No.
And then, if there are certain features that Notenik lacks, what are they, and how important are they?
This is a tough question to consider and I can’t guarantee that any of what follows is going to make sense.
TL;DR
What are the three starter packs that resonate with you the most? I would place a three-column flexbox (ideally beneath the image of the Macbook) representing these use cases to immediately introduce how Notenik’s usefulness to someone who’s unfamiliar with it.
1 Notenik vs. Obisidian
Notenik is different from software like Obsidian in the sense that Notenik philosophically predates Obsidian and other software similar to it. Obsidian is the product of the pandemic-era personal knowledge management boom where taking notes for notetaking’s sake was a strong enough incentive to try it out among the many other applications that sprouted during that time.
Obsidian prevailed by building a cult following bred by industries like academia and software development in addition to, and especially, its community plugin ecosystem. It also has to be noted that it’s cross-platform. The interests and anxieties of the community influenced the development of the plugin ecosystem. Early Obsidian was, in my opinion, an unremarkable application with the exception of its UI and UX which I found remarkable only in the sense that I understand why it was appealing to so many others.
All of this is to say that Obsidian tapped into a certain zeitgeist and unlike its contemporaries maintained its popularity by catering to popular interests to the point of baking community extensions into the software itself.
I think that few notetaking software is free from the anxiety of ambiguity once you get past the bare necessity of storing text. Which could be why some of the most prolific practitioners suffice with just a text-editor. So I suppose that there has to be some sort of value proposition presented to potential users or else the entire concept of “notetaking software” becomes precarious.
Obsidian’s feature set is its buy-in and is supported by democratic/community-driven ecosystem. What I mean by this is that the entire idea of “what” to do with your notes is generally informed by what the software enables you to do with them. So when people encounter the bottleneck of “I started taking notes now I’m not sure what to do next”, my observations suggest the Obsidian community lead them toward a plug-in or feature, or recommend an overarching notetaking system to adopt and abide or adapt to.
1.1 We Don’t Need No Education
From what I can read from the community here is that we don’t seem to have the problem of having to ask “what to do” with our notes. My impression is that we already know what we’re doing. Our needs are straightforward and settled as soon as we name, edit and save a note. Notenik is a utility serving some broader objective. Getting data into Notenik is a part of doing something else and not something that needs to be done in the way that an application like Obsidian may impose itself as.
2 About Niche
I’m not sure if Notenik belongs to the Markdown/PKM space you may be referring to. While it can seem so on the surface there’s so much that takes place beyond what’s expected from apps that fit into that space today. I think it’s unfair to compare Notenik to software like Obsidian, iAWriter, The Archive, Notion, etc. Notenik does a little bit of everything that they all can do but that doesn’t reflect the sum of its parts and none of these other apps do what is unique to Notenik when it comes to data transformation. The only similar software that I can think of in that respect is Tinderbox.
Notenik belongs to a kind of a matrix that where dimensions are added to the yellow legal pad in one place and dimensions are removed from the whiteboard or projector from another. I imagine Notenik as something between Excel and Tinderbox. However way you can construct a Venn-Diagram comparing people who use those two programs, in the middle you’d find the niche for Notenik.
2.1 Reasons to Rock
When I think about Notenik in the simplest sense—that it’s a tool for storing and transforming textual data—it’s probably been feature complete for a while. Perhaps since it was written in Java.
All of Notenik’s additional features are expansions of its primary functions relative to the particular use case that the functions represent only in general. The use cases that influence Notenik’s feature set is largely a consequence of developer self-interest (which is not in imply selfishness) and generosity toward its broader user base.
Notenik is a utility app. It’s easy to be convinced that it’s more than what it is because it can do so many things but in reality everything that it’s able to do is a riff on it’s basic functions with some colouring enhancements; “quality of life” improvements if you will.
Notenik gives you an instrument with which you are allowed to play many different genres if you know how. It also provides extra things like pedals and amps and what have you that assist you in getting the desired sound relative to the genre you’re trying to capture. For anything that it doesn’t provide you are free to access elsewhere in your studio (i.e., your Macintosh computer). The opposite of this is something like what you get out of a DAW and VSTs. There is no real “studio” that you are working in save for the software itself providing everything for you without any intelligible demarcation between forms and functions and interests save for whether or not the sound being worked on seems near to the user’s desires.
In a sense you’re doing for productivity software and desktop publishing what TASCAM did for audio recording.
2.2 Country Cousins
I think the only niche comparable to this would be for Org mode which like Obsidian can credit its longevity to its community with the exception that it is culturally rooted in a time that predates the PKM boom in the early 2020s.
The difference between Org mode and Notenik is that Org mode is essentially a markup language interpreted within a broader program, the Emacs text editor. If you squint hard enough this isn’t a difference at all, or rather the only difference between the two programs is the markup language of choice. If we consider Notenik and its personal flavor Markdown (which evolved into a family of markup languages in its own right) in conjunction with its scripting and templating syntaxes, Notenik interprets, queries and compiles plaintext data. So does Emacs with Org mode.
Maybe this is what we ultimately desire from our notetaking software—the means to record, store and transform textual data. Notenik excels at this in a unique way.
The closest I can get to describing this is by saying that some software is like a Lego set where the appeal is in taking the blocks and building the structure promised by the advertisement. Or not. You can build your own thing too. But the freedom or curiosity is somewhat subsidized by the people who instead want to build specific things.
