Notelink

NoteLink is one of my mental darlings; I absolutely love the idea and I keep coming back to redo and revise my old code, and I spend a lot of time trying to convince other people that really, it’s brilliant, if only they could see it my way. NoteLink is a note taking application that differentiates itself on one – okay, maybe two – core features. In any given note you can insert a link to one or more other notes, when can also be expanded and edited inline. It’s a tabbed interface, and the changes are maintained across the tabs so you can have a sing note expanded in several parent notes or even alone in its own tab and any updates you make will be reflected everywhere the note is displayed.

Notelink also takes a slightly unconventional (read: nerdy) approach sorting notes. Firstly (and most commonly), you can tag your notes, and browse notes by tags. But more importantly there exists in NoteLink the concept of ‘views’ which the user construct from collections of tags and other views. Within these collections users can create subgroups of tags and views, which creates the list of notes which is common to all the criteria selects (so if ‘favourites’ and ‘food’ are grouped together you’d get the list of notes related to your favourite foods). The list of notes generated by these subgroups are then merged to form the collection of notes represented by the view. For example, a view to represent high priority programming tasks could be comprised of two subgroups; the first of which could be the set of notes that has the tags ‘homework’, ‘due soon’, and ‘computer science’; and the second might include notes that share the tags ‘work’, ‘programming’, ‘pays lots’. Really it’s much simpler in execution than explanation, but if there’s one feature that doesn’t make it to the final product, it’ll probably be this one, just due to the complexity. To quote the Zen of Python, ‘If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.’

You can also embed views in notes (which link to the lists of notes represented by the view, or by any of the views components), allowing you to make index page notes as well.

If you’re still curious feel free to ask questions below, or watch the video I made showing it off back when I was first writing it.