I had to decode occasionally when there was a problem with the printing on the card. Not a big deal. The real "nightmares" came about when you punched a program, trudged down to the computer center, read it in, and then waited anywhere between 5 minutes and 24 hours before the computer operator took a bunch of output from the line printer, separated the individual jobs, and placed the output in racks for you to retrieve. And then you found out you had a syntax error. One plus side was that, since this took so much time, you learned to take a little care in writing your program and in checking it for typos before submitting it. That sort of discipline turns out to be quite useful in many activities in later life. On another plus side, the cards were made of relatively thick paper, and there was only printing on one side. So the flip side of an unpunched card was absolutely great for writing little notes. Those, sadly, are just about the only "plus sides" I can think of for punched cards. Fortunately I've never ever had any nightmares about those days. :) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card
mintplant 11y ago
Some screenshots of gthnk on the project page would be helpful.
- idm 11y ago
  Thanks! I added one just now, but I'll do a better job of explaining the features with screenshots in the near future.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
lfx 11y ago
Kudos to you! Would be great if you could add some video recorded workflow, now it is a bit tricky to understand what a tool does. Also not mocking or anything, but how 'gthnk' should be pronounced?
- idm 11y ago
  Thanks! A video is in the works, but it will be a few weeks due to schoolwork. I say it like "G. Think". gthnk is shortened from "greenthink," which was a computer system in Vernor Vinge's "Marooned in Realtime" that acted like a personal archive/assistant.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  'gee-think' maybe? (soft g)
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
This looks VERY interesting. Thanks!

by idm 11y ago

Tomte 11y ago

How do you handle Screenshots? I never thought it was important. Now I'm screenshotting a lot.

idm 11y ago
my workflow is like this on OS X: 1. use hotkey to capture screen or portion of screen 2. screenshot is automatically stored as PNG on Desktop 3. click-drag PNG onto gthnk attachments target 4. done. now it is stored with that day's entries Updated to add: the PNG itself is stored in a SQLite3 database. However, each night gthnk exports the database to the filesystem because, for future retrieval purposes, I think it will be easier to retrieve items from a filesystem than an obscure database format.
- hackuser 11y ago
  > each night gthnk exports the database to the filesystem because, for future retrieval purposes, I think it will be easier to retrieve items from a filesystem than an obscure database format. In 20 years, how do I know which binary blob goes with which text file, and also with what point in each text file? I want add: It's so wonderful to hear a developer concerned with these issues. Almost always, future-proofed data is an accident or afterthought, which means I can't depend on it being implemented well or being supported in the long term. It puts gthnk on my shortlist.
  - idm 11y ago
    I will need to document this, but it's an important question. - All attachments are named using the datestamp, so the first attachment today would be called 2016-01-19-0.pdf or whatever. - The entries are also named using the datestamp, so we end up with a text file like 2016-01-19.md. - The markdown itself contains an explicit link to the attachment; it is automatically inserted during export. - However, datestamp acts as a primary key so that entries and attachments can be paired using another technique. Finally, attachments are linked to days. It is not currently supported to associate an attachment with a specific entry on any given day.
reitanqild 11y ago
"""handwritten notes Bridge the physical divide. With gthnk, your timeline can directly import handwritten notes, whiteboard sketchers, and other physical media.""" Not a direct answer but it seems to accept images.
- idm 11y ago
  Yep. It imports anything imagemagick can handle.

WorldMaker 11y ago

OneNote's format is an open specification, under Microsoft's open specifications promise for Office: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd924743(v=office.12).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd924743(v=office.1...

