My first effort along these lines was Reason to Rock, which I've been pretty happy with. This was when I created a Java app called PSTextMerge, which was driven by text-delimited files in order to generate the pages and structure for the resulting website.

PSTextMerge functionality then became part of Notenik, and I used that app to create my next web book, Big Ideas in Software Development.

And then, of course, there's the Notenik Knowledge Base, which is also in a book-like form.

And while Notenik has been a very useful tool for all of this, these earlier efforts generally required the creation and editing of special merge templates and script files, which were very powerful, but also a little complicated.

For my latest web book, though, I decided to try to generate the entire site using only Notenik code, without need for any auxiliary files for formatting and scripting.

So many of the recent changes to Notenik have been focused on enhancing the Export as Web Book functionality to allow all the important niceties to be produced straight out of Notenik, without need for any merge templates or script files.

And while there's probably more that could be done here, I'm now at a point where I'm pretty satisfied with everything.

If you'd like to take a look at the resulting web book (or perhaps web-based book, to use the terminology preferred by Matthew Butterick), you can find it at AboutHumans.net. And if you'd like to view or even download the entire Notenik project, you can find that on GitHub.

I have to say that I think the current version of Notenik is a pretty awesome tool for writing, organizing and publishing a web book. Notenik supports all of the following:

1. Creation and editing of content
2. Organizing and reorganizing content
3. Sophisticated and flexible numbering of sections, chapters and so on
4. Generation of traditional book elements, such as an index and a bibliography
5. Generation of typical website navigation, including a search page
6. Internal presentation of the entire collection/book in something very like the finished form
7. Complete generation of HTML as part of an easy export function

Don't know if anyone else will be inspired to use Notenik in this way, but right now I'm pretty pleased with it!

Part of the problem is that, while I enjoy writing for the Web, my writings aren't really topical enough or frequent enough to fit into the blogging category.

Another part of the problem is that I never really got into use of Twitter. I think I just wasn't interested in the brevity of Tweets, or in their typical rapid-fire, back-and-forth nature.

I tried participating in the Micro.blog community for a while, but for various reasons that failed to appeal to me.

Recently, though, I found my interest in a personal blog reviving.

And part of the reason for that was a renewed interest in reading, and in documenting the books that I've read. While I'm not interested in doing a full-on review for each book, I am interested in jotting down a few thoughts about each work that I've finished.

So anyway, with all that being said, I recently decided it was time to take another run at this whole personal blogging thing.

And, of course, I'm using Notenik for this effort, so I thought it might be of some interest to others for me to document what I'm doing and how I'm doing it.

This will probably end up as a series of Adventure posts, with this being the first.

You'll note that, in designing my blog, I'm generally following the steps outlined in an earlier Adventure, How To Build A Website.

My first step was to create a new Notenik collection to contain my blog posts. This will be published on my HBowie.net site, so I created a new collection within the content folder of my project for this site.

Then the next step was to figure out what fields I wanted to have in my blog collection.

Rather than show you the entire completed collection template all at once, let me break it down so I can explain my rationale for each field or, in some cases, group of fields.

Title: <title>

There is a distinction that can be made between microblogging and non-micro blogging, and one of the distinguishing characteristics of a microblog is that individual posts lack titles. What I'm trying to do here is really more of a microblogging thing, in that the posts will be brief, and will often reference other larger items published somewhere else. However, I really like titles and, of course, Notenik mostly prefers unique titles for each note. So each of my posts will have a title, and the title will be the basis of each post's unique ID.

Body: 

The body field will provide the primary substance for each post.

Link: <link>

As I mentioned above these blog posts will often reference other items, so the Link field will be used to provide this sort of reference link, when appropriate.

Date: <date>

As with all blogs (micro or otherwise), the latest items will be shown first, and the Date field will be used to keep things in reverse chronological sequence. In my case, I don't really plan to post more than one item per day, so this field will simply contain a date (without any time). In fact, in some cases, it may not even contain a complete date.

Date Modified: <datemodified>

Seems like a good idea to have a more precise, system-maintained date and time as well, so the Date Modified field will scratch this itch.

