Inkdrop for Apple Silicon is now available

Hi, it’s Takuya. In the last release, Inkdrop, a Markdown-based note-taking app, bumped up the Electron from 7 to 12, which allows me to…

Takuya Matsuyama

14 Jun 2021 — 3 min read

Hi, it’s Takuya. In the last release, Inkdrop, a Markdown-based note-taking app, bumped up the Electron from 7 to 12, which allows me to support Apple Silicon. And I’m excited to announce that it’s now available. Not only just supporting the M1 chip, but it also comes with V8 snapshots, which boosts its launch speed much more. I vlogged about this improvement, so let me show you how fast it is:

Yes, it’s blazingly fast like native apps! If you have an M1-powered Mac, please download the Arm64 build (not x86_64) of the Inkdrop app here:

https://my.inkdrop.app/download

I hope you enjoy it.

What I’ve done for the ARM64 build

There were 2 blockers for Apple Silicon support:

Inkdrop Plugin Manager
V8 Snapshots

The first issue was plugins. Inkdrop’s powerful plugin system was ported from Atom Editor. It can install the plugin dependencies with the app-built-in NodeJS and NPM. But it depends on the old NodeJS which doesn’t work on M1 Macs. So, I had to upgrade it to the latest stable version of NodeJS (v16). That was kind of challenging because Atom Editor doesn’t support Apple Silicon yet, but I’m happy that I managed to do that.

The second issue was V8 snapshots. In the v5 release, it helped improve its launch speed 1,000ms faster as I wrote in the following blogpost:

I wanted to get them to work also on M1 Macs but it didn’t work because of the bug of mksnapshot:

Recently, thanks to the community effort, it’s been finally solved. I rushed to try it on my M1 MacBook Air, and it worked flawlessly. Pretty neat. This yielded the amazing launch speed as shown above.

Also, thank you for your cooperation to test it, Bob and Jeremie!

Thank you so much for supporting Inkdrop!

Inkdrop Website: https://www.inkdrop.app/
Send feedback: https://forum.inkdrop.app/
Contact me: https://docs.inkdrop.app/contact
Twitter: https://twitter.com/inkdrop_app
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/craftzdog/
Discord community: https://discord.gg/S7hDmvh

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