HN user
Working on markwhen & markwhen.com
rob@markwhen.com
Worth it! Easily one of the first things I install on a new mac. I have three finger swipe left/right to switch between tabs, three finger swipe down to close tabs (chrome, vs code, xcode, finder, anything that has tabs), and four finger swipe to go between spaces without animation.
What I don't quite understand is why we haven't merely come to the conclusion that, like everything else, the internet costs money. Running servers and services costs money, and by giving it away for "free" from the get-go encases certain types of problems in the platform itself. I'm not talking about paying your ISP, I'm talking about accessing websites.
I guess what I'm getting at is that there is no cost to making a request over the internet. Why not? Why doesn't every http request have a corresponding price associated with it? You can access the resource if you pay. I imagine this would be a minuscule amount ($0.00001 or less per request). Then, instead of trying to solve for monetizing eyeballs or personal data, these problems are solved with economics.
Waste it how? By spending it? By participating in the economy? Thereby turning it into someone else's income?
I'm reminded of the story of the Air Force designing cockpits for the "average" pilot, only to find that
out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions [0]
Surely, there are so many employees in general that probationary employees aren't needed. And surely, most government employees don't need to purchase things on a daily basis, so we can inhibit their credit card use. And most contracts about XYZ aren't crucial, so we can cancel them.
But, my goodness, there is so much nuance and breadth to the things a government does, let alone the government that is responsible for the largest military and that props up a big part of the world economy, that compounding these rash decisions will have far-reaching and serious blowback. I'm all about efficiency, but why be stupid about it?
The plane that we're all on is being dismantled midair, the engines have been turned off, and we're just gliding now. Gliding or falling, anyway
[0] https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...
https://docs.markwhen.com/syntax/dates-and-ranges.html#relat...
It doesn't look at task completion but you can base events on other events
Just edited the example so it looks like a span, thanks for the feedback!
Creator here - glad to see people like markwhen!
Been working on markwhen for a few years now, originally inspired by cheeaun's life timeline that another commenter posted about.
At this point markwhen is available as a VS Code extension, Obsidian plugin, CLI tool, and web editor in Meridiem.
Some recent markwhen developments:
- Dial, a fork of bolt.new (Stackblitz's very cool tool that leverages AI to help quickly scaffold web projects): an in-browser editor that lets you edit existing markwhen visualizations like the timeline or calendar or make your own. I just released that yesterday so it's still rough but I have big plans for it (it's one of the visualizations in meridiem)
- Event properties: each entry can have it's own "frontmatter" in the form of `key: value` pairs. I wanted this as I'm aiming for more iCal interoperability in the future, so each event could theoretically have things like "attendees" or google calendar ids or other metadata. This was released in the last month or two.
- remark.ing: this one isn't ready yet by any means but it's like a twitter/bluesky/mastodon-esque aggregated blog site. So you write markwhen and each entry is a post. In this way "scheduling" a post is just writing a future date next to it, and you have all your blog in one file. This one is a major WIP
Yes they fixed it, thank goodness! I will continue to think it was because of this article.
I want to be able to type instead of clicking on letters
There’s a CLI [0] that outputs html, alternatively you can encode the markwhen text as base64 and append it as a hash to timeline.markwhen.com which will render it. Would look like timeline.markwhen.com#mw=[base64 encoded text]
Thanks for the shoutout, glad you like it!
Also available for VS code[0] and Obsidian[1]
[0] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Markwhen...
The creator of this (Chee Aun) is quite prolific and creative with their work (https://cheeaun.com/projects/).
They created https://cheeaun.life, a timeline of their life, more than 10 years ago (which looks to be kept up to date), which was my inspiration for markwhen (https://markwhen.com).
Looks like markwhen[0]. When making it, which initially started out as a strictly timeline-making tool, I realized it is essentially a log or journal language - write a date, any date, and add some stuff to it. Good for notes, blogging, a calendar, etc etc.
Takes a bit to load but looks straightforward and useful!
This looks about like what I want! I may give it a go...
I really can't believe there doesn't exist a good "home box."
