A friend shared his excitement, and joy, of using a new notes app. That made me very curious and intrigued.

I thought I could do a bit of preparation before adding yet another notes app.

What kind of preparation though? How about answering the question: what features am I looking for in a notes app?

Here’s the list of features I came up with:

1. Support rich formatting. (A)
   1. Support inline code and block code (A1)
   2. Support embedding images (A2)
   3. Support for attachments (A3)
2. Automatic geo-location of the notes (B)
3. Automatic timestamp management (creation date, last modification date, etc.) (C)
   1. Support ordering based on these (C1)
4. Good search
   1. Search by title, tags
   2. Search by dates
   3. Search by location
5. Offline mode
6. Available on all platforms
7. Sync (push better)
8. Support for automation (create notes)
   1. Append to existing notes
9. Retrieve notes using API or other mechanisms
10. Import notes
11. Export notes
12. Advanced editing features
    1. History
    2. Folding
    3. Outlines

This list is not ordered. There are things on this list that I consider mandatory. Take for example the presence on all platform and synchronization. Without these, I wouldn’t even consider a notes app.

Earlier this year, I have added a new type of entry to the blog: a linked article.

I use this type of entry to capture an interesting link. Sometimes the link comes with some short commentary; sometimes it can be a slightly longer.

Until now, there was no easy way to access the list of linked articles. Firstly, I have added the Linked link on the left bar. And then made the linked articles list look more like what I’d expect, meaning like a list.

A post on Michael Tsai’s blog reminded me of a great RSS reader available for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS: News Explorer.

I have used News Explorer exclusively a few years ago at a time I felt Reeder might be abandoned; I was also frustrated about reporting quite a few bugs and never hearing back.

Now, I have installed News Explorer back. Because I feel Reeder, now called Reeder Classic, might be abandoned. Reeder has not been seeing regular updates when being the only version of the app. Now, the developer introduced Reeder. and I suspect his focus will slowly be moving to the new app.