Hi, I'm Scott.
I created Localnotes to boost my own personal productivity and efficiency. I use it all day, every day. And I'm happy to share it with you.
Theoretically, I should be reasonably good at this. I wrote a master's thesis on collaborative document annotation and did some of the earliest academic research on what we now call hashtags. As a graduate student, I had to organize all the information necessary to write a PhD thesis, and as an amateur standup comedian I've needed a way to organize my jokes. Today I lead a large team that has responsibility for a major retailer's search engine, and attend back-to-back meetings most days where keeping good notes is essential to performing my own role successfully.
Localnotes isn't a product, and it's not a company. You can join our mailing list or our Discord, and if you chose to support us on Patreon, it would be greatly appreciated.
You can email me at localnotes at redlog dot net.
Answer 1: I'm not a great designer, and I'm not a great frontend engineer.
Answer 2: The ethos of Localnotes is to be relatively simple, focusing on capturing, navigating and reading your notes, without a whole lot of extraneous features that make it harder to learn and slower to use.
If you want the technical details, check out How is Localnotes built?.
It's as secure as your own computer.
A key feature and design principle of the software -- it's right there in the name -- is that Localnotes is local to your own computer; none of your data ever leaves it.
This means that none of your data is ever on the web, so your notes can never be compromised or stolen.
This does have some downsides, for example, your notes are not backed up, nor are they accessible from other devices. However, we have a workaround for that.
Like most web-based applications, Localnotes collects some basic usage data in order to understand how the various features of the app are being used and to identify and diagnose software errors. Examples might be, "feature X doesn't seem to be popular" or "feature Y seems to not work correctly on Firefox."
No personally identifiable information is ever collected, and no note text ever leaves your computer (nor any signature/distillation/representation thereof).
It's as open as a plain text file.
The second design principle of Localnotes, after security, is openness. You are never locked into a platform. You're free to take your notes and leave at any time.
The PROJECT_PATH directory (see your Config) contains all your notes. Each note is its own text file (any formatting you add is simple, readable Markdown), stored in a chronological directory structure like yyyy/mm/dd/, with each note's filename being the timestamp it was created.
The index contains the metadata necessary to enable efficient search and navigation. However, the index does not contain any unique information; there is nothing in the index that is not derived from the notes themselves.
Making your notes available on the web or on a mobile device would require transmitting your notes across the internet, which would violate one of the core design principles of Localnotes, namely that your notes never leave your own computer (see How secure is Localnotes?).
Moreover, having a web version would also mean having an account, a login, security, admin controls, and all that stuff. You don't want that, and neither do I. If I had to build all that table-stakes web stuff, it would take time away from building actually useful features, and I'm only one guy. Plus, the web is always going to be far slower than your own computer. This is especially true if you're on an airplane, as I often am, or if you wanted to bring your laptop camping in the woods.
If there is strong community interest, a read-only mobile version could be possible, for those using the Dropbox backup option.
Since all your notes are in plain-text, there's nothing really stopping you from building it yourself.I recommend Dropbox.
There are two steps. First, move the PROJECT_PATH directory (the directory containing all the note files) into your Dropbox. Then, Dropbox handles all the backups, syncing, etc. Second, you need to edit your config file to point to that new location. Click Config in the navigation bar to find out where your config file is. Then edit that file (in Notepad, TextEdit, etc.) and change PROJECT_PATH to point to the new location. I recommend making a copy of your config file first just in case.
Yes, if you are using the Dropbox backup method.
As long as the config files on both machines are pointing to the same PROJECT_PATH, it should just work. Dropbox keeps the note files and index file synced, and Localnotes will automatically detect and reload a changed index, so even simultaneous use on multiple computers shouldn't be a problem.
If the index ever gets damaged (unlikely) choose Reindex from the Localnotes navigation bar on one of the computers, and that should fix it. At no time are the notes themselves ever at risk.
As a side note, syncing your notes to Dropbox makes it possible to use Localnotes as a simple wiki with anyone you share that Dropbox folder with. But lots of trust is needed, as remember there are no accounts, authentications, admin controls, etc. since that's not really what it's designed for.
Most of Localnotes is written in Python. It's running a Flask server with Waitress, and the task tray icon uses wxPython. The binary is built using PyInstaller. The web portion is mostly vanilla javascript with a little bit of jQuery.