Progressive Web Application

August 8, 2023

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

August 5, 2023August 5, 2023

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.

It should be fast.
It should work across multiple devices.
It should work without a network.
It should support collaboration.
It should support data access for all time.
It should be secure and private by default.
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

July 20, 2017

Clibu for Smartphones and Tablets is on its way

Our focus with Clibu’s development has been to get it working well on Desktop Web Browsers. Then once we reached that goal we’d move onto providing a full featured Smartphone and Tablet experience. And that’s precisely what we’ve been working these past few months.

In fact we’ve gone beyond our initial plan and have begun comprehensively updating Clibu to transform it into a Progressive Web Application.

This enables Clibu to automatically adjust its user interface and functionality to run on any screen size from small smartphones, to tablets to desktops, giving you all of Clibu’s capabilities on any device.

This animation shows Clibu on a tablet. You will notice the hamburger menu button at the top left and slide out panel typical on mobile applications.

The top navigation bar has changed and instead of three separate side panels from the Desktop user interface, there is a single panel which changes between Knowledge Base, Tags and Articles.

Apart from what you can see here, nearly all of Clibu’s user interface has been updated to work effectively and efficiently on small screens, while retaining all the Clibu’s functionality you are used to on your Desktop Web Browser.

Next you can see Clibu on a Smartphone. The article editor toolbar changes to occupy a single scrollable row, minimizing screen space. You can also see new round buttons to edit and add articles.

You will also notice the UI for adding a Tag has changed to use the full display area.

All of Clibu’s dialogs work this way when running on phones and tablets. And they scroll vertically to move out of the way of the on-screen keyboard.

Some further UI refinement may be needed, but overall Clibu is now very usable on our small smart devices.

In hindsight it might have been prudent to start with Mobile in mind, however a lot has changed since we started developing Clibu and supporting small screens along with all the developments in PWA’s has come a long way in the last few years.

We are most of the way through development of the next version of Clibu with smartphone and tablet support, however as you can well imagine we have a lot of testing to do, to ensure everything works correctly across devices and their various screen sizes.

We’ve been quiet on the Blog for a little while and now you know why.

I am excited about the forthcoming release which opens up Clibu to work on all of our devices. Stay tuned.

– Neville