Hi! Firstly, thank you for creating Joplin. It’s a great tool, well designed, and must have involved countless hours of your time to create and develop.
Joplin is outstanding amongst open-source note-taking PIM software. It is by far the best primarily because of its incredibly useful web-clipping tool. I’d looked for a tool like this for at least 8 years, writing to developers of open source note projects to implement a webclipper. Now that I found Joplin, I use it all the time.
However, the interface for organizing notes/data could use improvement. Every user will have their own opinion about this and I’m sure many users will like Joplin just the way it is.
I’ve used a number of note-taking PIM software since 2008 and, based my usage of these programs, developed a wish-list of features. The very best of the PIMs arguably, are Ultra Recall, MyInfo, MyBase, RightNote, and several others which share, by and large, the same interface layout. They tend to use three panes: Left Pane- a hierarchical tree file structure that the user can click on to show notes in the centre document viewing pane; Centre Pane where documents can be viewed; Right Pane- where search results appear or other meta-data that can be selected by the user.
My suggestions for improving Joplin:
1. Restructure as a 3 pane outliner.
The problem I see with Joplin is that the current structure uses screen space very inefficiently. While ‘notebooks’ are nestable, their location in a vertical menu on the left takes up a great deal of screen space. The major PIM applications use a horizontal menu across the top of the screen. This uses far less screen space. In Joplin, the notes pane is fine the way it is. It would be very useful if users could change the colour/highlighting of the note title. Joplin’s inefficient use of screen space is not a problem on a 27 inch monitor, but on a small notebook, it becomes awkward.
2. Improve the tag/keyword function
The tagging/keywording in Joplin is quite good, but could be greatly improved by adopting some of the innovations that other applications have implemented.
There is no need to speculate and “reinvent the wheel” as several applications have outstanding keyword capabilities. Please do check out Imatch 5. The Imatch 5 developer carefully studied other application’s tagging systems and arrived at quite a brilliant implementation. The key-wording features of IMatch 5 are probably the best-in-class. IMatch’s keywording system is specifically designed to be used for adding keywords to images, PDF, MP3s and a host of other document formats. Its easy to search by keyword, my multiple keyword, has autocomplete, recently used keywords, and a host of other brilliant functions.
The only thing thing that I believe could possibly improve this type of system it is to allow they keywording of sections of text. This would allow Joplin to function as a simple QDA (Qualitative data analysis software). Affordable QDA software essentially does not exist, and the open source initiatives underway are extraordinarily weak and years behind Joplin. I have little doubt there is a big demand from graduate students all over the world who would currently benefit from a simple open-source QDA, but cannot afford one of the “big names”.
3. Implement a ‘categories’ feature perhaps.
But perhaps equally important for consideration in your software is the “category” system of Imatch 5. The “Categories” option allows users to create move photos/documents (for Joplin, this would be moving of notes) into hierarchical categories (a type of folder) that are easily reorganized. The categories feature also allows for the creation of clones that IMatch refers to as “category reference” files. This is a useful method in that notes can exist in in a fixed tree/hierarchical format, but at the same time, the ‘tag categories’ offer other options for organization. Each note/document could be placed in multiple categories.
Hierarchical Tree Structure:
My city
– museum
– art gallery
– historical stories
– cultural heritage
– modern house architecture examples
– heritage houses
– industrial heritage sites
These could be regrouped into various “categories” without affecting the Hierarchical Tree Structure.
ie)
Category “nice building”
– museum
– heritage houses
– industrial heritage sites
Category “sightseeing”
– museum
– art gallery
– heritage houses
Each tagged item can appear in multiple ‘categories’.
#4. Implement a QDA (Qualitative Data Analysis) feature- User can select portions sections of text and apply a keyword to that entire section.
To achieve functionality as a QDA, in Joplin, a user would be able to select portions sections of text and apply a keyword to that entire section. Ideally, each keyword/tag would appear in a margin and indicate with highlighting or coloured bars each section of text that is coded with a particular keyword. By performing a search/analysis, all sections of text coded with particular keywords can be brought together in summary reports.
This would allow Joplin to function as a QDA (Qualitative Data Analysis) application. Low cost QDA tools do not exist (other than SilvaElm’s amazing SENSE program).
This would strengthen Joplin’s use as a data-sorting, cataloging and analysis tool, and should attract researchers and students.
#5. Offer an option to format text and documents without using Markup.
Perhaps its just me- when I began using computers, the eventual introduction of WYSIWYG was a tremendous breakthrough in that users no longer had to remember codes to format documents, but could use menu-driven selections to format text and see the changes immediately. I have trouble understanding the attraction of having to remember a slew of markup codes when I create documents. I would prefer to be able to format documents with full menu bars with standard formatting options.
#6. Ability to write a text box anywhere on the page like the outstanding KDE software BasketNotes which never really developed into anything.
Have any of you tried BasketNotes for Linux? It was utterly brilliant and one of the best note-taking systems. It allowed users to place a text box anywhere on a page, paste in photos or images and write beneath them. I’ve always thought this was an outstanding feature that allows users to arrange notes and research materials in an organic fashion. If Basket had remained under development improved several features slightly, had a webclipper, and was cross-platform, I don’t think anything today could compare.
The above represent several suggestions that I feel would greatly improve Joplin. I hope this may be of use.
I've waited 8 months before seeing the rest api