One Jotter

Stone -

Welcome to Episode # 108 in this adventure to find the best Android note-taking app out there. But first, a few welcomes and some personal hobby updates.

💡
A big welcome to Tasneem and Na'im from UAE, Hayden from Wisconsin, Ronny from no fixed address, Pratibha from India, Reso from Uruguay, Michele from Italy, Lisa from California, Julian from Réunion, Light from Vietnam, Virginia from Illinois, Aleksandra from Poland, Marina from Australia, Cromartie from Taiwan, and Song from Washington.

Thank you all for joining the newsletter over the past many weeks. No robots were involved in writing this post except for Grammarly and, in general, none of my posts intentionally use AI with the exception of What would ChatGPT say. If that changes, I'll let you know 🤗.

2,000 people and counting

I reached over 2,000 followers across all socials! Sure, I'm still not a Kardashian or a Swift but I'm happy to have you all along for this ride. Here's how the follower counts breakdown.

  - x: 1009        # previously known as Twitter
  - reddit-id: 441 # didn't go dark like other moderators :)
  - ghost: 284     # for these posts
  - mastodon: 142  # go decentralized :)
  - facebook: 88   # people still use it?
  - medium: 59     # I need to respond to some comments here!
  - instagram: 18  # App reviews on Insta?
  - threads: 5     # started posting as of last review

Apologies for being AWOL the past four weeks. I took a 5-week course from IDEO U called Designing Strategy and I've had Bronchitis for the past couple of weeks. The course was amazing. The Bronchitis, not so much 😂.

My ego network is in Markdown!

The other thing that I've been busy with was converting my social network from my custom HAL database into Markdown files. If you're bored or looking to escape a holiday party, I wrote an initial Medium post Keeping track of people and connections in Obsidian and provided more context in Goodbye social networks, hello Markdown.

Last week I finished the exporter tool and now have my 3,645 person ego network and 37,220 notes accessible in Obsidian. It takes about 30 seconds to load with Obsidian on Android but it's fast once loaded. Because of the load times, I continue to use Drafting as my favorite quick-capture tool and it co-habitates well with Obsidian.

Here's the visualization of my social network in Obsidian. This is a filter of the Markdown files that have tags: [person] in their frontmatter – the meta-data at the top of my note files. The colors represent which category I have the person in such as the bright green for my "A-listers" where I have the tags person and alist 😂.

The map at this level is mostly for entertainment. With the map at the individual level I am able to visualize someone's social network which is very useful.

I enjoy surfing the links between my notes and jumping from person to person to recall who they know or from person to organization to see who else worked or studied there.

I can query on life events, job titles, cities, skills, hobbies, or interests. Each time it tweaks my very bad memory. Here's a markdown file with embedded queries to find the people in my network who have birthdays or anniversaries in January. Not beautiful but very functional. Next step is to include one query in each of my daily notes to see who's birthday or anniversary it is today without going elsewhere.

I don't expect there are many (any?) other people out there that go to this extent with their social network but I thought it would be fun to share the art of the possible with note-taking. Thanks for indulging and now, let's get into this week's app review!

One Jotter

This week I reviewed One Jotter which is a great combination of note-taking and journal app.

The app's Web page has not changed in 3 years and I couldn't find anything on the company that created it. The address in Google Play appears to be an apartment building in Foshan, China. They were very responsive to my emails:

We are a group of programmers who like app development, we don't like social networking very much, so we don't have any social accounts, our studio is called Cocoa Studio, and we have also developed a Windows version. for more information please visit: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9p22c5m999ft.

I tried to get their real names but "Young Jonathan" wanted to remain private which I respect. Heck, I use an alias for this hobby.

One Jotter is fast, good looking and has a lot of functionality including linking of notes, Markdown support, calendar view, inline audio recording, images, sketching, and themes. It checks all of the boxes in my must-have list and 12 of the 20 features from the "In my dream a not taking app has this..." list.