Author: <lookup: authors>

Work Title: <lookup: works>

Rating: <rating>

These three fields will be filled in for posts stating that I've finished reading a book (or watching a film, etc.). Notice that the Author and Work TItle fields are lookup fields, meaning that they reference content in associated collections. This might be a bit much for a simple blog but, in my case, those lookup collections were already in place anyway, as part of my Commonplace with Lookups, so I figured I might as well use them. And then I'll use the Rating field to assign my own personal rating for each book, on a scale of 1 - 5.

Image Name: <imagename>

Image Alt: 

Image Caption: 

Image Credit: 

Image Credit Link: <link>

I think it's fun to add images to some of my posts, so these fields will allow for that.

Class: <class: finished, general >

A Class field is often useful to distinguish between different types of notes in a single collection. In my case, I want the posts stating that I've finished reading a book to have a class of finished, while other posts will simply have a class of general. This should be enough for my purposes (at least for now).

Tags: <tags>

And then, finally, I'm using the Tags field to categorize my posts in various ways.

Put all of these fields into some kind of reasonable order, and here's the complete collection template.

Title: <title>

Tags: <tags>

Link: <link>

Class: <class: , finished, general >

Date: <date>

Image Name: <imagename>

Image Alt: 

Image Caption: 

Image Credit: 

Image Credit Link: <link>

Author: <lookup: authors>

Work Title: <lookup: works>

Rating: <rating>

Date Modified: <datemodified>

Body: 

Note that, rather than starting a blog with some particular preconception of what a blog should look like, I'm starting by answering the questions, What sort of content do I want on my blog? and then What sort of fields would best contain and describe that content?.

And so, following this approach, I'm ending up with something that I think will work very well to accomplish my particular goals, but that doesn't necessarily look like every other blog that's out there.

In subsequent Adventures, I'll describe how I format this content into something that can be consumed by others.

The book featured a number of great interviews with early pioneers in what is now called computer science, and quotes from a couple of these resonated strongly with my own experience.

The first is from an interview with Ken Thompson:

> He has called programming an addiction of sorts, and it was in the Berkeley computer center that he got hooked. Sitting in the Bell Labs offices years later, he described the appeal as having all the craftsman’s satisfactions of making things, without the cost and trouble of procuring the materials. “It’s like building something where you don’t have to order the cement,” Thompson said. “You create a world of your own, your own environment, and you never leave this room.”

The other is from an interview with David Sayre, talking about the days at IBM when the field of software development was trying to incorporate practices from hardware engineering:

> The disciplines of hardware engineering fit uneasily in the more ethereal realm of software. “Software is a much more plastic object than hardware,” Sayre said. “You whip it up, squeeze it, and you can dream.”

It is feelings like these that run through me whenever I sit down at my Mac to work on Notenik. More than that, though, it is a desire to foster some of these same feelings for myself and others when we are using Notenik, or when contributing to Notenik through discussions on the Notenik Forum. My favorite software is open-ended, a sort of doorway into a magical kingdom with evolving rules and no fixed boundaries, and my intent with Notenik has always been to create such software, and such an experience for its users.

And on that note, I'm grateful for everyone who has used Notenik, and especially to those who have reached out to me to express their ideas and feelings about the software over the months and now, yes, years.

It's an ongoing journey, and I'm thrilled to have others along for the ride.

And, since I'm the author of the Mac app Notenik, these are naturally the priorities addressed by that app!

But whether you use Notenik or not, I think these priorities are deserving of your consideration.

Sometime ago I made some changes to Notenik so that I could easily see a random selection from this collection each morning: my quote of the day, so to speak. And I was frankly surprised at how much I enjoyed it.

So then I wondered if it might be worth sharing these with others. My first thought was to create an RSS feed containing each day's quote. But then I ran into a problem: how could Notenik keep track of these random selections?

After some cogitating on the problem, I came up with the idea of adding a new field type to Notenik, to be called Date Picked. This way, as each random selection is made, Notenik would have a place to store a timestamp recording the date and time of each selection. And then, of course, a script file could filter and sort using this field, so that the selections could be presented in reverse chronological order (latest first), as is standard for feeds of all kinds.

