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Collaborate with friends, family and colleagues

The latest release of Clibu Notes V0.83.020, enables you share specific sets of notes with other people. You can control whether they have full editing rights or can only view the shared content.

When you create a Share you are given a special link which you send to the people you want to sharing with. They do not even need to be registered Clibu Notes users.

Real time collaborative editing

Clibu Notes enables multiple users to edit the exact same notes at the same time. All changes coalesce, so everyone eventually sees the exact same content.

This goes even further enabling changes made by users who are offline to become consistent when they next come online.

This collaboration extends across all aspects of Clibu Notes. For example drag & drop of notes in the Notes Tree, changing note icons, title colors etc.

Automagic Content Synchronization

One way or another most PKM / Note Taking applications enable you to synchronize content. Often though, they do not enable collaboration. This quickly leads to notes overwriting each other and loss of content.

It can get even worse where the application relies on copying files from one device to another in order to synchronize. And if you forget to do this or can’t, well too bad. You then have content which may never become consistent.

With Clibu Notes you never, ever need to worry about content loss or inconsistency. The entire process is seamless and invisible to our users. As I’ve stated in several places, this is truly magically liberating.

For anyone technically interested in how this magic occurs Google CRDTs.

Our recent 4 day road trip

An excellent example of the joy this brings is a recent 4 day road trip we did. With me is a Windows Laptop, Android Tablet, Chromebook Tablet and an Android phone. Along the way I was making notes of places we’d visited, cafes and restaurants we’d go back to etc. These would be taken on the Tablets and Phone.

Internet access was often non-existent for long stretches or patchy at best, but this made absolutely no difference to my use of Clibu Notes. As soon as any of my devices came back online all content changes resolved and became consistent. When I turned my Windows Laptop on of a night it updated with the changes from the tablets and phone.

If others had been using a Share they also would have been updated.

The bottom line is it “just works’ and it is truly magically liberating knowing all of your content on all of your devices is either up to date or will be when they come online. Without any user intervention!

Details in the Clibu Notes Help

For full details on Clibu Notes Collaborative Sharing open clibu.app, select Help – F1 and the open the Collaborative Sharing note.

To Finish

Clibu Notes has had full collaboration from its inception, however implementing Sharing in V0.83.020 was a complex task. We needed to ensure it was robust and capable of being enhanced as needed in the future. I’m pleased to say we’ve met these goals.

Now that Sharing is ready for mainstream use we’ll get back to more frequent releases again. The next release is very close.

Thanks for reading – Neville

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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