12 The Philosophy behind Notenik ↑
12.6 Open and Accessible Data
The trend over the years has been to place an increasing number of barriers between the user and the data that he or she has created. This has been done in a number of ways.
- Use of complex and proprietary formats for storing data.
- Storage in databases, which are generally impenetrable to non-technical users.
- Concealing the data in bundles, and in hidden directories.
- Storing the data on servers owned by a third party.
Now in some cases this sort of obfuscation is entirely justified. But it has numerous disadvantages.
- While it shields the user from possible mistakes, it also prevents the user from learning much about their own data.
- When the software goes out of date, the data may be left stranded in some format that can no longer be accessed.
- It becomes difficult for other potentially useful applications and tools to access and manipulate the data.
- Users are often persuaded to pay an annual license fee just to continue to have untrammeled access to the very data that they originally created.
So in Notenik, all of the following are true.
- All data is stored in plain text files that can be opened and read by any text editor, on any platform.
- Notes are grouped together in ordinary folders, and the user can decide where they want the folders to be located.
- Notes can by synced to other platforms using iCloud or DropBox or any other file syncing service.
- While the Notenik Note file format is a little bit different, it's designed especially for human readability, and is open and non-proprietary. (See Why is the Notenik Format Different?.)
- Note text uses nothing more complicated than Markdown for formatting, making the text easily readable by just about anyone, even without the use of Notenik, and without any special training.
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