I then added a new variation on the Notenik Custom URL Scheme so that I could perform a randompick operation — meaning select a note at random from the specified collection, then set the date picked to the current date and time. This way I could easily perform this operation by launching a link within Notenik, or through any other utility (such as Keyboard Maestro) capable of opening a URL.

(Somewhere along the way I decided to dub this whole thing the Portable Wisdom project, partly because I own the portablewisdom.com domain name, but mostly just because this phrase has resonated with me for a long time.)

Next I created a new Notenik template or two to generate an Atom feed and a corresponding web page so that I could share the most recent twenty of these selections.

And then, of course, a script file to sort the quotes and generate the output via the templates.

And then I created another variation on the Custom URL Scheme so that a URL could be used to run a Notenik script file. Again, this could be invoked from within Notenik or by any other handy utility.

So now each morning, just through a few quick actions, I can see my Portable Wisdom quote for the day, and also share it with others.

And although picking a quote at random each day might seem — well, sort of random — I've found that it's this very randomness that I'm enjoying — as opposed to the usual relentless need to read and say something pointed and relevant about the latest bit of news that's happened. Hopefully each of these quotes carries some bit of timeless wisdom, and it's nice to reflect on that for a minute, before being swept up in the never-ending tide of the other stuff.

So feel free to subscribe to this Portable Wisdom feed if you're into RSS. I'll also be posting these from time to time to my Mastodon account, if you'd like to follow along there.

Unlike many other (perhaps all…?) somewhat comparable note-taking apps, Notenik allows you to tailor each different collection (aka folder) full of notes in several meaningful ways. Most significantly, you can customize the particular set of field labels and field types used within each Collection, so that different collections can be used for quite different purposes. And then you can also tailor the look and feel of a collection by changing the CSS used for the display of its notes, and even the HTML layout used.

All of these changes can be made simply by editing a few text files but, for some time now, when you create a new collection, Notenik has allowed you to choose from a number of different Starter Packs that can be used to initialize your new collection with a particular configuration.

I've added new Starter Packs to Notenik every once in a while but, still, as the developer, I've been the only person with the power to create a new one, or to enable other users to make use of one.

Up until now, that is!

The latest version includes two related features.

The first is called Clone, and can be found beneath the File menu. This function will copy the selected collection to a new location, but leaving behind the actual notes that make up the content of the collection.

The user may then use their trusty text editor to make any further changes to the clone (such as adding more sample data), before using it as a custom Starter Pack.

Once these further edits are complete, the user may copy this cloned collection into the Starter Packs folder within the user's iCloud Drive Notenik folder.

It will then become available as an option the next time the user executes the process of creating a New Collection.

Note that, when exchanging Starter Packs with other users, it will be most convenient to first compress each Pack into a single Zip file. The user will then need to decompress the Pack before making use of it.

Also note that the Notenik Discourse Forum now has a new category set up specifically for Starter Pack Sharing.

Is this a good idea?

Heck, I don't know.

There are certainly many other ways to launch an app on your Mac, including software designed specifically for this purpose.

But you be the judge.

Let me show you how you can use Notenik in this way, and then you decide if this use case makes any sense.

notenik://open?path=/Users/hbowie/Library/Mobile%20Documents/iCloud~com~powersurgepub~notenik~shared/Documents/Apps%20Catalog

notenik://open?path=/Users/hbowie/Library/Mobile%20Documents/iCloud~com~powersurgepub~notenik~shared/Documents/Apps%20Catalog&select=action

So let's start with the most significant, core differentiator:

• Each folder of text files managed by Notenik has its own unique template file…

• And each template file defines a set of fields for the notes within that folder…

• And each field is defined by a label, a type, and (sometimes) a configuration…

• And the file extension for the template file specifies the file extension to be used for notes created within that folder.

Let's look at an example of how this works in practice.

Here are the contents of a sample template file, which is just an ordinary text file that you can open with your favorite text editor. Here I'm using BBEdit.

And here's what the Edit tab will look like when adding a new note to the collection (aka folder) using this template.

