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I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten

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panzer:
NoteKit - Write your notes in instantly-formatted Markdown, organise them in a tree of folders that can be instantly navigated from within the program, and add hand-drawn notes by mouse, touchscreen or digitiser:
https://github.com/blackhole89/notekit/

panzer:
μPad - a powerful note-taking app that helps you organise + take notes without restrictions

panzer:
Roam Monkey:
https://roamresearch.com/#/app/roamhacker/page/jI-X_cwaf

JavaJones:
Roam Monkey:
https://roamresearch.com/#/app/roamhacker/page/jI-X_cwaf
-panzer (August 12, 2020, 01:00 AM)
--- End quote ---

Here is the maddening dichotomy of Roam, Roamcult, and Conor laid bare: Things like this - which, by the way, looks really useful - are a testament to the flexibility of the system, but also an indictment of the development priorities of the team lead.

It is on the one hand nice that Roam is flexible and extensible enough that such things can be done within it, despite them not having access to the code. That is really cool, in a way. It allows the community to help cover things that the core devs cannot, and without open sourcing, since not all developers/companies and profit models are amenable to doing so. It does present some security risks to allow this kind of stuff though, even with the warnings.

On the other hand, the security risks are arguably the smaller concern here. A majority of the features in RoamMonkey are highly useful to most people. They are, in fact, largely features that should be a core part of Roam! Maybe they will be some day, but here's what frustrates me so much. These features were achievable by a self-professed amateur JavaScript developer using only external access. Surely this could be done as well or better and faster by the internal developers. And yet, in the same several months that this guy has been developing these highly useful features that almost everyone would use, Conor and his partner(s) have added a Pomodoro timer, Mermaid diagrams, and other arguably niche and certainly not "first priority" stuff. This is behavior that users SHOULD NOT accept from a developer of an app they are paying for (and, I would add, paying a premium over many comparable products).

Roam is doing cool stuff, but I refuse to support Conor's self-indulgent approach to development priorities. It's not going to work out well in the long run.

- Oshyan

Dormouse:
That's an interesting take on the situation.
I share concerns about the professionalism of Roam's development. The offline enticement to believers through a PWA, risking data loss if cache is deleted before sync with the online database, just seemed the wrong way for the program to work.
But I hope it does well because a database has advantages that files don't - even if I prefer files for my own use.

I see two more positive possibilities.
One is that he's just substantially expanded the team; I have no experience of development teams, but in other areas it's not unusual for it to take time to become productive rather than a drain on existing resources. Hopefully they predicted this and had stuff like the pomodoro already up their sleeves to give an illusion of movement.
The second is that a huge number of cultists are desperate to fiddle personally with the program. Mostly, it seems to me, because they have a drive to fiddle (enhanced by lockdowns) rather than a particular need. This keeps them attached. Other programs like Trello have benefited hugely from third party enhancement. And I notice the building excitement in Obsidian over the near-term API release.

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