Synoptic

Synoptic

Synoptic is “GMail for your notes”. It gives you an efficient and friendly interface that makes it possible to keep and categorize a large number of small-ish notes and tidbits of information.

The following features set it apart:

  • Fully versioned. Never deletes anything, ever. If you want to go back to a previous version of something, just drag that slider up there in the top-left corner.

  • Super-simple Navigation. Adaptive tag clouds, support for the forward/back button on your browser, query links, support for browser bookmarks. All to make sure you can find that note when you need it.

  • Powerful searching. Synoptic is meant to keep large note collections manageable and accessible. You can search for items based on tags, their creation time, or even search through their full text. Plus arbitrary logical combinations of them, using the logical operatos and, or, and not.

  • Easy Markup. Synoptic uses Markdown to allow you to type formatted notes easily and quickly. Plus, there are a few extensions to facilitate typing math.

  • Advanced Features. A lot of refinement work has gone into making Synoptic work as seamlessly as possible. You may never notice many of these refinements, because they’re meant to make stuff work like it’s supposed to.

Download

Installation is simple:

$ # install setuptools, if necessary
$ wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
$ sudo python ez_setup.py

$ # install synoptic
$ sudo easy_install synoptic

You may also ownload synoptic from its PyPI page. synoptic requires Python 2.4 (as of 0.91.1). Further more, you can browse synoptic’s source control and check out a copy for yourself using

git clone http://git.tiker.net/trees/synoptic.git

And finally, here’s the screen shot you’ve been waiting for:

synoptic-screen.png
synoptic-screen.png

Release 0.91.2 of Synoptic

Yay, here I go again. (Update: and again) There were a few small wrinkles in Synoptic 0.91 (and 0.91.1) for which I felt it warranted to push out a followup release, aptly called 0.91.2. It fixes the following things:

  • Depend only on Python 2.4 by reverting to Python Paste’s WSGI httpd.
  • Speed up page load by serving all javascript as one big clump.
  • Change JS/CSS load order to fix history slider size.
  • (new in 0.91.1) unbreak daemon mode in Python2.4
  • (new in 0.91.1) launch browser from background thread, to avoid deadlock.

Download from PyPI

First real public release of Synoptic

I’m happy to announce the first truly public release of Synoptic, my own web-based dynamic note taking application. If you find yourself lost in a jumble of either paper notes, text files on a hierarchical file system, or an overgrown Tomboy wiki, and find yourself craving order, categories, and simplicity, Synoptic may well be for you.

So go check it out! :)