May 2023 in Review

From the very dramatic political situation in Pakistan to occasional days long Internet outages, May 2023 can easily be termed as one of the most intense months ever. Through all this turmoil, we have been hard at work to ship some of the most highly requested features ever. Read on to find out what we accomplished in May 2023.

Attachment previews

You can now preview PDFs & all kinds of images directly inside Notesnook. No need for long & tedious process of downloading & opening the attachments in a separate application. Here's a glimpse of how it looks:

Other types of attachments

Our plan is to implement the most useful kind of preview for each attachment type. For example, videos & audios are best previewed inlined. They don't need to be opened in a separate pane like PDFs. Similarly, other documents like text & markdown files would work best in a separate pane.

Eventually, we will allow users to add support for different file types using extensions. It isn't practical or feasible to support every single format officially.

New attachment manager

We have redesigned the attachment manager to include quick filters for different types of files making it very easy to manage your attachments. We have also improved support for performing bulk actions like deleting, downloading & rechecking the attachments.

Note: Orphaned attachments are those attachments that don't belong to any note.

Web clipper on Chrome Web Store

Thanks to @Aaron from our Discord community for donating a Chrome Web Store account and making it possible for the Notesnook Web Clipper to be published on the Chrome Web Store.

Ever since we release the Notesnook Web Clipper, this has been one of our biggest drawbacks. Our goal with Notesnook has always been to make it easier for people to use private & safe software. Unfortunately, until today it was a huge hassle for anyone wanting to use our Chrome extension. No anymore!

I am really excited to announce that Notesnook Web Clipper is now officially available from the Chrome Web Store! Go check it out and don't forget to leave a review.

Notesnook on F-Droid

Notesnook was already available on F-Droid via the IzzyOnDroid repository (which I believe almost everyone includes, anyway). However, the important thing about getting approved on F-Droid is satisfying their requirements. No Google libraries whatsoever, no lock-in, reproducible builds, fully open source etc. This is why it's a huge thing for an app to get approved on F-Droid.

It took us several months of back and forth with the wonderful people over at F-Droid to finally get Notesnook approved on F-Droid. We faced issues such as failing builds due to missing libraries, ABI version problems, build minutes running out on GitLab and a few other issues. The result? You can now easily install Notesnook from F-droid without requiring usage of any 3rd party repositories.

Note: The F-droid version of Notesnook is slightly different than the one available on GitHub.

Notesnook Importer

There were 2 very critical bugs that were fixed:

1. Images and attachments linked in Markdown notes were getting ignored.
2. Empty Google Keep notes with image attachments wouldn't import.

Both of these issues have been fixed in v1.7.7 of the Importer. Go try it here.

An important thing to keep in mind is that the Importer doesn't distinguish between an attachment and an internal link so any link that resolves to a local file will get imported as an attachment. For example, [this is an internal link](important-link.md) will get imported as an attachment named important-link.md.

Community achievments

1. We crossed 6k stars on our GitHub repo! (Go star the repo)
2. We crossed 5k followers on our Twitter account. (Follow us)
3. Over 400 students & teachers have benefited from our Education plan. (Apply now)
4. Over 900 people visit our website every day (an increase from 700).

Thank you for supporting us!

What the future holds

In the next months, our focus will be on releasing the following features (no promises!):

1. Backup & restore attachments
2. Default notebook/topic/tag
3. Changing default note title
4. Changing default date format
5. Support for sharing files/images to Notesnook
6. Custom themes
7. Note linking
8. Self hosting

If the above sounds interesting to you, I recommend following us on Twitter where we regularly post updates about the app.