The app uses SQLite for it's local storage but can export notes to many formats including Markdown, PDF, image, RTF, and HTML. You can also use the backup and restore to keep your notes safe although I don't know if that's encrypted. There's even a Windows version available. Sorry, your Apple friends and family members #nosoupforyou: get an Android phone!

Best of all the app does not require a cloud subscription but it does support synchronizing to a couple of services including DropBox, OneDrive or a WebDAV server like I have. I didn't test the sync capability so make sure to test it out if you want to make this app your go-to.

Here's how the developer Cocoa Studio describes the app:

One Jotter is a notebook designed in a minimalist style, which is suitable for Note-taking and Prose-writing. It has an extended keyboard with rich functions and beautiful themes. It can be used as a plain text editor and can save notes in RTF, as well as support for writing and previewing in the Markdown (CommonMark) format.

The cost is low considering a yearly subscription is $5.99 USD and a "Lifetime Membership" is $12.89 USD.

Read on for the ugly, the bad, the good, the great, and the awesome aspects of One Jotter.

Screenshot

Meta

Ugly

  • No transparency on who developed the app
  • No easy way to delete all of the sample content and WebDAV
  • Exporting Markdown note to PDF or an image shows the Markdown tags not the formatted note
  • The font setting seemed to be for the app not the editor?

Bad

  • Default notes at the top are in a language I don't use so that was confusing
  • Tags are not inline
  • Have to convert to RTF to get WYSIWYG editing
  • No tables support
  • No templates

Good

  • Text formatting: bold, italics, underline, strikethrough
  • Horizontal line
  • 3 heading levels
  • Blockquote
  • Code block
  • 16 themes
  • Dark mode
  • UI looks nice and clean
  • Import from text file
  • Categories
  • Toolbar
  • Trash
  • Favorite a note
  • Insert date
  • Insert time
  • Undo and redo
  • Indent and outdent
  • 57 font sizes (28 to 84)
  • Sort by title, created date, modified date
  • Card, list, and timeline views
  • 2 Android widgets
  • 8 fonts (for application?)
  • Image shown in note list
  • Pin a note
  • Attach an image (only 1 in free version)
  • Convert between RTF and Markdown
  • Inline checkboxes
  • Share via Android to SMS or email

Great

  • Markdown support using Commonmark
  • Fast
  • Local first
  • Inline audio recording
  • Bullet list
  • Numbered list
  • Tags on notes
  • Calendar view
  • Select text and click # adds the tag
  • 12 languages
  • Search options: today, yesterday, last 7 days, last 15 days
  • Search history
  • Synchronize with Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive
  • Export to Plain Text, JPEG, or Markdown (see Awesome)
  • Attach text or PDF files
  • Backup and restore
  • Lock with a passcode
  • Low cost
  • Adjust line spacing
  • Filter by category
  • Button to move lines up or down
  • Word count
  • Character count
  • Paragraph count
  • Search within note
  • Copy a note
  • Share as Markdown
  • Reformat tool: indent paragraphs, remove all indents, add space between paragraphs, remove all spaces
  • Adjust margins
  • Print (premium feature)
  • Synchronization (premium feature)
  • Customize fonts (premium feature)
  • Windows app

Awesome

  • Merge notes
  • Inline sketches
  • Synchronize to WebDAV
  • Long press to see preview of the note
  • Link notes
  • View media files in calendar view
  • Search by specific date using calendar
  • Lock with fingerprint (premium feature)
  • Import from Day One, Journey and Bear
  • Export to PDF, ePUB, HTML and Markdown

The end-ish

I was quite impressed with One Jotter and I would recommend you checking it out.

They let you use almost all of the functionality with no charge and the upgrades make sense. The app is very reasonably priced for what you get and I'm tempted to purchase it if only to support their development.

That's it for 2024!

Here's wishing you and your families a safe and happy holiday season. If you're not celebrating or you find yourself in tough times, please take care of yourself and I wish for better days ahead for you.

Until next time, have some great note-taking weeks ahead and all the best in 2024!