Jan 10, 2025
Its January 2025 and about a year since I decided to kick off chronicles again as noted in Reignition. From questioning whether it worked, to excitement in getting it running again. From briefly moving so quickly in the v0.5.0 release that I could barely stop to note it. To overwhelm and regret when midway through v0.8.0. To beginning to actually use it for real, where I noted:
Of the next features, which do I care about most? When do I stop working on Chronicles? When do I transition from mostly working on it to mostly using it? Can I use it at work? I have to figure out how to separate my work and personal notes, not that I do a great job of that with Apple notes or Obsidian.
From there, to finally releasing the last batch of changes in v0.8 today. 82 commits? I took at least 89 progress notes along the way to organize my thinking. Some of those notes were huge, and I’m not sure if I could have stayed on track without them. I’m still not sure where this is going, but it is going, and I’m not ready to quit, yet.
When the year started I was using Apple notes as my primary note taking tool. Though its good enough in many ways, and getting better, its lack of specific features drove me back towards Chronicles. I also gave Obsidian a shot finally and why did I wait so long? Its so good! Its nearly everything I want, and in many ways more than what I want. Although that’s also somewhat of my issue with it, its not exactly what I want. And this whole thing is an experiment in whether what I think I want is actually worth it.
Which was another theme of 2024, especially when the going got tough: Why the heck am I doing this again? Shouldn’t I be using my precious free time to relax? Or maybe dive into LLM applications, which probably have more utility, and certainly more ability to leverage into my career? Maybe I am crazy. Maybe I should quit.
But every time I try, I come crawling back. And I do try. I started Chronicles as an idea after being frustrated with Evernote. I gave Bear a try briefly but opted to keep on going. I used Notion a whole year and mostly loved it, but it still wasn’t right (2022?). Particularly when my network connection blips and poof, I have no notes. I am ADD as hell, if I can’t brain dump, I can’t work.
I settled for Apple notes and was surprised how closely it got to my core needs, and even picked up a few new ideas from it. It didn’t have note linking at the time (but does now, its great). Images don’t resize or display nicely, but they’ll fix that eventually. Its not stored as plain markdown, not a big deal. I miss markdown shortcuts. I miss my formatting and display. Why is this AI autocomplete not changeable? Back to Chronicles.
I gave Obsidian a try next. Wow its impressive. So good I feel silly for not using it; silly for working on Chronicles. It makes me feel small.
Yet somehow, its not all the way there. I miss hacking. I miss defaults that work the way my brain wants them to. I wonder if ditching my idea will leave me with lifelong regret. I wonder what it feels like to finish something that you know is real, even though nobody else can see it, or believe in it.
And again I am back. Years ago I wrote a note titled “Every time I quit” about this inevitable process I go through. Although I understand it better now. When you have an idea, even if its kind of stupid, if it feels real enough, tangible enough… you can’t let it go. You can let it eat you, or you can implement it. I don’t know what happens once you do. Is it a forever project? My biggest point of doubt. But after a year of thinking about it, as I worked on it, my answer is: No. I have a reasonably tight vision of what I want it to be. That vision hasn’t really changed much in the last 7 years. And many of those doubts I feel when looking at other apps, they materialize because those apps implement the ideas I wanted to do years ago. But only ever some of them.
No, there’s nothing wrong with my idea, nor my pursuit of it. The only issue is I’m an adult, with a job, with kids, with a life. There may have been a time I could ignore the world and bang out the full vision of this app in the course of a month. 400 hours would be plenty. But 400 hours isn’t a month any longer. Its more than a year, when all I can gather is 90 tired minutes a few times a week. The process can feel like hell at times, but I think at this point I’m resolved to keep going.
Some, but not much. First I I don’t take daily progress notes as my primary note. Instead I keep a single weekly note with minimal bullet points of what I did. Most of that is a link to a PR, or to another note. My notes are titled with what they are, and I continuously work in that note until its done, even when its very long. I’ve noticed that very process helps me scope things more appropriately and ensure things have a done point that’s sensible.
