Hi, it’s Takuya here. I’m very excited to announce that Inkdrop v4 is now available to all users. Thanks to all folks who joined the beta testing, I could finally roll it out. (Thank you, Erdem, Otawara-san, Asish, derkork, FORTRAN, Kazutaka-san, Horii-san, leptospira489, John, Gustavo, Nicolo, Andreas for the bug reports and suggestions.) Let me take you through what’s new in v4, which comes with new icon look, bunch of new features and ground-up improvements for increasing your productivity!

What is Inkdrop?

Inkdrop is a note-taking app with robust Markdown editor, built for developers. I built it because I wanted it. For those who are new to Inkdrop, check out the website here for more detail.

I am a freelance developer based in Japan, running this project for 3 years alone (See also: How I kept my solo project going over 3 years). My strategy to monetize with Inkdrop successfully worked well, and I eventually quit doing freelance works in the past year. While working on this project, I’m sharing how I did and what I learned on this blog as following:

So, this project is not just a paid app but also a story about a man who tries to live his life with personal development.

Why Did It Take 7 Months for Developing New Version?

9 months ago, as I explained in the roadmap (vol.3), I decided to rebuild the desktop app for making ground-up improvements. It eventually took 7 months. It was a long journey, but why? Let me explain a bit — The first version of Inkdrop was built 3 years ago. At that time, I was new to develop apps on top of Electron and ReactJS. As Inkdrop grew, I have learned a lot of good practices from it. I found that it can be improved much better in terms of implementation. Some dependencies of the stack were already obsolete. I was worried that it will cause a big problem on the project’s sustainability in the near future. I felt like I can’t continue developing it without rebuilding from scratch.. But I know it would be a dangerous way because I saw many companies have given up rebuilding their services since it requires lots of hard work and grit. But here, I am so happy to finish the big task!

What it does mean to users is that I can now move faster. I can fix bugs quickly and improve core features while keeping it stable, just like the early days. Let’s keep it evolving together :)

Support Inkdrop on ProductHunt

If you think the app is great, I really appreciate your upvote!🙏

Truly Private with End-to-End Encryption Support

Inkdrop provides seamless data sync across devices and platforms without headache. As a note-taking app designed for developers, it is crucial to protect your data since you may store many sensitive informations in it. I’m happy to announce that v4 now supports end-to-end encryption support. Your data will be encrypted and decrypted on the client (including iOS and Android versions), which means that Inkdrop servers will never touch your data without encryption. For more detail, please read the documentation about security.

Smart Scroll Sync for Side-by-side Mode

It works fine with images

Side-by-side mode is useful because you can write a note while checking its HTML output. It now syncs scroll position more accurately even if a note has various contents like images, so you won’t lose your focus.

Search UI & Performance Improvement

Desktop

Mobile

As you store notes, you search them more often. Providing clear UI and good performance for the full-text search feature is the core functionality of the app. It indexes your notes completely in local. No network round-trip time.

Learn more about how to search notes

Global Shortcut Support

You may want to access your notes more quickly whatever you do. You can set a global shortcut to bring a Inkdrop window into focus in your keymap.cson like so:

'global':

'cmd-shift-x': 'application:show-and-focus-main-window'

Learn more about how to configure keybindings.

Notebook Submenus & Count Badges

v4 will help your notes keep organized further.

As you add tags to notes, it easily becomes hard to find from tag list on sidebar. Similarly, as you set status to notes, it will be hard to know which notes are currently active. It know has a sub menu for each notebook, which lets you easily find tags and status only used in a notebook.

It also supports count badges which are shown on the right side of each item on sidebar. They indicate how many notes are available with an item, so you can quickly know statistics of your notes.

Learn more about notebook submenus

Offline Image Attachments Support on Mobile

Since mobile network is not always online and fast, you can’t see embedded images quickly on the mobile app. It’s kind of frustrating, but now it supports caching images in local. Once you loaded an image, it will be loaded from cache from next time. So you can see images while moving on the metro!

New Website

I completely redesigned the Inkdrop website. It is built with Gatsby — a static website builder based on React. I would like to say big thank you to people who gave me the great testimonials here! 🙏🙌

New Documentations Website

I also rebuilt the documentation website with Gatsby. It’s easy to maintain and add pages written in Markdown. I am planning to add useful tips and hacking tips!

v3 is Deprecated Soon

As of v4, end-to-end encryption is enabled by default. It requires you to use v4 on all your devices since there is no compatibility with v3 or older. If you are still using v3 after updating to v4 on another computer, it will prompt you to update. Note that the server for v3 will be soon deprecated.

Update Plugins

If you have installed some plugins, you get warning when launched v4. You can update them by running following command:

ipm update

How to Make Your Plugins Support v4?

If you are a plugin creator, please refer to this documentation about how to migrate your plugin from v3 to v4. You can make it support v4 with small amount of changes. Plugins that don’t support v4 yet will be hidden on the plugin list page. If you found your favorite plugin does not support it yet, please tell the author the documentation. Thank you for all your contributions!