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Why are so many apps so complex – Part 1

Feature Creep

Developing software to meet the diverse needs of a broad range of users is hard. You are continually be pulled in different directions and can eastly find yourself adding features your noisiest users want, only to find you’ve just complicated things for 90% of your users in order to satisfy that 10%.

Learn to say no

Designing software that is easy to use and delivers the functionality that the majority of your best users need is as much a craft as it is a science. As I recently posted on X, it is often times too easy to add a new feature (especially if you love writing code) and much harder to sit back, carefully weigh up the pros and cons and then conclude it is better not to add this feature, documenting the reasons why.

If you don’t carefully and thoughtfully follow this process you will most likely end up with a bloated, overly complex and hard to maintain application that may well be attractive to a small group of power users but not so the wider community. This could easily impinge on the success and longevity of the product.

Say no early and beware of hype cycles

Once you’ve built an application and have lots of users it can be extremely difficult to remove features or some would say cripple it. So you need to cull unnecessary features as early on as possible, or better still never include them.

With all the recent hype about AI, many applications have added some level of AI, so they get to join the AI hype bandwagon. In one case I’m aware of they’ve moved so heavily into AI that the app has morphed into something so different that the users are far from happy.

Experience counts

Having years of experience building user facing applications has made it easier for me to say no to creeping featuritis, code bloat and unnecessary complexity.

Having said that, every day I’m still learning and hopefully improving. In fact if I was to start Clibu Notes development today their are some user interface aspects I would do differently. Hindsight is such a wonderful thing.

Iterate and improve

Clibu Notes is our third generation of Note Taking application, each one a complete redesign and rewrite from the ground up. We started with a Windows only Desktop app, then a Cloud only Web app and now with Clibu Notes an application that works online in the cloud as well as completely offline. It can be installed like any native application on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and Linux and also works in the Browser.

With each generation we’ve refined the user interface and we’ve made some quite major changes along the way. Each time the goal has been to try and further simplify the application and at the same time make it more useful.

Be current & take on big issues

To deliver on that premise Clibu Notes works across all of your devices, whether online or offline, merges all changes automagically and has the same clear and consistent user interface and user experience on all devices.

In my opinion many applications are stuck in an old way of software development. Separate apps are built for each platform, Mac, Windows etc. And often the user interface and user experience differs across platforms, especially on smartphones and tablets, assuming they support these.

Progressive Web Applications are a win win.

Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) work across all modern platforms and completely bypass having to build separate applications for each one. With a PWA you have a single unified, platform agnostic, code base which simplifies all aspects of the application.

Designing Clibu Notes as a PWA from the ground up was a clear and obvious choice. The benefits to us and our users are truly significant.

Continued in Part 2.

Neville

Aside:

I’m now publishing our Blog articles on Medium. You can subscribe to those via this link and see our articles on Medium with this link.

PS. Follow us at X on Medium and on LinkedIn.

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Offline PKM has real and measurable benefits

Recently a Clibu Notes user had an issue which unfortunately caused Clibu Notes to crash. At that time we hadn’t got around to making Clibu Notes crash resistant. This quickly resulted in user emails telling me the server was down, which I was also aware of through our monitoring tools.

This brings me to the point of this post and that is no matter what happens with the Clibu Notes server (and in future your own hosted Clibu Notes server) life goes on pretty much as normal due to Clibu Notes ability to run with full functionality without an Internet connection.

Knowing that you still have full access to all of your notes and can edit them, create new notes, rearrange the tree etc. is wonderfully liberating. In the scenario above, as soon as the server was up and running again all changes were updated across all devices. Even edits of the same notes on different devices merge and are once more unified.

Online only applications

When applications only run on a remote server all work grinds to a halt when you lose your Internet connection or the server goes down for whatever reason.

Offline applications

On the other hand applications that run only locally will of course keep running, but these typically don’t have the ability to seamlessly merge changes or enable concurrent editing of content on multiple devices or by multiple users.

Clibu Notes – the best of both online and offline

It is clear to me that if you want the peace of mind knowing your content is always available, can always be updated and added to across all of your devices, regardless of whether you are connected to the Internet or not then applications with the level off offline support Clibu Notes has are a must.

