My hunt for the perfect notetaking software has led me back to TiddlyWiki. TiddlyWiki is an amazing thing, it's a complete wiki application written in javascript and encoded into a single html file and stored on your local disk. You open the html file and can browse through the entries (or 'tiddlers' in tiddlywiki parlance) at will. You can then modify the entries or add your own and then save a new version of the html file with the modified content.
A nice feature of a TiddlyWiki file is that it is a self contained wiki, application and data, and all you need to access it is a decent modern web browser (or IE will do). While it would be nice to store all my project notes in an application such as OneNote or on a blog or server based wiki, this has a significant downside in how could I possibly store these notes in such a format that I can refer to them in ten years time without having to set up the servers needed to run them or install the applications needed to read them? The TiddlyWiki file is simply opened in a browser, how hard is that? In desperation it would even be possible to open it in a text editor. Since the files are simple html format it would be a straightforward task to write a python or ruby script to extract the Tiddlers from a file and store them in some other format.
I have used it recently on a project and was happy with my ability to keep the project under control. I made extensive use of the tagging system to use the wiki for change control. For each 'Issue' that needed dealing with I created a tiddler and tagged it as 'issue' and 'unresolved' and another tag to indicate which version of the software the problem was found in. When the issue had been fixed I could change the 'unresolved' tag to 'resolved' and add a new tag to indicate which version of the software the issue had been fixed in. Voila, I have a database within a wiki and I can list changes made to the software in any version. The resulting single html file goes into the project documentation and could easily be checked into your source control system.
TiddlyWiki also has a 'journal' feature, effectivly a way to add datestamped tiddlers making it possible to use it for a blog. A standard feature of TiddlyWiki is a Timeline listing of Tiddlers in chronological order.
If there is one looming problem with TiddlyWiki it would be scalability: as you add more and more Tiddlers to a single file it is going to consume more memory, linear searches are going to take longer and performance is going to suffer. The best solution to this would be to seperate notes into multiple wiki files. It is easy enough to link from one file to another. Another possible downside would be that graphic files are not stored in the main html file so you would have to deal with the html file and it's associated graphic files but that is not a major problem.
Recent versions of TiddlyWiki have added support for server backends so that you can save your Tiddlers on a server. There is even an online service called TiddlySpot that gives you a web based TiddlyWiki. I am not sure if storing Tiddlers on a server alleviates the scalability problems or not. The real advantage of these systems is that you don't need to carry the TiddlyWiki file around with you.
It's worth having a look at TiddlyWiki if only to admire a great piece of software design.
Peter's Moblog
