It would be great if Dynalist could work completely offline, i.e.:
Do not require signing up
Store all the data locally, never syncing it with the server
I’m talking about standalone application, not browser mode.
How about that?
Edit: I explain it more verbosily in the comment below
it would be great indeed. especially considering the attack on the workflowy servers earlier this week. the way things are going these days, its really only a matter of time before something similar happens dynalist.
if something did ever happen it would be completely unnecessary for me as well because i dont even need to have dynalist syncing to someone elses server all the time. i just need it to sync with devices over my home network and then work offline on my mobile while im out, then sync the changes back when i get home. syncthing pretty much covers all this for me at the moment with my markdown notes
Yeah, a lot of people have been clamoring for an internetless Workflowy Clone for the last 10 years, and there’s been nothing but crickets from the outliner community. Some terrible apps like org-mode and sublime orgmode and taskwarrior have been suggested but don’t come close. A lot of people are especially frustrated within tech companies that disallow storing any work data on 3rd party clouds. It’s a bummer, because I know this is a huge market being untapped despite the tech being there. Just, nobody has bothered to put it together.
It’s been on the Dynalist Roadmap for 5 years, but it’s low enough on the priority list (which includes Obsidian), that I don’t expect it to ever happen
The wait continues for some hero to develop it.
Personally, I think the most likely future success will come from a 3rd party plugin for Obsidian + 3rd party Obsidian CSS. The app is offline by default. That community is rapidly making a lot of good 3rd party stuff and Obsidian is less than a year old project, and already exploding in new users. Obsidian treats lines of text (i.e. paragraphs between the \n characters) as “blocks” and has the ability to internally link to blocks via a search similar to Dynalist’s move dialog. So the “nodes” paradigm is kind of there, and the heirarchy tree is done via the nested folders paradigm. It’s only matter of time until you can do a lot of the Dynalist and Workflowy paradigms within an Obsidian document. It won’t be exactly the same but I think people can adapt. Of course, this is just speculation.
This topic is a duplicate of the bigger thread –
Quite lengthy discussion has started here, so I want to clarify my own point.
Actually I don’t ask for any brand new features. More like just a small tweak of what
Dynalist is capable of already.
The desktop app does store it’s data somewhere locally on user’s machine, right?
What I need is the opportunity to work with those local data directly, not signing in.
When the app starts, it should ask in what mode do I want to work:
A) Using a Dynalist account, with the access to my local data provided by signing in to
Dynalist servers. Everything like it is now.
B) Using direct access to my local data, without signing in. The data are never sent
anywhere, no synchronization of any type occurs. No Dynalist account is involved.
In the second case Dynalist should just skip some checks and relax about anything remote.
Generally speaking, it should not do some things it usually does. That kind of tweak seems
to be relatively easy to implement.
I do not request anything related to synchronization, encryption, local passwords etc.,
unlike True Offline Mode or Encrypted Data, so it is not a duplicate.
In the end I want to use Dynalist for editing lists in place, just like I use, say, Open
Office for documents or GIMP/Adobe Photoshop for pictures. To just edit something. Period.
Do not send it anywhere else, do not synchronize or merge anything whatsoever. None of
that. Just editing.
Imagine a text editor asking me to sign up before I write a piece of text. Would be
weird, right? That’s how I actually feel about Dynalist right now.
Dynalist is best at it’s niche, as far as I know. It makes lists really rock!
And it’s a pity that some simple things have to be complicated.
Hope you guys will take a closer look at this.
P.S. Have been on vacation so responding just now.
Check out https://www.moo.do/
Very similar to dynalist
Download their desktop app at the bottom
It lets you create offline documents that don’t sync to cloud
Logseq might be exactly what you’re looking for. You can open a local directory from Chrome and don’t need to sign in or sync anything.