Powerpack 3

Vts · April 27, 2019, 2:44am

Greg_Molyneux · May 30, 2019, 5:10pm

I’m a little late to this discussion, but if you’re still investing in the Zettelkasten method, you should seriously look into TiddlyWiki https://tiddlywiki.com/

It’s based on the concept of atomic “notes”, and is highly relational. it’s portable, cross-platform, and infinitely customizable (interface and otherwise).

Given your work on Powerpack, you’ll likely be interested in checking out the google group:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/tiddlywiki/bobexe|sort:date
and, more specifically, Jed Carty’s work on BobEXE. Look also into the other addons, and customizations (TiddlyMap comes to mind) to get an idea of the capabilities of this system.

I’ve argued repeatedly on that platform that the ONLY thing missing from TiddlyWiki is a good, well-defined user interface, that provides the functionality users want out of the box. An outliner/note taker like Dynalist, a mind map utility like Freemind, etc. All of these are possible in TW, it’s just cobbling together the pieces in a coherent interface that holds this system back form being the be all and end all of personal data management. They could use your talent towards that end.

Piotr · May 30, 2019, 5:37pm

Thank you, I was playing with TW and I liked the idea, it’s brilliant software, but after reading more about it I gave up - there are problems with bigger repositories, app gets slower and slower over time. I’m done with looking for solutions, I built already my own app for ZK, GTD and spaced repetition, all in one place and interconnected, maybe I will release it in the future

Kevin_Murray · May 30, 2019, 10:40pm

At first glance this looks similar to an older program called NoteStudio. I invested a lot of time in this database, but the software was eventually abandoned. I feel more confident in the commitment of the Dynalist team.

Greg_Molyneux · May 30, 2019, 11:05pm

The upside of TiddlyWiki is the code and the data are completely open. If TW dried up (won’t happen, they have a LONG history), you still own all your data, and it’s simple text. No proprietary formatting or storage.

I have heard people complain about extremely large data sets slowing down, but the tests I’ve seen usually demonstrate that such isn’t really the case. The limitations are the browser and/or the plugins you use to do the work through. In any case, there’s a lot of potential there, if you can find a combination of plugins that you work well with. It’s hard to beat the minimalist Dynalist interface for quick and easy entry.

Alan · June 1, 2019, 6:29pm

I’m interested to learn how to make my own hacks for dynalist. Like what’s the first step in making Powerpack that I could follow? The pack itself doesn’t have much I’d want to use, but the How is interesting to me.

Erica · June 2, 2019, 12:23am

My guess would be to play with the console, see what variables there are, and what do they represent. A good entry point is the below:

You can see in DYNALIST.app there are a bunch of things.

This is, of course, the hacky way though. Our vision is that soon we’ll be able to clean up the endpoints and document them, so you can properly use these interfaces and get notified when they change. We’ll try to keep them the same if that’s possible, but sometimes changes may be required. Right now changes manifest themselves in randomly breaking Powerpack

We’re preliminarily calling this the “plugin system”. It’s the client side/frontend counterpart of the data API.

Marek · June 5, 2019, 9:29pm

Hello, Is Powerpack 3 still working? Seems like superior tool, would love to use it.

Trying to install according to steps in manual, seems like it’s installed and active. But the only change occured is the “+” button left to “search”.

Any idea, how to make it work?

Marek · June 5, 2019, 9:37pm

My bad, completelly missed the “Open powerpack settings” option in right corner.

Mr_Montgomery · July 27, 2019, 1:13am

Is there any sort of tutorial for putting all of these features to use? It seems powerful, but frankly a little overwhelming. Like what is an agenda and how do I benefit from using it?

vibl · August 16, 2019, 3:04pm

Hi @Piotr, thanks for your amazing work!

I need a feature which I’d be willing to develop myself, so I have 2 questions:

Is there any way to contribute to your extension (by a pull requests and such)?
Is this feature already planned? In Spaced Repetition, I need to be able to use a breadcrumb of a node’s ancestors as the question. It would be very useful in order to memorize a whole tree. Also, I would love to be able to create a bunch of SR items from a list (or better, a tree) of nodes, just selecting a template to apply to each of them.

vibl · September 13, 2019, 11:56am

Bug report: on the Electron app, custom CSS does not apply to panels and popups.

Kada_Liao · September 15, 2019, 9:07am

Chrome 76.0.3809.132.

Code highlight not working.

Shida · October 22, 2019, 7:27pm

Just a fair bit of warning to everyone using Powerpack:
The internals of Dynalist is getting quite some change (in terms of naming and code structure). Since Powerpack uses some of our internal code api, that means there will be broken functionality.

We’re working on a fair amount of internal changes in preparation for some of the big projects we’ll be working on, but hopefully these changes will be done by the end of year and everything after that will be new and won’t be major refactors to the internal code structure.

It does mean that powerpack will and might continue to be broken until at least the changes can stabilize.

@Piotr I can pm you a list of major changes when they hit, but it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of activity here recently.

Kevin_Murray · October 23, 2019, 1:11am

Gulp! Powerpack is so integral to my workflow. Your warning is much appreciated and I hope it can co-exist with the new Dynalist.

Kevin_Murray · October 23, 2019, 1:13am

Gulp! Powerpack is so integral to my workflow. Your warning is much appreciated and I hope it can co-exist with the new Dynalist. Good luck with the development. We’re all very curious to see what emerges.

Brian_Rossiter · October 23, 2019, 1:34am

Agreed! I really would love to see Dynalist bake in PowerPack features. Without this and with broken PowerPack functionality, I might be forced to migrate to Notion. I would rather stay with Dynalist in an evolving, flourishing format!

Louis_Kirsch · October 23, 2019, 4:30am

Well maybe the big project is a proper plug in system that allows building a Power Pack with stable functionality

Viktor_Papara · October 23, 2019, 7:59am

Thanks for the clarification! I’m running Powerpack 2 and noticed yesterday that I can’t follow Dynalist-internal links and Powerpack was the culprit.
Guess, I have to work without Powerpack for some time. I still have my fancy custom CSS, though.

Shida · October 23, 2019, 4:40pm

Since Piotr seems to be inactive, I could look into patching powerpack to keep it alive.

I didn’t realize people are still using Powerpack 2… Do we have a good idea how many people are using 2 vs 3?