Obsidian with a couple of plugins is great for this process at work (I cannot use Chronicles at work, yet). The main thing I miss is the organizational aspect; I sometimes want to quickly jot other ideas down, but I don’t want to click around and find the right folder for it. I love how easy I’ve made it in Chronicles to make notes, that are always ordered by date, that you can easily move to another journal later. I love how is always a single stream of notes, unless you change the search. But anyways.
This is mostly how Apple notes works now, with its individual folders, tags, smart folders, and top-level “all notes” view. Its pretty great, and fun to see an alternative to Chronicles UI that works the same way. Anyways, not worth going into here, I only include it in this review because, my note taking strategy changes a lot in the early years. But at this point, with the very minor changes of this year, has mostly settled into what I think its both best for me, and best for most other people too.
It gives me a lot of confidence that what I’ve been building in Chronicles actually does make sense. Especially because there are still a few things in both Apple notes and Obsidian that drive me insane, regularly. Especially with images. I just want to freely type, drop links and attachments, and have the end result look like the typical blog that, despite all the custom blogging software out there, they all look mostly the same. They look that way because it makes sense and feels natural to people. Why do so few note applications look like that, by default?
A bit rough, a bit nice. I can type into it. It saves my notes as markdown, pretty cool. It has formatting, with markdown shortcuts, I can drag and drop images, link to other notes. Its got some bugs, I mostly know them and work around them. I built import functionality and now that I’ve imported all of my notes from Apple notes (exported via Obsidian), Obsidian, Notion, and older versions of Chronicles, for the first time I have my ten years of notes all in one place. That’s actually pretty cool.
I also like that it immediately gives me more ideas, useful ones. I want to see counts of my notes. I want bulk actions so I can bulk rename notes, convert tags to journals, and vice versa. I want auto managed history. I want to drag and drop groups of images, and have them displayed nicely, without having to fuck around with them endlessly. I want the UI to look nice. I want it to feel nice when I type a note in. I want to show it to people and not feel embarrassed about it. I want auto-correct because I am a typo machine.
I want to publish with it. I’d love to click a button and email a note to my wife. click another and have it publish to my blog. And in fact be my blog in a sense, where I share a sliver of my own notes online. That’s in part the dream of its final state, where it simplifies the process of keeping personal notes, and sharing some of them. Its not an everything app. I am pretty sure I know what I want it to do, in the end. The more I use it in anger, the more I want to use it. The more I want to fix it. Improve it. Finish a real 1.0 of it.
Without the detour that was v0.8, honestly 2024 went pretty well in retrospect. After being dragged out in the end, it felt like it didn’t. But if I take an honest assessment, in v0.4-0.7 I got a ton of work done, and quickly. I made good trade offs based on assessments of effort, time, which libraries and which versions exist, etc. If I do anything next, it will be focusing on getting it to a more polished and functional state.
First, there’s editor feature improvements. I’ve been holding off major ones here, because I’ve not fully invested in learning Slate and Plate. Once I do, once I really understand them, there will be a ton of potential unlocked. I’m most excited about image grouping, because when doing non technical notes its the feature I want the most both in this app, and all the others I’ve tried save Notion (which does a good job).
Second, theres some base usability issues. Things like first time use, code signing the app. Fixing security issues. I’d love to use the app at work, and making it a “real app” will enable that. It probably needs a real application Icon and I hope I can use generative ML for that.
Third, there’s app UI polish. The app is looking nicer these days, but its not as nice as I’d like. Some of this is from the second issue. Anther chunk is from being partially on an older UI library - evergreen-ui. It was great, and I intentionally used it as a stop-gap - a way to enable some key features without having to do any real component development. I’ve about hit the limits of what I can achieve relative to the design and UX I want, and its time to finish the process. This will also enable going fully esm, and dealing with some remaining tech debt I’d prefer to ignore. But its good to make those investments, sprinkled in amongst the other key work.
All in all, I don’t know if 2025 is The Year for Chronicles. But realistically, its close now, so it might be.