Notenik Next Steps

Community Discussion
4

  1. Are there ways to improve this Discourse community?
    There is an app which I use called Discourse Hub and that makes it easier to be engaged. I find that push notifications generate engagement too. It’s possible that a lot of users don’t need the extra engagement. I know that I run out of hours to read all that I want to read.

  2. Are there ways to extend Notenik’s reach, in terms of marketing and PR and visibility?
    Thinking about what you have to offer, and who you want to reach.

    • Notenik is a really simple way to create a database.

    • There is a Bento sized gap in the easy-to-create a database market.

    • It’s also a really simple way to publish. Like Frontier, now Manilla, it’s a DIY tool.

    • Anyone with a commercial interest in publishing wants to leverage large communities found on the major platforms: tik-tok, twitter, facebook, post, medium, etc. These big publishers pay for content.

    • Markdown is geeky. That’s a negative.

    • Notenik is geeky. That’s a negative.

    • @kpmansfield’s post reminded me of the disappointment I had with most markdown editors. Initially, I also wanted to see what I was doing, but most are primarily text editors. I can’t think of any that present like a word processor and hide the gory details.

      For example, MarkEdit says it wants to be like TextEdit. In the most important aspect, it does exactly the opposite. TextEdit when used for styled text, produces RTF. TextEdit doesn’t ask users to memorise arcane RTF symbols, so that they can pretty print styled text. It offers a styled text interface. Behind the scenes it does funky things and produces RTF. I don’t need to get my fingers dirty with code, and I work inside a visual WYSIWYG UI. MarkEdit could have taken the approach of generating Markdown from the styled text. It doesn’t do that. It expects the user to operate in the code at all times. The rendered version of the markup is of no interest to them.

    • WYSIWYG made Mac OS famous. Deservedly so, because it made computing tasks accessible. It made the doing-of-the-task fun, interesting, and much easier.

    • Markdown because it offers a way to disconnect the content from the presentation layer. That’s a positive. It reminds me of Lyx, the document processor which encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents (WYSIWYM) and not simply their appearance.

  3. Are there ways to improve Notenik in important ways?
    These are just blue-sky ideas:

    • Provide more out of the box experience. (The template collections are great.) Users want to be able to start at pace, so think about how new users can be on-boarded (as they say).
    • Think about users being able to “lock” a collection, in the same way that Knowledge base is locked, or to lock notes to prevent inadvertent change.
    • What about being able to lock the template to prevent modification. Users can add/edit/delete notes but not mess with the innards.
    • Have a “collection developer” mode. A UI for creating the fields, such as the database creator UI in AppleWorks.
    • Provide a variety of style sheets, so the user can modify the appearance without having to know any CSS.
    • Provide a variety of HTML templates for presenting collections.
    • Provide an visual, drag-n-drop, HTML template builder
    • Allow users to choose from a range of font families for their style sheets. Similar to the way that Google Fonts will suggest font pairings for Headings.
    • Allow users to make color selections for different elements.
    • Offer sensible color themes as choses for a collection
    • Provide styled text WYSIWYG editor for long text fields. Convert and store it as Markdown.
    • think of ways in which the user never has to deal with code, including markdown.
    • provide publishing portals, just as you do for Medium, for other publishing platforms. Imagine being able to publish a note to Tik-tok, Instagram, FaceBook, Twitter, Post, BlueSky, Medium, WordPress, Blogger, etc, just by checking boxes.
    • integrate more tightly with the eco-system. The UI could offer tools, such as an boolean check box, to push to the appropriate SQLite db. Or to pull from those DBs into Notenik.
      • Events ↔ Calendar.
      • To-dos ↔ Reminders.
      • Contacts ↔ Contacts.

Edit to say: I would love to have Notenik on my iPad