idm 11y ago
I appreciate that Microsoft has taken to publishing their file format specifications, but what do you make of the changelog? It indicates to me that the format itself is volatile, potentially changing multiple times per year. Further, the changelog highlights the proprietary nature of the format; Microsoft owns it and may change it at will. We have also been down this road before. Projects like LibreOffice/OpenOffice and pandoc have tried in earnest to match the specifications published by Microsoft, but it is always an imperfect implementation of either the reader or the writer. Because it seems to be virtually impossible, in practice, to implement Microsoft's document format specifications, I do not think the publication of the specifications alone makes a file format suitable for archival purposes.
- WorldMaker 11y ago
  I think the issue here is orthogonal end goals: 1. An organic/"rapidly" changing format does indeed make it harder to "keep up" if you are building a contemporary "competitor" application. 2. However, for archival purposes it shouldn't matter how rapidly/organically the specification changed in the lifetime of the document, so long as you have an adequate specification snapshot from somewhere around the last modified state of the document. (Or presuming, as you should be able to even with Microsoft's standards, a standard that maintains a heavy bias towards backwards compatibility in document reading, only the final specification.) Admittedly, we can't entirely anticipate the headaches of future cryptarchs, but an open specification I do feel is sufficient for archival purposes.
  - idm 11y ago
    > we can't entirely anticipate the headaches of future cryptarchs First off, I love the term "cryptarch". :) That's basically the user we're talking about here. My concern is that archival media may become skewed from the media reader such that the media cannot be rendered with high fidelity (i.e. lossless). > so long as you have an adequate specification snapshot If the reader implementation itself has been lost to the ages, or perhaps the implementation is not runnable on contemporary hardware, then I worry that the specs alone may not be sufficient to reimplement the reader. > a standard that maintains a heavy bias towards backwards compatibility On the topic of archival, I'm concerned that ASCII will be a readable data format in 50 years. With that perspective, I am pretty skeptical that a spec as complex as the OneNote spec will maintain backward-compatible coherence across the same time span.

howeyc 11y ago

I'm the same way. I can read my ascii files from the early 90's. Old msworks, corel, etc files... not so much. Maybe you'll be able to read your OneNote files created today in a decade or two, I don't know. I've actually been shifting personal files (less Excel if I can, as an example) to more text-based, or at least much simpler file formats when I can because I worry about this sort of thing. I'm a little different that way, perhaps I shouldn't be, and I should be fine not being able to read a file I created over a decade ago. Perhaps the newer cloud-based apps will always "auto-upgrade" your files/documents for you now (MS Office is pretty good at backwards-compatible files, and reading older versions, but Microsoft seems an outlier in this regard, to me anyway)? I guess we'll find out.

idm 11y ago
Bit rot, in one form or another, has been causing trouble since we started doing this computer thing. I have nightmares about my thoughts being stored on a punchcard but having no punchcard readers to read my own thoughts.
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  my thoughts being stored on a punchcard but having no punchcard readers to read my own thoughts A single punched card?[1] That's only 80 chars, very low density, not much room for any nuance in any given thought. As to information retrieval, punched cards are very easily decoded by hand, without a reader. I used punched cards IRL as a student, and I had to decode occasionally when there was a problem with the printing on the card. Not a big deal. The real "nightmares" came about when you punched a program, trudged down to the computer center, read it in, and then waited anywhere between 5 minutes and 24 hours before the computer operator took a bunch of output from the line printer, separated the individual jobs, and placed the output in racks for you to retrieve. And then you found out you had a syntax error. One plus side was that, since this took so much time, you learned to take a little care in writing your program and in checking it for typos before submitting it. That sort of discipline turns out to be quite useful in many activities in later life. On another plus side, the cards were made of relatively thick paper, and there was only printing on one side. So the flip side of an unpunched card was absolutely great for writing little notes. Those, sadly, are just about the only "plus sides" I can think of for punched cards. Fortunately I've never ever had any nightmares about those days. :) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card

mintplant 11y ago

Some screenshots of gthnk on the project page would be helpful.

idm 11y ago
Thanks! I added one just now, but I'll do a better job of explaining the features with screenshots in the near future.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

lfx 11y ago

Kudos to you! Would be great if you could add some video recorded workflow, now it is a bit tricky to understand what a tool does. Also not mocking or anything, but how 'gthnk' should be pronounced?

idm 11y ago
Thanks! A video is in the works, but it will be a few weeks due to schoolwork. I say it like "G. Think". gthnk is shortened from "greenthink," which was a computer system in Vernor Vinge's "Marooned in Realtime" that acted like a personal archive/assistant.
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
'gee-think' maybe? (soft g)

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

This looks VERY interesting. Thanks!