You can check how applications you maybe using compare with Clibu Notes offline functionality with the following:

Works without
Internet		Collaborative
Editing		Devices update in realtime*Awareness
Offline OnlyYesNoNoNo
Offline + SyncYesNo (1)No (2)No
OnlineNoNo (3)MaybeMaybe
Clibu NotesYesYes (4)Yes (5)Yes

* Awareness shows you other users/devices who are online, where they are editing and what changes they have made.

1) Edits on different devices will typically overwrite each other, losing content.
2) Synchronizing changes for offline apps is unlikely to be fine grained and and make take some time.
3) Unlikely to support real collaborative editing of the same content at the same time. Similar issue to (1).
4) The same note can be edited by any user on any device and all changes will eventually coalesce to the same content. This is regardless of whether a user is online or not.
5) When online, otherwise as soon as they go online.

Eventually consistent content

In order to update all changes from all users whether they were made offline or online, we need code the appears to work like magic. This includes edits to exactly the same content on different devices.

We get this magic from CRDT’s or Conflict-free Replicated Data Types. Discussing CRDT’s here is well beyond the scope of the article, however I can highly recommend a series of articles by Jake Lazaroff, starting with An Interactive Intro to CRDTs.

Conclusion

If you want to be able to access all of your notes, add new notes and edit notes on your Smartphone, Tablet or Desktop PC wherever you are, whether you have an Internet connection or not, then Clibu Notes is the solution you need.

PS. Clibu Notes is now Crash resilient. This means that if there is a serious issue which takes the server down it will automatically restart.

PPS. Clibu Notes V0.72.030 has just been released, and continues our steady stream of new releases. See the Release Notes in the Help for details.

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How I use Clibu Notes

I’ve been asked to provide some information on how I use Clibu Notes on a day to day basis. Hopefully this article will help you get some ideas to fit into your note taking workflow, whether you are using Clibu Notes or a similar Knowledge Management application.

I use Clibu Notes for several purposes.

Research

Research is one important area. When I invest time in researching an area of particular interest, I want to ensure that what I’ve found is retained and readily accessible. The last thing I want is to have to do the same painstaking research all over again.

This might be about recommended places to visit for a future trip, detailed information I need to keep for specific development work on software projects such as Clibu Notes. Or information to help improve my Golf game or Fitness and maintaining a happy and healthy life.

Find it once, keep it forever and access it anywhere. You get the idea.

Research

Project Tracking

Next is tracking the work I’m doing. What new features am I considering, how useful are they to the broader community, how much will they cost to implement, can they be justified and what priority are they given.

When a new feature is in development I also track it’s progress, and ensure Help and other documentation is written for it.

Then there is a need to track bugs, usability and other issues.

I also track and keep notes on work around the house and things that need to be done.

Project Tacking

Planning

We like to travel, especially overseas and these trips take considerable planning. This something I do with my wife, so we share and collaborate on the various tasks. It is a combination of research and detailed checklists.

These tend to be intense periods of work which happen infrequently and are very important to us.

Planning

Experiences

When we’ve been to a nice restaurant, drank a bottle of wine we particularly like, visited an unusual and interesting place, we keep notes so we can remember to enjoy these again at some point.

Notes of places we’ve taken for trip planning will find their way here for the ones that stand out. Often times the memories you bring back home are as important as the original visit.

Trees and Work Spaces

In the examples above I’ve shown how I organize my notes using Clibu’s Notes Tree. However not everyone wants to organize their notes in a hierarchy and Clibu Notes in no way forces you to. You can even hide the tree, so you never see it.

For those of you who prefer a flat structure I recommend having a set of top level tree items to organize your notes into collections. This will enable you create (Work) Spaces for each collection.

Spaces enable you to segment the tree and focus on a single branch of notes.

When a space is selected the tree and notes list/grid only shows notes in that that space. Search and Filters are restricted to notes in the space. You can still open linked notes, which are outside the current space.

Nitty Gritty

In order to produce notes that function well for me I make heavy use of backlinks, which enable me to navigate between related notes. Note icons and colors to visually locate notes. Search and less so Filters to drill down to specific sets of notes. I use the My Order view along with drag and drop to arrange the tree just how I want it. And Date views to see notes in a timeline. Spaces to segment the tree into actionable work areas.

