UPDATED: 2024-02-27
I want to echo everyone else. Focus on polish (though I know you can't utterly ignore feature parity) and annoyances. There are a lot of crusty corners in the application. Tackle the annoyances. Tackle anything that is ugly or fragile. Tackle anything that takes far too many clicks or complicated processes. When I was a product manager many moons ago, we called these broken window issues. I.e., every cycle, we worked on the feature set of our products but gave broken window items extra emphasis. Polish makes people happier.
The off-the-top-of-my-head annoyances (because I am not keeping a list, though I should). This is all for the desktop …
- some means to refresh Joplin's CSS cache, ref: How do you force a joplin cache refresh?
- the publish-a-note UI is simply weird and non-intuitive
- … and give me a list of published notes! ref: List of notes published to Joplin Cloud?
File
>Export all
… all the export options are for the totality of your notes … except forPDF - PDF File
. That's just weird. You needImport
,Export
, andExport all
in that file menu. Yes, only one option to export to in thatExport
menu is just fine. Maybe someday we can export a solitary note to an additional format.- Linux desktop:
File
>Export all
> (any option) triggers an OS-window-manager level (like GNOME, for example) notification with an empty message and then opens a dialogue to save your PDF beneath the Joplin UI. - Linux desktop:
File
>Export all
> (any option) always defaults to the home directory (doesn't remember where you saved it last) - Linux desktop:
File
>Print
still doesn't work. It takes 20 to 30 seconds (on my machine) for the dialogue to appear (and no feedback during that wait), and then Joplin still crashes when you attempt to actually print. - Joplin notebook, note, curser tracking: I'd like Joplin to always remember where I was in a note and in a notebook. Of course, have a default behavior if you change that calculus by editing or deleting a note or notebook on another machine. If I close Joplin and open it again, start right back where I was before. If I use the back and forward carrots to navigate through notes I have been editing … remember where I was in every one of those notes (up to some limit, of course).
- Bug: every so often Joplin still bounces that cursor around. It's a much rarer event now, though. Pesky little bugs, they are!
- Managing the viewports is a little wonky: If you have the navigator to the left, the notebook panel to the right of that, your editing viewport, and then some panel to the right of the editing viewport … resizing panels gets really awkward. The panel to the right seems to govern the behavior of everything else. This is just weird and kludgy.
- 10 and F11 are nice keystrokes to make those panels disappear, but why not have vertical collapse widgets on the borders?
- profile switching is weird and kludgy. To the point that I don't use it at all. I wish I could. I run three businesses and, of course, use Joplin for personal things. I would love to keep all those in their own domains. For now, top-level notebooks is how I do it. Improve profile switching, and I would use that instead.
- a
userstyles.css
equivalent for HTML notes. And wrap them in a<div id="rendered-html" />
Ref: this discussion.
Anyway, you get the drift. Fix things and improve things but with an emphasis on the stuff that lacks elegance. Reduce the incidence of broken windows.
That's just off the top of my head.
Note: to cushion the sting of my whining. I want to emphasize that I, too, am a very, VERY happy user of Joplin (and supporter via a Joplin Cloud subscription) and find it superior to everything else out there. Now, just make it more elegant and a joy for even non-geeks to use.
Cheers.
-todd