The Next Roadmap of Inkdrop (vol.2)

Next roadmap of Inkdrop — The note-taking app with robust Markdown editor Recently, Inkdrop has finished previous roadmap which I posted last year. This was kind of long journey but it’s time to think about the next roadmap. There are a handful of ideas to improve it more…

Takuya Matsuyama

26 Sep 2017 — 4 min read

Recently, Inkdrop has finished previous roadmap which I posted last year. This was kind of long journey but it’s time to think about the next roadmap. There are a handful of ideas to improve it more.

Inkdrop is growing slowly but fortunately earns good revenue now as I wrote in the previous blog post, so I am able to keep myself highly motivated :) Thank you so much for your support.

What has improved so far

Inkdrop has made many improvements so far:

Again, Inkdrop is not for team work use. I will keep focusing on developing it as a personal note-taking app.

What’s coming next

Recently I’ve established new user support forum based on Discourse so that we can discuss more comfortably than the previous forum hosted on GitHub. I posted a draft roadmap to this forum and asked users to join the discussion. I was so glad to hear many suggestions from you, thanks. Now, let’s talk about the future work!

1. Mobile app improvement [done]

The mobile app is built on top of React Native, so the most of codebase is shared between them.

for both platforms

It doesn’t have features that the desktop app already has:

Image attachments
Sharing notes on the web
Exporting

And there’s a problem that the editor is loaded too slowly since its implementation is web-based. It’s necessary to be pre-loaded somehow.

for iOS

Currently the mobile app has several problems. One of the problems I’m experiencing on iOS is that the editor sometimes crashes and it turns into white blank screen for some reason. As CodeMirror is kind of unstable on iOS, the editor is necessary to rebuild from scratch for the mobile platforms.
It is kind of hard but we need it.

Jean introduced me slate.js which looks so powerful editor component. I’ll look into it.

for Android

Android version needs to be improved its look and feel. It doesn’t conform to the Material Design guidelines so it doesn’t really look or feel like an Android app. One of reasons is that I’m an iOS user.

Matthew suggested me to check out Google Inbox as a good example of Material Design implementation:

https://github.com/inkdropapp/forum/issues/492

Tablet support

Since it is currently not universal app, it will be just zoomed in to the screen size if you run it on tablets. It seems like just a matter of UI implementation. I think it’s good to have a UI with three columns like the desktop version.

2. Spell check [done]

Since I am Japanese I didn’t realize how important it is when you write text in English. Inkdrop is for taking notes regarding programming but is also often used for writing text about projects and issues.

There’s a plugin to add spell check support for CodeMirror:

https://github.com/sparksuite/codemirror-spell-checker

It could be just a small plugin using it. Victor suggested me other language support would be great. That’s right, and I would like to expect your help to prepare dictionary data for them ;)

3. vim keybindings [done]

I have heard the same request from many users who want a support for vim keybindings. Actually I am also a vim user and I understand it would be nice to support it. I’m so happy to know that Chris was trying to make a plugin for it:

https://github.com/inkdropapp/forum/issues/761

I decided to make it by myself because I noticed that when the vim mode enabled it conflicts default keybindings of the editor such as editor:new-line so these keybindings need to be overridden. You need some internal knowledges to solve this issue.

4. PDF export and printing out [done]

I would like to implement more comprehensive support for exporting. As it already supports HTML export, it seems to be easy for other file formats. But the problem is that it needs some workarounds to support extended Markdown rendering such as math plugin.

Oliver suggested me that it’d be great if it also allows to apply a theme styling to output. This would be similar problem to the extended rendering.

5. Task progress view [done]

It seems like many people love task list feature of GFM. I love it, too. So it would be convenient to have a count of remaining tasks displayed on the note list, similar to what is displayed on GitHub issues.

Timothy requested this feature:

Finished/Remaining To-Do Items Count

Let’s make it together

Remember that features listed here are only big ones on which I will focus. As I added many features without notice so far, I will also work on many unlisted improvements in the future.

Please don’t hesitate to post your idea to our forum. Since I would put my efforts where it will have the most impact on the user, I may sometimes decline them but I would surely consider them again if I’ve got the same request from many users. The forum will certainly work for collecting your voices.

As always, I appreciate your bug reports and feature requests very much because it would’ve not been possible to get Inkdrop offering as solid and stable as it is now without your help and support.