The Archive owes its heritage to nvAlt, which owes its heritage to Notational Velocity — a unique piece of software that broke new ground by integrating new note creation with search in an Omnibar. I’m old enough to remember using the original Notational Velocity. The Archive is true to the heritage of the OG, but moves it in a direction specifically suited to the zettelkasten philosophy of note taking.
What’s zettelkasten, you ask? It’s too much for this software review, but in short it’s a note taking methodology that sees the deconstruction of source material broken down into atomic facts/points, expressed in its own words by the note taker, and given a unique reference link such that it can be tied to other items of knowledge held within the corpus of notes.
A key to the zettelkasten, and thus key to The Archive, is the generation of a Note ID. Upon creation of a new note in The Archive it is given a Note ID which is a concatenation of YEAR MONTH DAY HOUR MINUTE. This ensures that every note can be identified as a unique item, because each note will have a different ID.
To tie these notes together, The Archive supports wiki-links, in the form of [[Note ID or Note Title]]. This makes it possible to create a web of notes, where each atomic note can be tied to others: a key requirement of a zettelkasten.
The app is a good Markdown citizen, and it supports the streaming API to Brett Terpstra’s Marked app. It can also be configured to use an external editor, should you have a preferred one. Given The Archive is quick and efficient, and supports typewriter mode, I don’t bother using an external editor.
The Archive allows you to generate and keep saved searches in a sidebar. This could be useful if you want to show all notes tagged with a particular #hashtag. I use it to break down my notes into years - by relying on the first element of the Note ID, which is the year.
A fun element of The Archive is the range of Keyboard Maestro add-ons that have been built for it. My favourites are the ones that search the notes corpus and allow for quick creation of wiki links. Make sure Keyboard Maestro has full disk access to guarantee some of these work, though.
The user community has built a range of alternative themes so the app is customisable to a point. It also supports multiple text corpuses (corpi?) but only one can be loaded at a single time. A corpus simply represents a folder of text files in the standard filing system, which means The Archive can be complementary to other Markdown/text editors. It doesn’t lock you in. While it doesn’t have an iOS app, the ability to work with files stored on a cloud storage platform means it works nicely with unrelated iOS text editors.
The Archive can be used as a replacement for nvAlt if that’s all you need. It feels more stable than that app. Of course, there is nvUltra in development - but that has had a very long gestation period, whereas The Archive is here and now.
I hit the basketball court for the first time in a long time yesterday. My free throw percentage was better than ever, but three point range was a struggle! 😩🏀
Recently after a discussion about email on Episode 023 of Hemispheric Views, I dug into the settings and configuration of Fastmail and I was pleasantly surprised by how much more than a simple host they truly are!
I’ve been again trialling Hey for the past week or so, but I still don’t think it matches the combination of Fastmail & Sanebox.
They normally pass 50 ships a day through the canal. With so many backed up, it will be a few days before things get back to normal.
The linked article includes some cool graphical imagery of the shipping impact of the Panama Suez Canal1 being blocked.
It goes to show how fragile our trade system is; and the economic value inherent in the canal.
My thanks to Steve Snider for pointing out my dopey mistake of calling out the wrong canal. Geography, eh? ↩︎
There’ll be a new episode of Hemispheric Views podcast dropping soon. Best catch up on the last episode then. The episode is named Perthonalities! as we reference people from my home town of Perth, Australia. 49 minutes of top-quality audio enjoyment!
I’m enjoying getting to know @mandaris who sounds like one of the happiest people on Earth. A great episode! pca.st
I want an email app that works with standard IMAP, but is well-designed and something different, like Hey. Is that too much to ask?
A quick test post straight from Ulysses 22 to micro.blog. Awesome to see Ulysses supporting the best blog host on the internet!
My HEY experiment is not going well. For some reason, forwarding from Fastmail to HEY isn’t working. But I can’t be bothered figuring out why.
The battery of my iPad Pro 2017 has reached that point where it drains rapidly, even in standby. It does everything I need of it, so I could probably get a battery replacement. Or, I could buy the upcoming new iPad Pro or the current iPad Air. Prudent decision versus fun one. 🤔
Me and my boys. Benji refuses to smile for any photo.
Dammit Microbloggers, now I’m trialling HEY again.
There are a couple of core concepts, and they’re so simple you’ll wonder why you haven’t thought of them before.
It’s worth mentioning at this point that all of this is free, and it’s possible to implement it without any additional tools.
I was introduced to the Johnny Decimal filing system by @jack. I’m going to give a go with my own computer document filing. As organised as I think I am, I certainly struggle to find digital files on a more regular basis than I would like.
