Forum Posts Feed
CintaNotes
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Posted by WSP
Mar 13, 2019 at 01:21 PM
This is just to report that Alex Jenter continues to make modest but steady progress on CintaNotes: the latest release is 3.13, and he says that he will issue version 4 (offering a much improved interface and some new features) later this year.
As I mentioned here earlier, I am trying to shift all my bibliographical references, now scattered throughout many apps, into a couple of sections in a CintaNotes notebook—one for printed sources, the other for bookmarks. The work on this is going slowly, but I so far have about 5300 entries, and the material seems much more accessible than it used to be. CintaNotes is a fine little app if you are willing to accept its limitations (most conspicuously no images).
Posted by washere
Mar 14, 2019 at 12:25 AM
Hope he makes the left outline tree pane happen finally with v4 soon.
Also, without a really dark theme, or even better black theme, many including probably most coders will still not use it.
Posted by WSP
Mar 14, 2019 at 02:59 AM
You can see an earlier prototype of version 4 that Alex posted on the CN forum:
http://cintanotes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2357
I too hope that we will be able to escape from the pure white note background. I’m not terribly enthusiastic about a black theme (though I know it’s very fashionable right now), but I would be satisfied with almost any color other than white. My suggestion was a pale cream or gray.
Posted by washere
Mar 14, 2019 at 01:19 PM
Thanks for the link.
Those look pretty white to me, not dark at all.
I did a search on their forum and plenty of dark theme requests and discussions from 2013, 2009 etc. The admins just talk about it, saying vote vote.
Same thing with Markdown support. Saying for years, not now we are going Qt or this or that, vote vote vote. Or how to do MD dual panes since we don’t want to? When a simple icon in the note’s toolbar can switch between markdown preview/editor modes.
Plugging in one of MD flavors’ libraries into a text editor and also a dark/black mode stylesheet is not exactly brain surgery. Numerous note apps have done it in a heartbeat. Not discuss them for over a decade. I think the two guys in charge need correct analyses of priorities and then move fast on decisions made, not wait for a decade.
Posted by WSP
Mar 14, 2019 at 02:58 PM
I agree that CintaNotes’s glacial pace of development is frustrating, but then that’s true of some of my other software as well. These little one- or two-person operations, often in distant parts of the world (CN comes to us from Siberia, no less), can cause real annoyance by their sluggish upgrades.
I think the only way to approach these apps is to recognize their weaknesses and work around them. In the case of CintaNotes, I’m not persuaded it would be terribly useful as a full-blown note-taking program (though I suppose I could use it in that way if I absolutely had to), but for some specialized cases—such as my huge bibliographical list—that involve short notes and no illustrations, it seems to function brilliantly. (It has, for example, the best tagging and search system of any program I know.) In other words, I’ve just had to scale back my expectations and admit that no single app is going to meet all my needs.