What features did you like in 2023 and what do you want to see in 2024?

News
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Hopefully mermaid will refine it a bit more in 2024.

When the mermaid content becomes complex, the rendering is hard to read and needs to be zoomed.

I tried to start a thread to discuss this:

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OK, so I found how to install the pre-release. The OCR search only works on PDFs, not on images, is this correct ?
Also, will it be available on the mobile app as well once the desktop app is moved to full release ?

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Why doesn't Joplin support the use of the phone's lock screen password?

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I'd imagine the OS vendors aren't happy encouraging people to type their lock PINs into random apps, since it would encourage people to treat this as normal and weakens the concept of keeping it secret, meanwhile the PIN itself is part of the encryption on the phone and is equivalent to giving away your FDE credentials to a certain extent. ( Technically It's not entirely the PIN itself but in this context I don't think it matters. )

I.E, if users expect apps to ask for their lock screen pin, it makes people likely to fall for malware/scams by not being seen as exceptional.

A fingerprint isn't sent to the app, it's handled by the OS entirely and although an app can request the OS verifies the fingerprint, the app never sees the fingerprint itself and likely can't even if it was malicious since it'd be unable to directly interface with the hardware. A malicious app could mock the user interface but wouldn't actually get anything from the sensors itself, meaning a fingerprint isn't trickable in the same way.

( But this is all conjecture and random guessing, in truth I don't know enough about the APIs available to say it it were actually this way. )

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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
  • File > Export all … all the export options are for the totality of your notes … except for PDF - PDF File. That's just weird. You need Import, Export, and Export all in that file menu. Yes, only one option to export to in that Export 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. :slight_smile:

Cheers.
-todd

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127

Hello, I've long thought that Joplin is an excellent tool. The thing that I would love to see it natively support more than anything else, would be really good and complete internal link support. By that I mean things like seeing a sidebar (or similar) list of incoming/outgoing links to whatever note I happen to be viewing or writing. I'd love to be able to type two square brackets and have the tool suggest/autocomplete the title and link to another note that exists. I know I can drag and drop a note onto another to create a link but this breaks my flow and I can easily lose my place if I click wrong on the note. The type of linking functionality I'm describing has become fairly common in note-taking tools (e.g. Zettlr, Logseq, Obsidian, etc.) and it makes life better.

Another thing that would be nice is if the properties were a bit more adaptable with YAML. Joplin imports much of that info but last I experimented with it, I don't think it necessarily retained everything to export again. It would be useful to be able to add/remove/edit them as YAML

Thanks for considering!

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128

Another late response...

Strong encryption
The downgrading of the encryption was a great disappointment for me, and even with long notes and numerous notes I never noticed any of the performance issues with it. (If for some it causes problems, why not it at least optional until the performance issues are addressed?)

Right-to-Left support
RTL works partially, and it would be great if support was better.

"Pin" to top
Almost any other application of this kind has this simple and useful feature. It is genuinely surprising that it doesn't exist in Joplin. I'd like to keep certain notes at the top of the list while others are sorted normally by date. (The hack I have been using in the absence of this feature is to convert the items I want to keep at the top into "to-do" items.)

Internal links
Make it easy to reference other notes. That would make Joplin more useful as a tool for research and knowledge-management.

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129

It's a quite minor point, but facilitating profile switching (by improving the current quit-then-manually-restart method) would greatly help those, like me, that attempt migrating progressively from a Dropbox-like sync to the Joplin cloud server.
The frenzy of quit-then-restart-then-requit-then... is a significant annoyance -for instance I cannot impose it even onto family users.
I discovered there seems to be a trick to at least create different Linux shortcuts selecting exactly which profile to trigger, but in the above link the safety seems dubious...

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I would love to see the following in 2024:

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As a relatively new user, this is what Joplin needs if it hopes to gain market share:

  • Joplin must to a better job safeguarding user content and preventing wholesale deletion of notes.
  • Joplin must include Simple Backup as a core feature of the program as one way of achieving the first bullet point
  • Joplin must aggressively prevent or allow different users to sync to the same target (e.g., Dropbox) without causing havoc for existing notebooks.