A Note with Links, Backlinks & Collapsed blocks

When editing I use a mix of markdown and toolbar functionality for text formatting. Task lists, well for tasks. Drag and drop to reorder lists, block select & move to reorder blocks, details for collapsible blocks and text highlighting. I typically have two note editors open.

I’ll Archive notes that I want to keep, but that are no longer of interest in the context of my current day to day work.

Smartphones & Tablets

On my phone and tablets Clibu Notes is installed as a Progressive Web App (PWA) and added to the home screen. A single tap then opens it. When I’m primarily consuming content, I’ll tap the Editable icon on the bottom bar to prevent any accidental changes.

Using Clibu Notes to take short notes on my phone is very convenient. I’ll typically flesh them out when I’m back on a device with a physical keyboard.

Knowing that Clibu Notes automagically synchronizes changes down to the character level, across all devices is and I’ll repeat magically liberating. Along with the ability to work offline, which is a must in todays mobile world.

Note on Smartphone + Search

To finish up

There are no hard and fast rules about how you use a PKM app like Clibu Notes. Different people have very different ideas about what works best for them and ways of accomplishing that.

You need to sit down and work through your requirements and then see if you can find an application that meets those criteria, or at least comes close.

Think about how you want to structure and organize your notes, but don’t stress over it. Your PKM of choice should make it easy to restructure and reorganize your notes, as the need arises and as you and it grow together.

Unfortunately a common trait is to spend too much time and effort organizing notes. Think more about note retrieval – how can I quickly locate a specific note or set of notes and the notes that are related to them. What tools does my PKM provide to assist in fast and accurate note retrieval.

There are plenty of Youtube videos on organizing notes. Some are focused on specific applications and others more generic or focusing on a methodology. 

Tiago Forte is quite prolific in this area. This is a new video on his PARA method. A methodology called the Zettelkasten method has received quite a bit of attention the last few years.

The ways that people are using PKM’s is exploding in much the same way that PKM applications are.

I hope you’ve gleamed something useful from this article. Please do leave a comment below and follow us on Twitter (now X)

And if you haven’t signed up to use Clibu Notes yet, please do give it a try. We’d love to get your feedback.

– Neville

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Clibu Notes: Your data, stored locally, available on all your devices.

There has been a move for some time now, which continues to gather pace where people don’t want their data in the cloud on some large companies servers where they have no idea who might be looking at it or profiting from it.

My background was developing Windows Desktop software where everything was stored on your PC and you copied files around from PC to PC as needed.  Cumbersome and fraught with missteps which could easily leave you in a pickle.

After many years of doing Desktop software I moved to Web Application development where data was stored on servers under my control and could be accessed from any device effortlessly.

For Knowledge Base applications like our original Clibu App this meant users could access and update information anywhere they had access to a Web Browser and the Internet.

So far so good. However obstacles still remain. First some folks don’t want their data stored in the cloud, second cloud only applications are useless if you don’t have an Internet connection or the cloud server is down and third is what happens if the company hosting your app and cloud data goes out of business.

For Clibu we tackled these issues by releasing Clibu On Premise, a version that you install locally. However this meant the ability to access your data from anywhere on the planet was lost, unless you had the wherewithal to setup and configure secure  remote access. Another downside is we needed to keep our cloud version and on-premise versions in step, which created more work for us and meant on-premise sometimes fell behind.

So what’s the solution. Well we’ve learnt an awful lot developing Clibu, which was our first serious Web Application. Over that time Browser capabilities have improved a lot, often quite dramatically.

This has led us to rethink Clibu from the ground up, how it could function to deliver the best possible end user experience. One where all data is kept on your local device, where it can be accessed without any Internet connection, where the application continues to work should we go out of business or stop development, where data is automatically shared and synchronized across all devices on your local Network and where you can optionally access it from any Browser anywhere if you enable your data to be kept on a central server.

Given we can meet all of these objectives I think you’ll agree this paints a very good picture. You own your data, it is kept on your devices and optionally on a central server either run by us in the cloud or on PC of your own (on the roadmap).

This is all very timely as others are on this same journey. I can recommend reading Local-First Software: You Own Your Data, in spite of the Cloud and a shorter easier to read related article by Adrian Colyer – Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud from his daily newsletter.

To quote the articles above:

Great local-first software should have seven key properties.

