The roadmap of Inkdrop vol.4

Better exportability, project-like behavior on notebooks, and plugin support on mobile

Takuya Matsuyama

30 Aug 2019 — 5 min read

This is how I develop Inkdrop :)

UPDATE: New roadmap has been announced!

Hi! It’s Takuya here.

Inkdrop is a note-taking app that comes with robust Markdown editor with cross-platform cloud sync. I’ve been working on the roadmap (vol.3) and finally completed! Now we have got v4 which was completely rebuilt with modern libraries for the sustainable development (Check out what’s new in v4 if you haven’t read yet). I believe that this step makes sure Inkdrop’s project longevity further more. For launching v4, I also redesigned the website and that work made me think about the app’s concept again. So let’s begin with the concept before talking about the roadmap!

Inkdrop now has more than 1,000 paid users!

Let me talk about it first. When I started this project, I’ve set 1,000 customers as a goal. And it’s 1,200 paid users now. I’m so happy to achieve that. Thank you so much! Now, that lets me focus more on long-term strategies rather than rushing to acquire new paid users, losing my focus on looking at existing loyal customers. I don’t need exponential growth like unicorn startups as I’m alone. I would like to make it better rather than bigger. Let’s foster Inkdrop together!

Organizing Markdown notes made simple

This is the slogan I’ve put on the website. This means that Inkdrop helps you organize your Markdown notes so that you can comfortably jot down your daily hacking endeavors in Markdown and increase your productivity. That’s the core concept of Inkdrop.

The biggest reason I built this app is because I was struggling to organize md notes across devices and computers. When I rolled out the first beta version, I found that a lot of people are in the same boat. So I decided to focus on features that help organize Markdown notes while supporting seamless data synchronization securely. Now Inkdrop solves most of my own itches. And I will keep it going on the same direction. In other words, it will not support features for teams, WYSIWYG editor, etc. It will continue to be for developers and will never target a mass market.

Let’s think about what Inkdrop can do to help organize Markdown notes further more.

Improve file exportability

☑️ Done! (Sep. 21st, 2020)

Markdown is just a plain text format and it doesn’t rely on any proprietary systems or even WWW. Because of its easy-to-read, easy-to-write syntax, nowadays Markdown is used for various purposes like documenting, blogging, and, of course, note-taking. For example, static site generators like Gatsby allow you to build websites from Markdown files. So Markdown comes in much handy when it’s just .md files so that you can make full use of them easily.

Inkdrop’s Markdown support is fully compatible with CommonMark, unless you install plugins to extend its syntax. And that allows you to reuse your notes with other tools and places. But I think Inkdrop’s export functionality is not enough powerful for doing that. It only allows you to export a single note in one of supported formats and to export all notes as .md files at once. So, there are some features missing like the following:

Per-notebook exporting
Flexible directory structure and filename rules
YAML frontmatter support

Those features would make your notes much more reusable than just storing them in the Inkdrop database. And it should be more fun!

Make notebooks behave more like ‘projects’

☑️ Done! (Sep. 1st, 2020)

As I continue to develop Inkdrop, I saw some people expect notebooks to behave like projects. Specifically, I’ve got following feature requests:

Those look different features but have a common essence: They want workspaces. Honestly, I answered no to them because I don’t need them (That’s important to provide stable features and keep it simple). But more I use Inkdrop for many purposes, more I understand their necessity. They would help organize notes of multiple projects and that matches the app concept as I explained above. Inkdrop should be usable for years. You will work on many projects as time goes by. Supporting them would make Inkdrop competent for your long-term use.

In terms of implementation, it requires a big change to the database structure so it will take some time to implement. After having some research for them, I guess Android support is the hardest (as always😂) and one of the reasons is that FTS5 is not enabled in its built-in SQLite3. Recently, React Native 0.60 has migrated over to AndroidX and I assume that it makes us possible to use sqlite-android which supports FTS5. If not, I have to find a way to accomplish complex indexing for those features.

Plugin support on the mobile version

☑️ Done! (Jan 24th, 2020)

Last year, I posted an idea toward accomplishing plugins for mobile. I confirmed that’s feasible in the note sharing feature. I recently added math support on shared notes. It actually runs the math plugin on browser. The mobile app’s editor implementation is to embed WebView and runs similar components as the desktop app. So as the first step to support plugins, I would like to add math support on mobile because it’s the most used plugin in Inkdrop. Next I will integrate other plugins with it as well.

Gboard support on Android

☑️ Done

Gboard does not work well on CodeMirror — the editor component Inkdrop internally uses. I’ve had to disable Gboard by force to avoid that issue but it causes another problems that you can’t type Japanese and can’t use autocorrect. That’s so painful. I can’t wait CodeMirror 6, the new version of CodeMirror which is supposed to work well on mobile devices, to be released. So I’ve been spending a lot of time to try to solve them. Recently, I guess I finally found a solution. Actually, it has been already tested in the beta channel for a month and it looks like working fine so far. I would like to roll it out soon.

Let’s make it together

That’s it that I’m planning to add at the moment. I only talked about ‘big changes’ for Inkdrop and it does not mean I will not work on any other features. The mobile version needs to be improved since there are a lot of missing features that the desktop version has. It’s natural improvements, obviously.

Thank you so much for reading it. To make Inkdrop more sophisticated and mature, it will not be possible to accomplish without your help. Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts on our forum! Let’s make it together 😄