About
Summary
UhlittleLessDum is an open source, forever free note taking framework that generates an entire academic/stem focused note taking application based on a user's configuration file. The configuration allows for the user's application to be extended with incredible ease by anyone familiar with React, Node, or even just Css.
The Inspiration
After studying physics and astrophysics in college, I decided against a PhD. I instead went to work in software, and had a fairly successful career before I stumbled upon an assumption made by Einstein that made much more sense before some of our more recent discoveries. I spent the next few weeks thinking about this assumption to no end, until I finally developed the initial pieces of a model that can remedy this assumption with our more recent discoveries.
After I had these initial pieces in place, I knew that this model could lead somewhere. I quit my job and become homeless in the process so I could focus solely on this model. Over the course of this pursuit, I became increasingly frustrated with existing note taking options. I needed something that could:
UhlittleLessDum is an open source, forever free note taking framework that generates an entire academic/stem focused note taking application based on a user's configuration file. The configuration allows for the user's application to be extended with incredible ease by anyone familiar with React, Node, or even just Css.
The Inspiration
After studying physics and astrophysics in college, I decided against a PhD. I instead went to work in software, and had a fairly successful career before I stumbled upon an assumption made by Einstein that made much more sense before some of our more recent discoveries. I spent the next few weeks thinking about this assumption to no end, until I finally developed the initial pieces of a model that can remedy this assumption with our more recent discoveries.
After I had these initial pieces in place, I knew that this model could lead somewhere. I quit my job and become homeless in the process so I could focus solely on this model. Over the course of this pursuit, I became increasingly frustrated with existing note taking options. I needed something that could:
- Display interactive plots directly in my notes
- The ability to display media within my notes, including videos of college lectures, PDFs of the latest research and images of my own hand written notes.
- Had great search and organization features
- Had an integrated bibliography manager, and ideally integrated this bibliography into the app's search functionality
- Supported interactive code in a Jupyter like manner
- Allows me to organize dozens of notes into a single stream of thought through tags, embedding and creating lists and categories.
- Could help me organize equations and snippets, and ideally could search based on equations that appear in my notes.
- The ability to interact with many of the components embedded in my notes through time stamp links to specific videos, search functionality within the bibliography manager, the ability to search based on equations with support for adding more detailed data including code snippets directly to equations, and more.
- Was based on Markdown, a syntax simple enough that anyone can learn it in 15 minutes while remaining incredibly human readable.
After giving up on existing note taking options that all failed to include most of these features into a single option, I started to build my own. It was initially a personal project that I used to support my own research, but as it grew and grew to support all of the above features and more, I decided to rework this application into a complete framework that can be automatically generated based on a user's configuration file.
While the first, very, very early beta of this application worked flawlessly, there were still many improvements I could make to the build script. As of the end of December, I'm in the final week of this build rewrite in Go with a much improved user experience, and I'm now hoping to release this app to the public as a free, open source tool for students, researchers, those that are self studying, and just those that want a note taking app that can support much more than
How you can help
Your support for this application will help this free tool grow to include an accompanying mobile application and peer-to-peer collaboration, but most importantly, it will expose this application to more users.