  1. It should be fast.

  2. It should work across multiple devices.

  3. It should work without a network.

  4. It should support collaboration.

  5. It should support data access for all time.

  6. It should be secure and private by default.

  7. It should give the user full ownership and control of their data.

So how does the new Clibu Notes app rate on these criteria. The good news is we tick all of these boxes.

I could be that I’m overly optimistic as:

… we speculate that web apps will never be able to provide all the local-first properties we are looking for, due to the fundamental thin-client nature of the platform. By choosing to build a web app, you are choosing the path of data belonging to you and your company, not to your users.

I don’t see the issue here. The data for a web app that can run entirely locally belongs to the users.

What is a real issue with offline use where you still want online access from any device anywhere, is the accumulation of changes made to your data over time. To be precise in order for users to collaborate and work offline, every change to every bit of data must be retained, potentially for ever.

Quote:

Performance and memory/disk usage quickly became a problem because CRDTs store all history, including character-by-character text edits. These pile up, but can’t be easily truncated because it’s impossible to know when someone might reconnect to your shared document after six months away and need to merge changes from that point forward.

To handle this ever increasing memory/disk usage some sensible controls can be put in place. For example if you know that worst case any one user maybe offline for a month, then when they come back online you can cleanup up the accumulated data for all users. Or if you know who all the users are and all of the devices they use,  then you can cleanup when they are all online or you can notify them they might lose their local changes if they don’t get back online within a certain time. Best practices here will evolve over time.

So where are we now

Clibu Notes can and does work entirely offline. You can use Clibu Notes in your Web Browser or Install it as an application on Desktop, Tablet and Smartphone.

When you are online, all updates are synchronized in real time with all  instances of Clibu Notes you have open and online. When an offline instance of Clibu Notes goes Online it will synchronize all of its offline changes with all changes made by other online instances. These changes are fine grained down to the character level in notes. In other words edits to a note in multiple copies of Clibu Notes whether online or offline will merge and resolve the changes so the note is identical on all devices.

Just as edited notes are eventually consistent so are changes to the shape of the Notes Tree, note icons and colors. And finally Work Spaces are also kept consistent. Simply put it doesn’t get any better than this.

As stated on the Clibu Notes website. knowing that your notes and associated data is automagically kept up to date across all of your devices is Magically liberating.

If you haven’t signed up for free access to Clibu Notes go and do it now. How well does it meet your needs? We’d love to know.

– Neville

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Clibu Notes, Preview Release is live

I’m pleased and excited to let everyone know that we have launched the Clibu Notes Preview release.

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) applications have really taken off and blossomed over the past few years to the point where you have a plethora of choices, so why Clibu Notes.

Clibu Notes is the third generation and evolution of PKM software that we have developed, each one building on and refining what came before it. We can actually go back further, but that is another story.

With Clibu Notes we’ve strived to present a simple, effective and attractive application. We see these as its core strengths. Content seamlessly updates across all devices in real time and feels quite magical. This gives you a freedom you’ve unlikely ever had before. And if you don’t have an Internet connection everything just works. Content magically synchronizes and merges once you are back on line. Multiple people can even edit the same notes either on or offline and all changes will be magically resolved.

Clibu Notes goes beyond PKM, meeting the needs of Teams with full concurrent editing of the same notes at the same time.

Simple to use doesn’t mean sacrificing capabilities. Clibu Notes delivers a rich and more than capable set of PKM features and we’re not done yet.

Clibu Notes works across all of your devices, Smartphones, Tablets and Desktop PC’s. It works in the Browser and can be installed as a native application. Updates happen automatically.

For more information and to sign up for early access see the new clibu.com website.

– Neville Franks

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Clibu Notes Update, July 2022

I have been very slack with the blog, primarily because I’ve not had a lot to say or show. 

The good news is that Clibu Notes is coming together nicely and IMO looks, feels and works well. 

There was a major setback with the library I was using to handle offline use which forced me to discard a lot of code that I’d put a lot of time and effort into. The switch to a different library required an extensive rewrite to both backend and frontend code, which in turn took considerable time and effort.

I also switched high level editor frameworks and some other low level libraries. Again taking time and resources. Much time has been spent evolving and improving the code base whilst trying to prevent runaway complexity. That said Clibu Notes is an ambitious and complex app. 