So let me just point out a few interesting bits here:

• Every note must start with a Title field, and conclude with a Body field (although they can be given different labels).

• In between those two, a note can have many different fields, of many different types.

• The field type will, among other things, determine what sort of widget appears on the Edit tab for that field, when adding a new note within that folder, or when editing an existing note.

• Some field types, such as status, can also have a configuration specified in the template. In this case, the allowable status values are being specified, and these are the values that will appear in the drop-down menu when selecting a value for this field.

So here's what a sample note might look like after being added to this collection, and when viewed on Notenik's Display tab.

And, just to round things out, and remove the last bit of mystery, here's what the resulting note file might look like (again viewing with BBEdit).

And then, perhaps, I should make one final point for today's Adventure post.

One may always edit a Notenik template file directly, if one is so inclined, and this is sometimes the best way to build some new and exotic sort of collection.

However, direct editing of the template file is generally a last resort, and Notenik offers these other ways of tailoring a template file, before resorting to direct editing.

• When creating a new collection, Notenik currently offers sixteen different Starting Collection Types from which you may choose, each with a different collection template. Even when creating something new, you can help yourself by picking a good starting point from this list.

• The Collection Settings window allows you to pick from several common field labels and types in order to add them to your collection template.

• After initial creation, Notenik offers a handy window to Rename, Add or Remove a field, available beneath the Collection menu.

It's generally best to exercise these options to get you as far as possible, and then perform direct editing of your template file to implement any final tweaks.

Hopefully this post has helped to explain one of the key ways in which Notenik differs from other similar apps.

Now, as to why Notenik works this way…?

Well, when creating a list of items, with each row containing a number of columns, I often wished to have one or more columns containing some significant amount of text… but then a traditional spreadsheet app quickly gets awkward and unwieldy.

And then when writing some significant chunks of text, I often wished to organize many such chunks into a coherent collection, and then sort, filter and format those chunks using some set of discrete fields, in addition to the more free-form bits of text… but then a traditional document editing app proves disappointing.

So Notenik attempts to provide a happy medium in between these two extremes, and the collection template file is the key to pulling this all together.

And on that list was a site created by Blake Watson, called HTML for People. His site is in the form of a web book, offering a tutorial on HTML for those new to webmaking. It walks a new user through the entire process of building a personal website, and makes the entire journey easy and fun.

I really liked Blake's site, and it made me wonder if I could create a companion web book that would supplement Blake's instructions, following the same trail, but at every step showing how Notenik could be used to perform the same tasks.

I've been working on this companion book for the last several months, and I'm happy to say that it's now as complete as I can think to make it.

(That being said, I'm eager to hear feedback from others, and expect to make further improvements to the book as feedback comes in.)

There are really four somewhat separate achievements here.

1. I learned a bunch of stuff that I hadn't known before.

2. I realized that Notenik had numerous shortcomings, and I've tried to rectify all of these that I could identify. You'll find these changes sprinkled through recent updates, starting from Version 15.5.0. The last few of these have just been released, in Version 16.2.0.

3. I've finalized (at least for now) and published my companion guide, which I'm calling an Intro to Website Creation using Notenik.

4. This tutorial makes use of a new Notenik Starter Pack, # 16, titled HTML for People demo, providing all of the Notenik folders and files needed to make your way through the tutorial.

This has been a very rewarding three-month journey, and I'm thankful to Blake Watson for his site, and for the Notenik users active in the app's Discourse forum, who are continually finding ways to make Notenik a better, more useful Mac app.

Starting with the big picture, this means Notenik has had roughly 150 significant releases, starting with 1.1.0 on July 15, 2019. This works out to about 1 release every two weeks, over a period of five and a half years! And Notenik today has an average rating of 4.8 stars out of 5 in the Mac App Store, based on every rating ever made, starting with that first release. So this feels like a milestone worth celebrating!

Zooming in to the details of this release, I'll start with the invention of a couple of new Markdown extensions. I've added a segment command that can be used to start and end a portion of your writing that you wish to embed within a div or an aside, as examples. And then there's the new inject that can be used to inject common attributes (class, id, and/or style) into the following block element (such as a p or a ul).

