rewrite

What is this?

I’m building an ambitious research-oriented writing environment — with native and web user interfaces: macOS and iOS and web first, someday hopefully also Windows.

This is an absurdly ambitious goal, because it includes a lot of pieces that all have to work together:

• a citation/reference-management tool which is as robust as any of the others out there and hopefully a lot less annoying
• a note-taking tool
  • which plays nicely with a Zettelkasten style of knowledge development
  • with support for quotes as their own distinct kind of item within the note-taking environment
  • which has some way (very much TBD) to deal with papers already or still to be read
• an authoring tool
  • which emphasizes writing text, not formatting, using Markdown (or something like it: Markdown itself needs some extensions for academic writing)
  • with powerful integrations with the reference and note-taking tools
  • capable of scaling from a journal article or long-form magazine news articles to Ph.D. theses and other book-length works
• a publishing tool
  • which combines authored documents and CSLs to generate documents in the desired format
  • with the ability to build custom CSLs, since it is common that a journal will want APA-but… or Chicago-and….

If you’re in the market for that kind of ambitious app, sign up and I’ll keep you up to date on my progress—and you’ll be the first to know when I have something you can use!

How far along is this?

Not very! I kicked off software development in September 2019, after spending the summer breaking down two distinct parts of the basic application design:

• the information architecture, which will ultimately drive the UI design
• the user experience, which is a superset of visual UI elements: interaction flows, keyboard shortcuts, accessibility, etc.

(I’m working closely with a small handful of trusted friends to validate those ideas.)

This is going to take a while. I’ve been dreaming up this app for almost four years, and the goal has always been: native UIs as well as a web UI. But the dream is also cross-platform. There will be a Rust core backing those native and web UIs; the front-ends will be in Swift and Elm (and, someday, F♯).

Who is building this?

I’m Chris Krycho, a detail-obsessed software engineer. I’ve worked on everything from real-time avionics software to sophisticated web apps — including some you’ve certainly seen and probably used.

I freely admit that this is a bigger project than anything I’ve worked on individually before. That’s okay: I have a knack for picking up hard problems and getting them solved, even when I start out with no idea what I’m doing.

When can I get it?

I have no idea: I’m just getting going, and there’s a lot to build! The best way to keep up with my progress is to sign up for the mailing list!