An overarching goal is to keep the UI and UX as simple as possible, not an easy task. This has also required quite a few iterations and there maybe more to come, once it is out in the wild.

I’ve been using Clibu Notes for real for the past little while, instead of Clibu and I’m finding it quite magical, especially the offline use case. I’ve been on the road with intermittent Internet and have Clibu Notes running on a Windows Laptop, Android Tablet, Android Phone and a Lenovo Duet Chromebook. It is running as an Installed App on the Android and Chromebook devices.

When any device comes back online all changes automatically sync up in both directions. This is something that is lacking in most applications, including of course Clibu. Without doubt knowing that intermittent or no Internet has no effect on Clibu Notes usability is a very comforting feeling.

The Clibu Notes editor is quite a step up in functionality from Clibu and it will also continue to evolve. Some new capabilities include a task list, which you can reorder using drag and drop or the keyboard, back links as mentioned in the last blog post, collapsible text blocks, uniquely identified text blocks, smart context aware popup toolbars, markdown support and lots of keyboard shortcuts.

PWA support is largely complete. This enables Clibu Notes to be installed as an application and opened like any other native application, without any download from the Web and even without any Internet connection. PWA’s can also be distributed through App Stores.

I’d also like to touch on Clibu Notes ability to have multiple note editors open at once. On larger screens these can be laid out side by side or maximized to use all available space. On smaller screens they occupy the full screen and you switch between them. This helps you stay in the flow as you can keep a note open in one editor while working on another.

Finally we’ve invested considerable effort into multi-device support. This enables you to seamlessly move between Smartphone, Tablet and Desktop PC regardless of the underlying operating system.

As always we welcome your feedback. You can comment below or reach me at info@clibu.com

– Neville

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Clibu Notes, Been awhile

At a guess this is the longest time between blog posts in many years. It has been a turbulent year for us all and our thoughts are with you, wherever in the world you may be.

Here in Victoria, Australia we had two long and hard lock downs last year. We couldn’t travel more than 5km from home, couldn’t see family and friends, and couldn’t do any of our normal activities like Gym and Golf. And we had to wear masks all the time outside the house. Having said that we’ve done incredibly well with very few community infections and deaths.

There weren’t many upsides to the pandemic, however it did mean lots more time working on Clibu Notes. Out of that has come considerable progress.

Clibu Notes has been designed with offline use and data privacy from the very start. Along with the ability to use it across devices, operating systems and Browsers. Unfortunately there is no getting away from the fact that full Offline use is hard. Different users working on the same Clibu Notes database can be offline for unknown amounts of time. When back on line the changes for all users must be synchronized amongst each other.

Collaboration is part of this picture as well, where several people can be editing the same document at the same time and their changes must be merged into one cohesive whole. This is further complicated when editing is done offline. The initial release of Clibu Notes is unlikely to include full collaborative editing.

There has been an explosion of Note Taking apps in the last year, which is pretty interesting to watch. Competition in any space is good, however one needs to be careful not to be distracted from your own goals. Adding features for features sake, making apps more complex to use, along with code bloat do not benefit anyone.

In these new apps Backlinks is an often touted feature that seems new, however our earlier application, Surfulater had two way ‘See Also’ links years ago. Clibu Notes does of course have back links. These are a bit of text anywhere in a note that links to another note and the other note has a backlink to the source. This is actually an improvement over the ‘See Also’ links in Surfulater. These links can also be used to create and link to a New Note, which is a feature found in some Wikis.

Most applications enclose these links in square brackets ex. [[Mercedes-Benz EQC]] which can be a distraction, whereas Clibu Notes shows pleasant clickable buttons Link buttonInbound links have a different background color. More on these links in a future post.

For Clibu Notes we are using a new text editor which is extremely powerful, but also complex to code for. It does however provide an incredibly rich set of capabilities, which enables us to do a lot of interesting things. Examples so far are backlinks, mentioned previously, todo lists and WYSIWYG markdown support.

We’ve recently changed both the front-end and back-end databases we are using in Clibu Notes. In the Browser this has improved and simplified some complex work flows. This work is currently ongoing.

The Clibu Notes User Interface continues to evolve. We’ve recently enabled side by side note panels. In other words you can see and work on two possibly related notes at once. The Tabs for Selected, Search, Viewed etc. have been removed as they complicated the user interface and duplicated tasks that can be done elsewhere.

