Itermusing

Since 2001, Brian and I have been dreaming, thinking, designing, building, avoiding, and otherwise circling the topic of how to pragmatically collect thoughts about technology, projects, personal interests, and more. In essence, how to remember for the long term. Our desires have outlived many product offerings and many more technology trends. Through it all, the web platform has grown more capable and long lasting. Open Source and Open Standards are only proven mechanisms capable of safeguarding content against the erroding forces of time. Decades from now I want to be able to share my body of work with others; as it is now, our creations are likely to be locked behind abandoned products, acquired or failed companies, changed priorities, antiquated technologies (CDs, Zip Drives, or floppy disks), or cloud hosting we can no longer afford.

Over the years, we have talked about this product concept under the names "Syncromatic" and "Continuum App", collecting many notes, designs, diagrams, and code sketches. During the global COVID Pandemic of 2020, I was able to focus some of my free time into creating several supporting Open Source libraries including PHORBAS Opaque, Store, and HAMT, among others. Pursuing our concept once again, we are starting work under the PHORBAS project with the name "Itermusing", giving a digital place of pasture for the paths your musings lead you down.

Get Started

npm ci

# Continuously build ./esm library (using one console window)
npm run watch

# Run development website (using another console window)
npm run vite

# Build the ./esm library and the ./dist website
npm run build

Inspirations

• Self-hosted nature of

  • TiddlyWiki
  • Feather Wiki
  • Modern web browsers and developer consoles

• Habits & methods like

  • Zettelkasten
  • Bullet Journal
  • PARA Method
  • Getting Things Done (GTD)
  • blogging
  • bookmarks collections in browsers
  • read-later services

• Diagraming and Whiteboarding tools

  • Excalidraw & GH: excalidraw/excalidraw
  • Draw.io / Diagrams.net
  • Mermaid
  • Miro
  • Mural
  • Figma

• Myriad of knowledge management tools:

  • Obsidian
  • Notion
  • Notational Velocity
  • The Brain
  • AnyType.io
  • Curio

• Hundreds of Todo tracking apps

  • TodoMVC

• Hundreds of Kanban board like-apps

  • github, gitlab, and similar kanban card-like viewers
  • NullBoard
  • Trello

• Structured data:

  • CBOR
  • Schema.org
  • JSON
    • JSON Schema and draft-07
    • quicktype to generate types and converters from JSON, Schema, and GraphQL
    • JSON-LD
    • JSON Type Definition (JTD)
    • JSON Pointer
    • JSON Patch
    • JSON Merge Patch

• Single-Purpose tools

  • Markdown: zero-md or md-block
  • MathJax
  • MathQuill
  • MathJS
  • ProseMirror
  • CodeMirror, Monaco, or ACE

• CRDT

  • Y.js & GH: yjs/yjs
  • JSON Joy & GH: streamich/json-joy
  • automerge & GH: automerge

• Coding Notebooks

  • iPython / Jupyter Notebook
  • ObservableHQ
  • Smalltalk Playground & images
  • D3 sketches
  • Plot
  • Vega
  • Math Notepad

• Explorable Explanations

  • Bret Victor
    • Explorable Explanations
    • Ladder of Abstraction
    • Tangle
  • Mike Bostock
    • Visualizing Algorithms
    • Fisher-Yates Shuffle
    • How Selections Work
    • A Better Way to Code

• Handwriting digitization tools

  • image scanner
  • pictures of whiteboards
  • jscanify & GH:jscanify
  • RocketBook
  • LiveScribe
  • reMarkable