These suggestions are born of my experience losing thousands of notes when my wife inadvertently started using Joplin and synced to the same Dropbox account as I was already syncing to. Her notebooks populated my Joplin and my notes were completely destroyed in the process. I was able to recover about 160 notes through a tedious, manual process but lost thousands more. Thankfully I was able to recover old notes from Evernote (never thought I'd be thankful for Evernote) but I lost hundreds of notes I created between the time I joined Joplin and lost my notes.

This simply cannot occur. I've already warned two friends away from Joplin because of these issues.

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My wish list for 2024 is a revamp in the resource/attachments manager.

If you accidentally paste an image in a note or even "cancel" a drawing in your mobile, Joplin will create an attachment with a random name (ex. asbdas99843923252352005.jpg). There is no way to find and delete this attachment unless you browse all existing attachments to see their content.

As the years pass, a lot of junk accumulates in the resources database causing sync delays, increasing the size of backups and even privacy concerns.

Some ideas:

  1. Sort attachments by date (currently this can be done only by title and size). This simple sort button already does a great job showing "recent accidents".
  2. Display icon for orphan attachments (not used by any synced notes). Joplin batch already does that in a brilliant way but it is a little complex to use.
  3. Thumbnails (at least for images).
  4. Display link for referring notes that are currently using the attachment.
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I feel your pain, but honestly this isn't a Joplin problem. I believe Dropbox expects one user per account. I'm not sure how Joplin could be expected to not do what someone with access to a dropbox account is telling it to.

And backing up is always the responsibility of the user at the end of the day. That said, I believe that soon the backup plugin will come pre-installed with Joplin.

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You're right on both counts, but that doesn't solve the issue that people are losing notes because of sync target issues. I see this on a regular basis on r/joplinapp. This isn't a failure point for note apps that have built-in sync (which is most of them) or if one uses Joplin Cloud, but because Joplin gives the user ability to choose their own sync target, it creates all kinds of opportunity for user error. I think Joplin has to build in safeguards or some kind of clear warning with easy to understand explanations. Otherwise we will continue to have these mass note deletion events, and when people complain about that on reddit, it turns away a lot of prospective users.

Agreed that the coming inclusion of Simple Backup in Joplin will at least provide a built-in recovery option if disaster strikes. I just think the app needs to do a better job of steering users, especially the less technically sophisticated users, away from disaster in the first place.

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135

I'm new here and I imported my over 600 recipes from evernote to Joplin.
What I miss and would like to see in Joplin is a thumbnail view additional to the list view. Because of course I get my inspration or sometimes I search by images, not text :wink:

Or is there a workaround to get this view?

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Check out the Note list (Preview) plugin
grafik

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@whitewall I am truly grateful for the work that @laurent and others have devoted to Joplin and shared with the world. But here's where I disagree with you: Joplin has got to protect users from losing their data. While my personal Dropbox experience may be a one-off, when something like that occurs, I should not lose my existing notebooks and thousands of notes (which I did). Joplin is the only note-taking platform on which I've lost content. This never occurred on Evernote or OneNote or other syncing platforms (e.g., Resilio Sync).

If you read the forums, people are too frequently posting about lost notes, lost attachments and syncing conflicts that are hard to resolve. I feel that Joplin needs to protect user content in these situations. I wish I had the skills to contribute to more fluid operations and safety net protocols.

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Yes this is why we bundle the Backup plugin now. Unfortunately it wasn't there when you had this problem.

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I just installed 2.13.15 on 2 windows and one Android device. encryption rejecting passwords is driving me nuts, and it appears that bug reports from 2022 get automatically closed as people give up on updating their inputs. On onedrive, how vulnerable is my data, as I have bank account and other sensitive data in Joplin notes.

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where is this wonderful "backup plugin"? Export All? Or somewhere else?

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