My problem is not really with #Logseq or other #PKM or #TfT apps but with the silos most apps are and how much effort it requires to build and maintain "bridges" between these silos i.e. the integrations everyone look for when evaluating a software solution.
Storing notes in a standard format like #Markdown is a step in the right direction but we need more standard protocols and formats and more OS-level integrations.
The OS should take care of stuff like contacts, calendar, indexing files etc and let applications transparently access them. This approach has been explored by #KDE for example with Kontact, Akonadi, Baloo and more.
I should be able for example to login into Mastodon from my system settings and 1) receive native notifications 2) being able to share a note or a image to Mastodon without opening a full client 3) found my bookmarked toots in my PKM app of choice 4) see my followed and following accounts in an ad-hoc category in my contacts and so on.
Too much work is required now, like "in which service did I save that thing?" because we have no unified search (well again KDE's Krunner does its best with this concept) or again "where can I contact that person? In which format the resource must be for that platfom?"
From this perspective projects promoting themselves as "Everything OS" while just being the n-th low-code platform like #Tana are laughable.
#Emacs ecosystem is certainly the best one and indeed you can implement the whole OS in it.
My point is more about the OS, that provides a lingua franca when it comes to things like the file system. Android does a bit more with API to access contacts, calendar etc.
On Linux we were supposed to use D-bus, I don't know if MacOS or Windows have something like that. For sure apps like #Logseq are developed to be cross-platform and most of the time are available for MacOS, then Windows and only if we are lucky Linux.
This means those apps use the greatest common divisor of these platforms, totally ignoring things like D-bus.
On Plasma and GNOME you can even login with some online accounts (Google, Nextcloud, ...) and get integration with various parts of the system and applications.
Almost no one use them though: even Mastodon, so focused on protocols and interoperability, is developed by people using MacOS and a proper integration with a Linux OS is a dream.
The concepts are there, most technology too, but we are chained by this apps-as-silos approach by MacOS and Windows and their opinionated and proprietary solutions.
@post @masi COM (and its derivatives) is supposed to be used on Windows OSes for integration with the OS.
Object-oriented RPC much like dbus. OSX has XPC (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xpc).
In basically all cases and across all modern OSes based on those, the unified RPC/IPC is ignored by devs way too much and prevents any uniform experience (the way you'd expect from Emacs or LispM OSes).
For storage I think OSes should expose transactional interfaces, as filesystems have way too many failure modes.
@post I have a preference for markdown format as the base storage of information, but also see that this doesn’t allow for a bunch of@other things. Something like OPML I think does allow for more transparency and transport between silos.
I see what you mean but let me split the matter in two and start from the latter:
Communication between apps/system should use structured formats as always but I'd like if we could all agree that at least fields containing text would use Markdown syntax for bold, italics etc.
On storing structured data in Markdown, #Logseq does it by using Markdown indented lists (to define hierarchies) and "properties" for each element with the syntax `key:: value`. To my knowledge everything can be stored with it but I see this as a nice option to have, while the first part is the important one.
@post re part one. Yes. Agreed
@post re part two. I’d see this as a must have not a nice to have.
Not stuck on the syntax of `key:: value` But it is easy to type and maintain in plain text. Have seen anything I feel is a viable alternative. So quite happy with it.
But I feel we do NEED a way to give extra information to the system (app) we use to play with the data.
Having this syntax introduced by #Logseq standardized as the "structured Markdown" format and supported by libraries and applications just like XML, JSON etc would indeed be very nice!
@post absolutely 👍
@post Agree on both points.
Point one is particularly important to me. Blows my mind that the concept of a Contacts app that can communicate with other apps (like on macOS and Android) isn't prevalent in every desktop environment.
It's the kind of thing I would expect from #elementaryOS but I suppose they've chosen different priorities.
@post I agree that more could be done to integrate everything better together, because there are different tastes when it comes to personal choice. Even more so on the side of apps communicating with each other.
I think #Emacs based #PKM using Org Mode and its various tools handles most (if not all) of the problems you write because everything can be accessed from a single entry point. At least you can write your own solution, if one doesn't already exist.