treetonin

I read Eric S. Raymonds book The Cathedral and the Bazaar about a year ago. In this book he seeds bits of wisdom as lessons. I found most of these lessons interesting, clever, amusing when reading the book, but I don’t really remember them. With one exception, and that’s the very first one.

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.

This one somehow sticked in my mind ever since. And it describes how the piece of software I just shared through Github came to be.

I like taking notes. I don’t like taking notes on paper. I like organizing information in a tree structure. I don’t like using a heavy-weight tool for an easy task. When my office box was running Windows, the requirements sketched by these personal preferences were met by Treepad. On a Mac I could use Jreepad, which is close enough to Treepad for an easy switch and it can even read the files Treepad writes.

The downside of both Treepad and Jreepad is their lack of portability. They require you to install them locally and if you want to use your notes on several machines you have to take care of keeping the data files in sync yourself. That’s where treetonin comes in. treetonin is based on Rails and jQuery and takes tree based notes to the cloud.

If you are using Treepad, Jreepad or anything like that and you want to be independent from a particular machine or want to get rid of a program you have to install on any machine you currently work an, just give it a try.