After a way too long hiatus from Blogging I hope I’ve given everyone a good feel for the state of Clibu Notes development and look forward to posting regularly again.

As always we welcome your feedback. You can comment below or reach me at info@clibu.com

– Neville

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Clibu Notes, Fast Full Text Search. v0.45.00 Released

This Clibu Notes release continues laying the foundation for our simpler, faster, private, Note capture application. It includes important new capabilities such as fast full text search, a range of user interface changes based largely on user feedback and plenty of tweaks and bug fixes.

Fast full text search

Let’s start with Search. We’ve replaced the search engine used in Clibu, which unfortunately wasn’t as good as we’d liked.

The search in Clibu Notes is lighting fast and includes fuzzy and partial matching along with word stemming. For example “camping” will find “Camper”, “Camping” etc. as will “camper”, “camp” etc. as shown below.

Search results are displayed instantly as you type, with no waiting to get data from the cloud. Search results are available in the Search Tab, so there is no need to redo a search. Results update when you select either the Search Tab or Search prompt, so they are always reflect reality.

The Clibu Notes Tree, Notes List/Grid and Editor all update to include just the search results as shown here.

Search results will be highlighted in the Note editor in a future release.

Selecting a note in the tree will show only the search results in that tree branch, letting you drill down to a subset of results. Click on the Home icon goes back to showing all search results.

In a similar way, Filters can be used along with Search to home in on specific notes. For example you could show only search results with a green title or a certain icon.

Being independant

Every combination of View Group (Notes, Archive, Trash), Sort Type (Title, My Order, Date Updated,…) and List View Tab keeps its own set of Filters and Hoisting properties. This flexibility lets you have independant and specific sets of Notes displayed for each of these combinations.

When these change a notification is displayed summarizing what’s on view.

Streamlined user interface

We’ve simplified and relabeled various user interface components in this release. Click/tap on the Filters button now toggles filters off/on and the dropdown arrow opens the filters menu. Changing any Filter setting now activates it’s filter and turns Filtering on. The New Note button is also more prominent.

The Sort Order button and menu have also been changed. The button text and icon indicates the current sort order, which can be changed using the direction button on the right. We’ve removed the sort direction buttons from the menu itself, which were confusing.

That’s all for now

This release adds important new functionality, addresses a range of issues which weren’t working quite right and improves overall usability.

Next steps include major updates and added functionality to the Note editor along with work on the server to finish the multi-device synchronization. This builds on the current multi-tab synchronization currently in place.

The About page in Clibu Notes includes a roadmap I suggest you read. About can be accessed via Help or the Settings menu in Clibu Notes

As with earlier releases send an email to info@clibu.com to get access to this release. For continued early-release access we need your comments, criticisms and suggestions, so please do get in touch.

You can add comments below and open tickets in our Help desk, accessed via. the Settings menu in Clibu Notes. Or get in touch via email if you prefer. You can also follow us on Twitter.

Stay well, stay positive and be considerate to all around you.

Neville Franks, Author of Clibu Notes, Clibu etc. ©Soft As It Gets P/L 2020

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Clibu Notes, Simpler, faster note taking, Part 2

If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, I suggest you do so first.

Seeing only what’s relevant

As you create more and more Notes it’s easy to get overwhelmed – you can’t see the wood for the tree’s. Filters remove the clutter, so you see only the notes that matter, for the task at hand.

For example let’s say you want to see only the notes updated in the last month, with a title color of red and whose title includes vaccine.
This screenshot shows how easy this is.

Title Search does a live fuzzy search on note titles. A tap on Show toggles each filter between show and hide. Show will only show notes that match the criteria, whereas Hide will hide them. Tap on Icon etc. lets you pick specific items from a menu. The switch to the right of each filter either enables or disables that filter.

Finally there is the Match All / Match Any toggle. Match All means notes must match all enabled filters, whereas Match Any means include notes that match any of the enabled filters. This has no effect if only a single filter is enabled.

For a more exhaustive demonstration click on the image below.


As Filters change, the Tree and Notes grid update to show only the notes that match the filter. Tree items which are filtered out but need to be displayed because they are ancestors of matching notes are displayed dimmed to identify this.