There should be a product that you can buy (a computer) that you bring home, plug in, set up via your phone or computer that:
- can host websites
- can store your files and sync them to other devices
- control your home automation
- host your email
- anything else you might otherwise put on a server
And does it all EASILY with a simple phone or web UI.
Yes I know you can actually buy a computer or server or raspberry pi and put something like NextCloud or Home Assistant et al. on it, but the real barrier imo is the setup and configuration. Even I don't do all this because it seems daunting to configure all of it, and I consider myself a pretty technical person. I really just want to buy a box, plug it in, and like select which apps I want to use, and then it starts working for me.
Reddit and Craigslist remain incredibly useful and valuable precisely because their software remains frozen in time
Craigslist, sure, but Reddit has fallen off a cliff in terms of content quality since the whole API/3rd party apps debacle. More confirmation of the author's point, I suppose - valuing the marginal user and a broader base over what's already there.
According to this[0], oneview is the #5 top dead show hn.
[0] https://nami.land/2023/06/11/track-hn-analyze-survival-rate-...
Thank you for the candid feedback.
on iPad the UI is extremely unintuitive and/or broken
The benefit of the desktop is being able to hover over buttons, most have tooltips with descriptions. This is not an excuse necessarily but I would liken it to landing on github.dev or vscode.dev without having seen or used VS code before. I really hate walkthroughs with tooltips (both as a user and a developer) but maybe I'll have to do something like that. What I do like about the current UI is that, by keeping control elements on the side and tabs on the bottom, I can have a consistent experience across devices and screen sizes.
Drawing more attention to the fact that there is a tabbed interface might help, seems like that was an issue.
Re: markwhen's syntax - I'll tell you what I like about it first, and then get into some of your points. I like that it is quite progressive. You don't need a header to start, nor groups, nor ranges necessarily, and you shouldn't have to think much about date formatting.
``` 1 Aug 2023: hi ``` is a valid markwhen document. If a list of dates like that is all you need, that's great. If you need ranges you can add ranges. Need groups, add groups. Need metadata, add a header. I like that it follows a new user's experience, you don't necessarily have to start with everything from the beginning.
On groups and sections, people wanted nesting, soooo the simple hashtag syntax wasn't going to work without an end hashtag or something. So it doesn't mean nothing, it means the end of the group or section. Idk, I'm open to suggestions about it. I personally don't use nested groups and sections that much but people wanted it. There has to be some endGroup or endSection syntax I think, even if it's not those specific words
The CLI[0] outputs html in one self-contained file
What’s broken? I think it’s less intuitive on mobile especially for a new user but it definitely shouldn’t be “completely broken”
Ah yikes that’s a missed opportunity on my part. It’s https://re.markwhen.com and it’s slightly broken at the moment. Basically it turns markwhen into a blog, each entry is an event. Only entries that are before the current time show up.
You just add ‘re:’ in the header of a shared markwhen and (when I fix it) it shows up as re.markwhen.com/[your username]
The viewer is open source[0], so yeah you can embed it in an iframe (that's what the editor does), and just `postMessage` the parsed markwhen and some additional state to it. The structure of the posted data is here[1]. I'm happy to help, rob@markwhen.com or I'm in the markwhen discord[2]
[0] https://github.com/mark-when/timeline
[1] https://github.com/mark-when/view-client/blob/9eddc1a2cf79b4...
Ah that's so wonderful to hear! I'm glad it's working for you!
I haven't used org mode. I should probably look into it. If you know how it compares, though, I'm all ears. Always looking to improve.
The pricing structure I'm going for is offline == free, online/collaborate == paid.
There's a promo code on the most recent blog entry (https://blog.markwhen.com) for those who are interested
Oh :/ Even after zooming in? Or zooming in doesn’t work?
I’ve had a lot of these thoughts when working on markwhen. It’s basically turning into a calendar and planning IDE, pretty excited about where it’s heading.
https://markwhen.com maybe? Might be too manual for their use case though
Sounds like you might be writing markwhen (though it expects a colon after each date or date range)