And then there's my favorite. I've been using Nova a lot recently, and I was missing some way to open a folder in Nova when starting from a Notenik project folder. Then I discovered a way to do it using Nova URL Schemes, and so there's now an application general setting to Gen Open in Nova Items, and turning this on will achieve the desired effect. Very handy if you're using Nova regularly!

Oh, and I added support for Markdown highlighting, using the syntax found in the Markdown Guide to Extended Syntax.

And then there were a couple of other changes to improve handling of sync conflicts (when using a third-party sync service), and to allow a project folder to become a user's Essential Collection.

As with our prior adventure, many of the enhancements here were inspired by working my way further through Blake Watson's excellent web book HTML for People.

Watson's book is for beginners, but I keep learning new things, and seeing new ways to make Notenik easier to use, and this release includes more of these sorts of refinements.

And while my Notenik companion to HTML for People is not yet complete, I think it is now far enough along to make it available for any interested reviewers.

I've decided to publish it at notenik.app/web-intro.

If you're at all interested, I'd love to hear any feedback you might have.

And, as always, bug reports can be filed and enhancement requests can be submitted at discourse.notenik.app.

Blake's book takes the reader through a quick and painless introduction to Hypertext Markup Language, and makes the point (near and dear to my own heart) that HTML is not just for technologists, but is a document format meant to be accessible to everyone.

Blake's how-to gave me the idea of trying to write a companion document that would walk a user through the same steps of simple website creation, but using Notenik, rather than straight HTML.

That companion document is still in work, but a funny thing happened along the way.

I discovered that some of the Notenik steps I was trying to describe were actually harder than they needed to be.

And so, I fashioned some enhancements to make things a bit easier.

First, I realized (finally, I guess) that what I've been calling a parent realm in Notenik for so long has actually evolved into something that might as well be called a project folder. So I made that nomenclature change, which seemed a valuable step towards making Notenik a little more straightforward, and a little less esoteric.

And then, once I had made that change (in my own thinking, as well as in the software and documentation), I wondered why in the world simple text files (such as README and LICENSE files) were not visible within Notenik when they appeared at the top level of a project folder.

And so, now they are.

And then, I wanted to make Class and Status fields visible within a content collection, without the user having to worry about them initially, but both fields looked a bit awkward with empty values, so I wondered why Notenik didn't have a way to specify default values for those fields.

And so now it does.

And then, when I was describing how a script file could be viewed and edited, I realized that the long-time file extension of '.tcz' that I had been using — even though it made it easy for Notenik to recognize those files — made it difficult for other apps to recognize what was basically a tab-delimited file format. And so, I thought, why not allow script files to have file extensions of '.tsv' (for tab-separated values), so long as they are stored in a folder named scripts?

And so now it's much easier to open and edit a script file using Numbers or Excel or even Modern CSV.

And then Blake suggested the user download one or more classless CSS frameworks and try those out, and I realized that sounded pretty cool, but there was no way to easily download one of those things and apply it within Notenik.

And so now there is.

And then I realized that, while it was easy to apply CSS and load image files within Notenik, there was no easy way to transfer those things to a website being built from a Notenik collection.

And so now there is.

And I'm still not done going through all of Blake's book! So no doubt there will be more to come.

But that already seemed like quite a lot, and I was getting close to two weeks without a Notenik release, so I've bundled up all these enhancements and released them into the wild as Notenik 15.8.0.

Available now from the Mac App Store.

A Sequence identifier is meant to be an arbitrary value whose only purpose is to establish a position within a sequence.

A Sequence identifier can consist of letters or numbers, or some combination of the two.

In many scenarios, it would be most useful for each Note in a Collection to have a unique Seq value, but Notenik does not insist on this.

Sequence values will sort into what will generally appear to be a "normal" sequence, based on an algorithm of incrementing on the right and then carrying overflow to the left.

As you would expect, a value of '12' will appear after a value of '2'.

But also a value of 'AB' will sort after a value of 'B'.

A structure can be implied by using a series of values separated by periods, or dots: something like '15.3.1', and this might imply that the Note so identified should be treated as a "child" of '15.3'.

