Blog Oklahoma Podcast / Blog Oklahoma Bonus #10: Joplin

This is the Blog Oklahoma Bonus for March 31, 2018

The the other day I was researching information on open source cloud storage servers like ownCloud or NextCloud. Well during this search I came across an article about an open source note-taking app that will let you sync to NextCloud. That intrigued me. I've been meaning to get something to help organize my notes. I've been without a dedicated note-taking app for more than a few years now.

I was a big Evernote user for a long time. And then one day they changed their pricing model and scaled back the free tier. It just wasn't economical at the time for me continue to use Evernote. So I exported everything I needed out of it, and never looked back. Since then I've been leaving sticky notes, scratch pads, text files, online documents, and note folders all over the place. It's definitely time to look for a new dedicated notes app.

So that brings us back to this open source note-taking app I mentioned earlier. It's called Joplin.

Joplin is a free, open source note taking, and to-do application. It'll run on Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. You can organize your notes into notebooks, it supports tagging, and the notes are searchable. A big plus for me, the notes are formatted using markdown.

Joplin notes can be synchronised with various cloud services including OneDrive, Nextcloud, Dropbox, and other webDAV supported services.

I've been using Joplin for a few weeks now, and I'm liking it. I connected it to OneDrive and it's been working smoothly. I can get to my notes on my desktop and from my iPhone. Just got to remember to give a moment to sync.

There are a few things that I'd like to see. At the time I'm recording this for the desktop version you can't sort the notebook list, you can't resize the different panels, I would really like to adjust the size of the edit panel or be able to hide the side menus, there's no spell check, and you have to go into settings to adjust the font and scaling. However development is continuing on Joplin. Since I installed it's already updated twice, and one of those updates added Dropbox sync support. So it's an active project.

There are plenty of other note-taking applications and services you might consider, all with their pros, cons, and costs. Such as Evernote, OneNote, Google Keep, Dropbox Paper, Simplenote, and Bear (MacOS/iOS). I'll have links to each of those in the show notes if you want to look them over.

Overall I'm liking Joplin. I'm going to continue to use for a while more. In fact I used it to compile some notes for this very episode. Even with the nitpicks, it works, it's being worked on and improved, and it's nice to have a free and open source alternative.

If you would like to try Joplin you'll find it at joplin.cozic.net.

Links from this episode

Joplin:
- Joplin - open source note taking and to-do app
- Markdown Cheatsheet
Other Note-Taking Apps:
- Evernote
- OneNote
- Google Keep
- Dropbox Paper
- Simplenote
- Bear
Extras:

This episode's bonus interesting articles

This episode's bonus musical selection

You can listen To the Blog Oklahoma Bonus playlist on Spotify. Enjoy.

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