Thanks for the clarifications.

Lothar Scholz wrote:

> Sounds interesting. And you have a track record of creating and
>maintaining a stable app :-)

No. I do not.

Oh, sorry. I confused you with Christian Tietze who (co-)created The Archive and a Markdown table editor (https://zettelkasten.de/tools/

To follow up on my "database"/file storage question: So the data will be stored in a proprietary format on disk? No way to get the data out when I decide to stop using your app or when you (one fine day) stop updating the software?


But i think we all learned to buy software never on

promised features and timelines but always on what is available right
now.
Products come and go, single developer or big corporation. This is not a
kickstarter project.
I don't ask for your money in advance, i ask for your thoughts.

I'm an experienced programmer and do it since i'm 14 years old and now
have hit my 50ths birthday a few months ago.
So i think i'm at least more qualified then the guy from Polywick
Storyserver.

Oh yeah, my german computer science master thesis was writing a search
engine for usenet news. It was used by the once popular german search
engine called "Fireball" in the early days of the internet in 1998. And
my interest for information processing never stopped afterwards.

>First question(s): You talk about a database. Will the data be stored
in
>a proprietary file format? What about the PDF files and HTML data that
>can be added? Where will they be stored? And what about images, audio,
>video, equations...?

There is no "database". I like the NoSQL "movement" because they have
shown the world that SQL and relational databases are not the only way
to do things.

I have developed a preprocessed format to store the markup text and
index the data field / hashtag parts. This is good enough. The markdown
of cards and outlines will be keept completely in memory (mmapped so it
can be swapped out by the system on memory pressure) without special
indexes. The data size is hardly a problem. Let this be a few hundert
megabytes but even a few gigabytes will be ok. Just remember all threads
and messages in this board have less then 20 MB in size. So people often
overestimate this a lot.

By the way exactly this question was why in feb this year i asked here:
https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/8580

The data itself is written generational, so only the modified delta is
stored to reduce write operations on SSD.

Because the program will run purely in single user mode on your own
local database on your SSD there is no need for database optimizations.
We have disks with transfer rates of 3GB/sec now and CPUs with a 40GB
memory throughput with 8 and more cores in mainstream desktops and even
phones. It's time to use them.
The program will not be cloud based but i want implement a Peer2Peer
synchronization feature or an on premise synchronisation server.

PDF and HTML will be stored externally and so will any full text index.
HTML snapshots are stored in a proprietary format to eliminate duplicate
items.

I know very well that some people here love to have their data in the
file system as normal markdown so that it can be accessed via Spotlight
etc. Therefore i thought about storing a duplicate of the data in the
filesystem or the very overengineered but fun idea to implement a custom
user file system that gets mounted via FUSE and could provide very
interesting access pattern to the stored data. Just for the case anyone
want to run a script on them or import them elsewhere. Anyone old enough
to remember the MH mail client? That was nerd fun. But there is no FUSE
on windows so i doubt it will happen.

Video and audio ... they will be implemented as simple file links,
nothing else on the agenda at the moment.

For equations, i looked at the way how ConnectedText handles Latex. It
is opensource and i think i could integrate that. But it's not on my
agenda at the moment either, but i say it has a much higher probability
to get on my agenda then many other features. In the second round of the
markdown editor tables and equations will be added. But this is 2+ years
in the future.