My note taking application based on TiddlyWiki
Why an ELNB is necessary?
A laboratory notebook is a document that researchers use for writing their hypotheses, experiments, initial analysis and interpretation of these experiments. And a personal electronic laboratory notebook (ELNB) for replacing a hand-written notebook. This software application is also named as note taking application or personal wiki.
The mandatorory features that this type of application has to have are:
- Local application, not a web server.
- Windows and Linux versions, it should be used in both OS.
- A kind of blog with categories and tags.
- Dynamic tree views of the notes.
- Notes can be ordered by date.
- Caterogies and tags for notes, as in wiki.
- List all notes by creation date, category and tag.
- Inter links (notes links) and external links (files and web).
- Write a note using a WYSIWYG editor.
- Embed images, videos and so on.
- Export notes to RTF, XML and PDF.
- Spellcheck.
And some extra feature that are interesting:
- Drag and drop support for images, text and video, mathematics
- LaTex Eq. support.
- Power search engine: ext, name, date, categories and tags. Use a Desktop Search (Copernic, Google Desktop, etc) application for doing this task could be an option.
TW-WNB as my note taking solution
As I was not able to find any application that matches my expectations after using several of them, I decided to build mine over TiddlyWiki. TiddlyWiki is a reusable non-linear personal web notebook . It’s a single HTML file which contains CSS, JavaScript, and the content. The content is divided into a series of sections, or Tiddlers.
TiddlyWiki has been used by different people as a software framework to build specialisations including task management tool, web clipping tools, a collaborative note taking tool, etc.
My version, named as TiddlyWiki - Work Notebook (TW-WNB) is a tuning version of TiddlyWiki for managing your daily work. It allows you to add to-do tasks by priorities(now/next/future), attach tiddlers to activities (or projects), write meeting minutes and more.
I have created this TiddlyWiki version because no other version satisfies my personal requirements. For doing this I modified some existing plug-ins but I have also developed my own plug-ins in Javascript, html templates, CSS styles, etc.
The source code of this note taking application is in here.