In fact, Seq values can be used as part of an outlining scheme, and there is a separate post on Outlining with Notenik.

A Seq field can be useful to impose some sort of taxonomy on your Notes, but Notenik itself does not define any particular taxonomy to be used.

Note that there are several different sort options that make use of the Seq field.

• Seq + Title will sort everything by Seq and, if there are duplicates, will then sort by their Title fields.
• Tasks by Seq can be useful if the Seq field is being used as a priority indicator; in addition, a Status field will be expected, and completed tasks will sort separately from tasks still to be completed.
• Tags + Seq can be useful if you are using the Seq field for some sort of priority within Tag values.
• Date + Seq can be useful if you are using the Seq field to enter a time of day.
• Rank + Seq + Title can be used if you wish the Seq field to be used within a separate Rank field.
• Folder + Seq + Title can be used to sort by Seq within each subfolder.

For additional details, consult the Knowledge Base.

And yet I know that Notenik users have struggled over the years trying to figure out how to fashion their own sites using Notenik.

But it's not that I'm trying to make things difficult. It's just that I've been doing this for so long that I tend to take a lot of knowledge for granted.

And so, based on recent feedback, I've taken a couple of additional steps to make things a bit easier for those who might be trying to use Notenik as a static site generator.

The first is publication of a more complete tutorial on the subject, always available from the Docs page of the Notenik.app website.

The second consists of some improvements to Notenik itself, and to the Website starter pack, just released in Notenik 15.5.0.

Hopefully this will prove helpful for those Mac users trying to create their own websites. If there's other stuff that's tripping you up, or that you think could be improved, I would encourage you to post something on the Notenik Discourse Forum. It's a friendly, helpful group that hangs out there, and I respond quickly to any new posts.

So it's good to know that one of the more reliable sources for quotations is WikiQuote.org, one of the lesser-know siblings of big brother WikiPedia. WikiQuote will generally provide a verified author, source title and date for any quotation, and its collection of quotations is pretty extensive.

WikiQuote has been around for quite some time, and my old app iWisdom used to have a handy feature that allowed a user to dowload a particular quote from that site.

Notenik version15.4.0 now adds a similar ability, using SwiftSoup to parse an author's page on WikiQuote, and then allowing the Notenik user to specify a search string that will allow them to zero in on a particular quotation of interest, and then bring it over into their personal Notenik commonplace book.

Because we're parsing a web page, and not reading information from a database, the retrieval process is certainly not perfect, but I believe it's good enough to often be useful, saving the time and potential inaccuracies associated with manually typing in a particular quotation.

For those of you assembling digital commonplace books, I hope you find this new feature to be of use!

This post is part of a series on use of Notenik to maintain a commonplace book. If you found this post to be of interest, then you may want to read some of these others as well.

1. Commonplacing with Notenik
2. Storage Medium for a Commonplace Book
3. Commonplace Data
4. Custom Display Mode
5. Leveraging Commonplace Entries
6. Formatting a Quote Attribution with Notenik 15.0.0
7. Importing a Quotation from WikiQuote
8. Using Match-Merge Logic in Notenik

But Notenik has its own file format, which is slightly different from these others.

Why is that?

There are a number of reasons.

1. Historical happenstance. I devised the Notenik file format after learning of MultiMarkdown but before the use of YAML frontmatter became popular.

2. A CMS/database influence. With the Notenik format, everything is a field, and everything has a label, including the Title and the Body of each note. To some extent, this just reflects my long history doing database development. And also my prior use of the Drupal content management system, in which every field is explicitly named.

3. Maximum field flexibility. Notenik allows the use of multiple Markdown fields within a note. A second Markdown field, for example, might be used as a teaser or preview for a blog post. So rather than structure a Notenik file as a single Markdown document with some optional metadata in front, I chose to structure it so that Markdown (and a variety of other data types) could be accomodated in other fields.

4. Preference for readability over bare-bones data entry. Because every field has a field title, and because blank lines are used to separate fields, a Notenik file is highly readable by anyone opening it using a text editor. And Notenik expects to take that formatting off of your hands when creating new notes. On the other hand, for users who create text-based notes using nothing but a text editor, the Notenik format requires a few additional keystrokes.