Keeping everything synchronized

The ability to update all copies of Clibu Notes as you add, edit and rearrange them, both efficiently and in real time,  has been a major undertaking and is a must have capability.

Pictures speak a thousand words, so without further ado. 
Click on the image to enlarge.


This shows Clibu Notes open in two Browser Tabs, positioned one above the other.

Editing is occuring in the top tab with the bottom tab updated in real time to match. Of course automatic content synchronization isn’t restricted to Tabs in the same Browser (except in this release).

Clibu Notes instances in any Browser on any device, anywhere, will be updated in exactly the same way, using exactly the same Clibu notes synchronization engine you see working above.

Taking this further you can continue using Clibu Notes even when you don’t have an Internet connection, including full editing, adding new notes, rearranging the notes tree etc. Then when you are next online, your changes and other online users changes will be synchronized with each other.

The ability to seamlessly access and work on your notes both offline and online is important to many of you and positions Clibu Notes at a level above similar applications.

In Conclusion

The About page in Clibu Notes includes a roadmap I suggest you read. About can be accessed via Help or the Settings menu in Clibu Notes

To be added to the evaluation list and get immediate access to Clibu Notes v0.42.00 simply email info@clibu.com

You can also follow us on Twitter.

As always we look forward to your suggestions and guidance.

You can add comments below and open tickets in our Help desk, accessed via. the Settings menu in Clibu Notes. Or get in touch via email if you prefer.

Neville Franks, Author of Clibu Notes, Clibu etc. ©Soft As It Gets P/L 2020

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Clibu Notes, Simpler, faster note taking, Part 1

Clibu Notes Alpha V0.42.00 has now been released. We’ve made considerable progress since the last release, both in what you see and what you don’t.

Clibu Notes functionality, user interface and overall attention to detail have all taken big steps forward since the last release.

We’ve added “Help” to get you going quickly and “About” which provides an overview of what’s available now and lays out a Roadmap outlining where we are heading.

Privacy and speed

Clibu Notes stores your notes privately on your device. Unlike most Web applications Clibu Notes does not need to query cloud servers located half a world away. This enables Clibu Notes to deliver a level of performance well above most cloud based applications.

For Clibu notes to synchronize your notes across your devices, we need to maintain a copy in the cloud, however this is encrypted so it continues to remain completely private. If you don’t need synchronization then you don’t need the cloud either.

Notes and Cards

Clibu Notes display their content in two varieties of cards. The first is a summary card, which includes the Note icon, title, date created & modified, number of times viewed and it’s ancestors (if any) in in the notes tree, which are termed breadcrumbs.

A click or tap on the note icon lets you change the icon and the title’s background color as show in the image below.

The other style of card displays the full note content along with rich editing capabilities.

This animated screenshot shows both types of Note card. Click on the image to enlarge.


A few things to notice in the screenshot

  • The date ‘Updated’ (date/time ago) is continuously updating.
  • Changing the icon or title background in either card updates them everywhere.
  • Clicking in the note editor switches it into edit mode. Click Ok or tap anywhere outside the note card editor stops editing.

The note editor card is either displayed beside the notes list or over the top of the notes grid – read on.

List and Grid views

Clibu Notes presents two ways to view selected Notes as shown here.
Click on the image to enlarge.

The List / Grid view toggle button changes views.

The currently selected note is highlighted via a change to its background color and shadow.

List view displays a single column of notes with an overview of their content. The selected note is open to view or edit to the right of the list.

Tap or click on a Notes Title opens it in the editor in view mode, whereas the Edit button opens it for editing.

To toggle Notes from view mode to edit mode, click anywhere on the notes editable content.

Grid view lays out the note cards in a grid. Clicking anywhere outside of the Note editor or on the Ok button closes the note editor.

In Conclusion

Our preview coverage of Clibu Notes will continue in Part 2, due out tomorrow. We have a much to discuss and a lot more to accomplish.

To be added to the evaluation list and get immediate access to Clibu Notes v0.42.00 simply email info@clibu.com

You can also follow us on Twitter.

As always we welcome your feedback and comments, either below, on our Support Center or via. email shown above.

Neville Franks, Author of Clibu Notes, Clibu etc. ©Soft As It Gets P/L 2020