Welcome to Laminar Notes!

Hello world! I'm Andrew, and I made this website and app, called Laminar Notes. Thanks for coming to see it. The best way to see what it's about is to try the demo.

Laminar Notes grew out of my attempts to build a virtual index card app. Index cards are a nice way to survey, re-arrange, and add to your ideas or information. But either packing them up or leaving them laid out on the floor is a pain before long. Computers exist to make this kind of thing easier. I built a simple desktop app called GraphPaper to scratch the itch, including the feature of making connections between notes, corkboard-and-string style, but re-arranging them was still cumbersome. I also tried several of the various outliner and mindmap programs, and liked their nested information structure, but I found them too rigid.

Meanwhile, I was learning about ZUIs, or Zooming User Interfaces. These are an old but underused UI concept, where information is laid out in 2D space and you control how much detail you see, and where, by "zooming" in or out of that space. They're especially good for looking at hierarchical information, like you find in an outliner program. Eventually I had the idea of a nested ZUI note card system, that does some of the layout management by clustering cards next to each other. The initial design for Laminar Notes was born.

Personally, I've always had more ideas than I knew what to do with. I was full of stories from my earliest memories (a lot of which was, in modern parlance, more worldbuilding than story, but give me a break, I was three). Today, I write scifi and fantasy for fun and hope to get something published someday. The programming bug bit me around age twelve, and before long I was full of ideas about that too. Tools for managing ideas always fascinated me, from clever use of paper and diagrams to advanced software tools.

The other major motive for Laminar Notes, one that strongly shapes how I do things here, is independence. Personal financial independence, so I can work on interesting things, maybe crazy things. Independence from corporate structures, so I can focus on good choices rather than just profitable ones. Some of those good, less-profitable decisions are things like having a simple, unexploitative business model. I only charge you for things that actually cost my business money. I'm not promising to never have ads, but I'm hoping to avoid them (and I am promising to never have ads for paying subscribers, forget that noise). You probably want to be independent from me, too; it's still on the roadmap, but I'm going to let you export your data whenever you want, in as many formats as I can feasibly support (org-mode here we come). I'm hoping to make Laminar Notes work long-term as a small business.

One of the reasons Laminar Notes is not going anywhere is that I use it daily. I've been dogfooding Laminar Notes for a couple years now. I've fixed a lot of issues this way, and stored a bunch more in the big nested note in the app where I store Laminar Notes-related stuff. My grocery list, lots of story ideas (including a work-in-progress novel outline), notes on books I've read, and random cool phrases that came to me in dreams (literally and metaphorically) all share the same space.

There's still a lot of work to do. I want to build a more intuitive and fluid UI. I want more flexibility to put ideas where you want them. There is some low-hanging fruit, some really high-up fruit, and some fruit hanging from enticingly climbable but precarious branches. I'll have to think carefully about those. Whatever happens, the app is going to keep getting better, and hopefully help you do more with your ideas and dreams. Thanks for reading, and I'll see you around!

You can follow Laminar Notes on BlueSky, if you're into that kind of thing.