May 9, 2024: App Recommendation: Joplin

I take a lot of notes and visit a lot of webpages for research. I find it invaluable to be able to scoop up info from interesting pages, copy bits of code or ephemera that have proven useful, and save recipes. (I have a lot of recipes . . .)

As far as software that does what I need, I can recommend Joplin. I've been relying on it for over 5 months, and it works great. It lets you type in "fresh" notes as you think of them, or – with a suitable extension installed – copy bits of websites that catch your eye. All its data is stored locally (encrypted, if you like), and it can sync via Dropbox or any similar service you might use.

Joplin is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and iOS. Oh, and it's free and open source. It updates often, so I feel pretty confident I'll be able to use it for a while. It's a bit finicky to set up, especially if you want to be clever and sync stuff via Dropbox, but it's not terrible. And at a cost of zero dollars to try it out? Well, that's pretty . . . noteworthy.

-- Steven Marsh