3. Application Overview
Notenik is a system for recording, storing, organizing, viewing and publishing Notes.
Notenik is available as a Mac App that can be downloaded from the Mac App Store. There is no up-front cost, nor any in-app purchases, nor any subscription required, in order to download and fully use all of Notenik’s features.
Each Note is stored in its own text file.
A folder full of Notes is referred to as a Collection, and a user may have as many Collections as desired, and Collections may be stored in a variety of locations. Collections can be synced to the cloud, and/or to other devices, using services such as Dropbox and iCloud. You can use any text editor, on any platform, to view and edit your Notes. Notenik formats each text file in a simple, straightforward way that is easily read by humans.
One special feature of Notenik is the liberal and flexible use of Fields. In Notenik, a Note’s Title and its Body are distinct fields. A Link field and a Tags field are available by default. Other field names, and field types, can be easily added. Each Collection can be tailored to have its own set of Field Labels and Types. For example, add a Date field, a Status field and a Recurs field, and you have a simple but very workable To Do list.
Each Collection can be sorted in a variety of different ways, and an outline view is always available to let you explore your collection via Tags.
Markdown is supported in the Body field, as well as in other fields of type longtext. Several extensions to basic Markdown are supported, including wiki-style links from one Note to another.
Notenik offers several ways to get Note data into and out of Notenik, in a variety of different formats.
Notenik also has its own templating language. You can create Merge Templates, using your preferred text editor, and can then merge the Notes and their Fields into one or more templates in order to create output text files – most typically, HTML files.
Notenik also has its own scripting language. You can record, modify, and/or write Script Files that will filter and sort one or more Collections and then merge the resulting data into one or more template files, to create a variety of output files.
By creatively combining different fields, scripting parameters, and merge templates, Notenik can be used as a static site generator to create an entire website.