I'm working on a Zettelkasten notes app

I’m currently working on a Zettelkasten Mac app! It borrows heavily from other apps out there, notably Notational Velocity and Ulysses and incorporates a lot of my own opinions on how a network notes app should work. Of course, I’m also using elements from my other note-based apps: Minders and Card Buddy.

I’ve been working on some form of these ideas for the last couple of years, but mostly just prototyping various user experiences. I haven’t been able to settle on a UX that feels quite right for something like this. Everything I’ve tried so far makes navigating notes feel too overwhelming, but I think I’ve finally figured it out.

Understory is a Zettelkasten-style notes app where you can create spatial connections between notes without having to rely on wiki-style links, although they are available. It favors the idea of atomic notes and treats all links to notes as transclusions, making it possible for a note to appear in more place than one. It’s sort of a hybrid of a note graph and an outliner, but it uses a minimalist interface so you’re only ever looking at one list of notes, never a nested tree or a graph.

I’ve always thought that the typical graph view you see in apps that support note-linking weren’t the right design. They demo nicely, but from a usability standpoint, they’re not as fast as reading and navigating a list. I personally don’t think of connections as a graph, necessarily, but as a list, and that’s how I ended up with Understory’s user experience.

Understory

It’s not available yet to try out, but I am planning on beta testing it, if you’re interested. There’s a ton more detail about how the app is structured at the main Understory landing page.