Comment by devsda
5 hours ago
The note taking genre of opensource apps is saturated with many options but most of them are electron based.
I was hoping that someone with enough motivation and money for tokens would come up with a non-electron option that is similar to onenote, with free form note placement and handwritten notes.
Basically I wish there is an opensource app having good feature parity with OneNote. Thats a good benchmark to have.
an ambitious version of a note-taking program might be one that comes in pieces that you then put together by explaining to an AI what type of program you want, adding only the features you want and ignoring everything else
its always been a problem for me that ive never been able to find something that works exactly how i want, so i just put up with whatever is close enough, like obsidian for example. its probably because note taking is just a very personal thing so everyone is going to have different needs, and the amount of options out there is kind of proof of that
from the point of view of a developer, an AI would help with the complexity of a program that has every feature under the sun, and for the end user ian Ai would help the complexity of having to put all those modules together and making them work well
obviously each person could just vibe code their own program right now but each one would be starting from scratch. it would be more efficient to start with the same modules that have been tried and tested and then piece them together into something more standardised
i would love if this was a thing for most software actually. photoshop for example has only a dozen features that i ever use and the other 1000 features are wasted on me and just mean a longer startup time and a larger install size, but also i dont want want an AI to make me a custom version from scratch because you would probably spend more time trying to iron out all the weird bugs in it than actually using it
This is exactly what I've been thinking for decades.
I once made a proof of concept. Wikipedia use to have static menu entries. I had a greasemonkey script that hides some of them them.
For entries that shouldn't be hidden the line that hides them is commented out.
https://userscripts-mirror.org/scripts/review/170442
Then I had a form that let you pick which ones you want. It spit out a gm script with all entries commented out except from the ones you wanted to keep.
https://go-here.nl/gm/wikipedia-clean-up.php
I also wrote this as a joke.
https://neanderthal.go-here.nl
When a link or button is clicked the server return a js file that contain one function. Then it executes the function.
To borrow your example, when you've picked the functionality you want in your note taking app a version number like 1.0.0.unixtime can be generated and stored so that you can later populate the config form with the chosen configuration and add or remove things.
Or you could do something with a config file to populate the form again.
An LLM can also modify a config file. Before execution it can be validated, as it is so simple it can show which mandatory entries are missing, which ones are spelled incorrectly.
If you provide the LLM with the html form or the config file (+docs) it shouldn't have much difficulty generating exactly what you wanted.
As the application has now been turned into ravioli it also addresses the ancient puzzle of separating feature updates from security updates.
You can still introduce a new gui that confuses the hell out of users. Then if no one checks the box you can take your learnings from it without 1000 people having to tell you in 500 different places.
[] Icons? [] Text? [] Icons AND Text?
A few years ago I was wishing the same, but I was wishing it for someone knowledgeable enough.
Today I wish the same, but for someone with enough motivation and tokens instead.
Don't get the wrong idea: I would be glad for a OneNote/Obsidian alternative that's performant. I just lament the days where I'd stare in awe thinking about the levels of wizardry one must get to in order to build something that I admire. Now the first thing that comes to mind is "I wonder how many tokens did this took them to make".