So while I try to maintain maximum interoperability with these other formats, Notenik continues to prefer its own – slightly different, slightly quirky, but very straightforward – format.

See the Notenik Knowledge Base for a complete description of the Notenik file format.

Well, it's not because I'm trying to keep it a secret.

But Notenik does have a sort of "perfect storm" of attributes that seem to keep it from becoming a household word.

1. It's only available for the Mac. Availability on multiple platforms — at least on multiple devices throughout the Apple ecosystem — seems to constitute table stakes for a lot of people these days, including those who write about tech.

2. It's nowhere near the bleeding edge. Notenik is written in Swift and AppKit, technologies that are well supported by Apple. But it doesn't run on Apple Vision Pro, or on the Apple Watch, or even on the iPad or iPhone. And it doesn't make use of SwiftUI or any of Apple's latest technologies. So it's not part of, or adjacent to, any other hot topics for tech writers.

3. Positive reviews don't get much traction. I'm proud to say that Notenik was very well reviewed in what turned out to be the absolute last print issues of MacFormat and MacLife magazines. And also proud to say that Notenik has an average rating of 4.8 stars in the Mac App Store, with 68 ratings, and reviews that say things like "A hidden powerhouse." But these sorts of positive reviews don't actually seem to attract much attention.

4. Open source but not Unix. Because Notenik is open source software, there's no money for advertising. But most of the open source community is focused on command line tools that run on any Unix platform — including, but not limited to, the Mac. So Notenik does not hit the open source sweet spot.

5. Independent but not Indie. I'm an independent developer, and I'm the developer for Notenik. But when people talk about indie developers, they are mostly talking about developers who are independently making a living by selling their software and, increasingly, about game developers. Also, I'm not using any independent distribution channels for Notenik, so my indie status is compromised by virtue of distribution through the App Store.

6. Not popular enough for the productivity gurus. There seems to be a whole group of writers about productivity tools and techniques these days. These people seemingly make some sort of living writing about how constantly switching from one tool/technique to another, and then back again, makes them more productive — as measured, I suppose, by their ability to churn out more and more of these pieces faster and faster. But perhaps because Notenik is already so well documented, it has not attracted much attention from these sorts of folks.

7. No plugins. Some tools gain popularity because they allow development of plugins that can be dynamically loaded by their apps. Notenik doesn't work like that. So there's no room for incidental add-on development and discussion.

So, when a recent user discovered Notenik and wondered why he'd never heard of it before, I was only half-joking when I responded:

> Shhh… it's a well kept secret. Only the cognoscenti are allowed to know about it. Welcome to the club!

In all seriousness, though, feel free to tell your friends and neighbors about Notenik. As I said, I'm not trying to keep it a secret.

It's just sort of worked out that way.

In it he talks about the slippery slope of sliding from art to entertainment to distraction, and ending up in a place where the cheap and easy hit always wins out over "the long flourishing."

Although this phrase hadn't occurred to me before, my Mac app Notenik is definitely designed for this latter goal.

To wit:

1. It's designed for use on the Mac, which is itself an example of the long flourishing, and less inclined to be used for the easy hits so often found on phones and tablets.

2. Notenik avoids any sort of attention-grabbing tricks. Notenik will never nag you or beg you for attention. Instead it patiently waits for your intention.

3. It's not flashy, and its appearance doesn't try to entice you with any slick graphics.

4. It's designed for the long haul. It's all open-source, and all of its data is stored in plain text files. So both the app and its data are designed to be survivable.

5. It intentionally avoids the modern app merry-go-round on which users are encouraged to continually try the next shiny new thing, and then try to rebuild their workflows around something new every few months or so. Notenik is designed to be easy and straightforward for initial use, but deep enough to reward ongoing learning and exploration, and flexible enough to be used for many different purposes.

6. Its primary focus is on the written word, rather than still or moving images.

So if you're trying to adjust your life to consume less junk, and more substance, Notenik is ready to help.