Notenik is sort of like being into model trains or 1/16th scale military figures. You aren’t building things (e.g., ideas) as much as you are managing or modeling things that already exist, that you are expected to do something with independent of their appearance as text files.
3 Cultural considerations
I don’t know. I think I’m on to something and I don’t think the matter of increasing Notenik’s usage is a technical one. I think that there is an implicit trust in Herb as the sole developer and chief steward of this software and its users are rewarded by having their interests entertained in earnest even when if each one isn’t fulfilled. There are technical and personal limitations at play that achieve this. This probably wouldn’t be the case if Notenik was meant to appeal to a broad audience like Obsidian or was as independently extensible as Emacs.
“Notenik” in the broader sense of the word—with regard to its user base—is a guild. If we refer to the cultural origins of its suffix it represents a subculture.
I think the key to increasing Notenik’s user base would be to figure out “who we are” in the broader sense, beyond what we’re trying to do. What we’re trying to do is clear. Take notes. How Notenik enables this is clear in the various ways you can classify and manipulate them, in effect adding fidelity to the idea of what constitutes a “note”.
What actually distinguishes the people who choose Notenik ahead of other alternatives, ironically, won’t show up in a table of comparisons to other software. Its appeal, I aver, is actually something more arcane or anachronistic than what contemporary software provides.
3.1 What McLuhan & Knuth Thought About Text
Notenik in some ways is a “literate” program. In the cultural sense I mean this similar to how Marshall McLuhan used the term in comparison to oral cultures. With the caveat that notetaking as a practice is oral in essence—one participates in dialog with oneself. McLuhan had this idea where a medium was either “hot” or “cool”. Hot mediums are low in participation (e.g., print, film) while cool mediums are high in participation (e.g., television, radio). While I think he missed his mark with the designations I think the concepts in general are useful.
We can tweak the concept of hot/cool media and apply it to textual notes. Notes are essentially snapshots of an idea expressed in characters. If we apply McLuhan’s association with the phonetic alphabet and literate cultures to the eye and squint and tilt his portrayal of this idea to accommodate a body of text of any kind as a sort of macro-level “ideogram” representing the entirety of an idea as opposed to the idea in its most basic conceptual instance, then we’ve wound our way back toward the idea of print media being “cool” according to McLuhan. If this is too much to fathom within reason then let us at least entertain the idea that the act of reading entails more participation than McLuhan alleged.
The relevance to Notenik here is the idea that leveraging it as a utility requires a greater amount of active participation from the user than what one may find in other notetaking applications (e.g., Obsidian).
Notenik’s standard feature set gives us the tools to determine how to leverage our notes on our own. This can be informed by the practical “response” we have before or after engaging with a note. Getting data in is the easy part. How to classify, query and manipulate data is left to the user within the ambit of its feature set as opposed to pre-fabricated plugins that pre-empt the question of what we want to do with them.
This highlights something that I don’t think I’ve seen said about Notenik before: it has a legitimate learning curve.
Notenik can also be thought of as a “literate” program in a way similar to Donald Knuth’s conception of the term. The Literate Programming FAQ defines the concept as follows:
Literate programming is the combination of documentation and source together in a fashion suited for reading by human beings. In fact, literate programs should be enjoyable reading, even inviting! (Sorry Bob, I couldn’t resist!) In general, literate programs combine source and documentation in a single file. Literate programming tools then parse the file to produce either readable documentation or compilable source.
Squint hard again! While we aren’t actually writing computer programs with Notenik and it might require a stretch of the term “documentation” I think the comparison is close enough to the idea of a suite of tools for text that is inherently and simultaneously human-readable and machine-computable. With this in mind we can consider Notenik as a complete system that is a distant relative to the family of tools like R, Knitr, Jupiter Notebooks, etc.
This idea is useful to consider because it can help with finding baseline for the aforementioned learning curve and in the process provide a grounds for sifting out the niche that Notenik belongs to in its own right. The comparison to Knuth-like systems isn’t meant to be perfect but I think it tracks well out of the previous comparison to Org mode.
4 The Madcap Conclusion
In any case I think drawing inspiration from McLuhan and Knuth’s ideas helps illustrate the theoretical and practical complexities that make Notenik unique and a draw for certain types of users.
If I were to suggest something like a marketing/PR campaign its primary objective would be in figuring out how to tap into what I imagine to be the “literate post-literacy” class of users (i.e., the sort of people around today with enough patience to sit and read and sit and think and sit with their own thoughts that require them to read and write what they think out) and “post-industrial neo-craftsman” (i.e., the sort of people who don’t expect their tech to do all of the work for them).
In general I would try to leverage Notenik’s “unsexiness” compared to more popular software (i.e., the things that Notenik respectfully lacks that other applications possess) and balance it against the virtue and productivity that users can achieve with it if they’re willing to exert the “manual” labor needed to use Notenik to its fullest.
This is all an extrapolation of how I view Notenik. I don’t know if anyone else thinks the same, but I’m confident that if we take these points into consideration in comparison to most productivity software today we can at least identify something like the phenomenon I’m suggesting.
People today are more likely to watch an odyssey unfold than they are to read it. People today are more likely to be instructed on how to live their own odyssey out than they are to sit down and figure out their own. In the grand scheme of things Notenik feels like the product of time unlike the present and it shouldn’t be expected to satisfy that. It should continue to leverage its own heritage.
This is a lot to proofread so evaluate what I have to say in proportion to its intelligibility.
