Bicycle For Your Mind
this is not a good idea
Abandoned Software and Lock In
An user called Skywatcher, in the OutlinerSoftware Forum posted the following question: Outliner Software About the survival of our Data ( when Apps die ).
He was a heavy user of iThoughts and was surprised by development on the product being terminated and the product being abandoned.
Let me try to address the question that is underlying his post: “…what might happen to the massive amount of data I have in various applications, especially Curio, Tinderbox, Devonthink and Obsidian.”
DEVONthink is safe. All of the data it collects is still available in its raw form. You will need to get into the package contents of the file it keeps all the data in, but it is there. All the documents, in their original form, are available to you if want to get to them.
Obsidian is almost future-proof. At the base of it are Markdown based text files. Obsidian also has Canvas files, which are text files but not Markdown. They are readable in any text editor but would require a significant amount of clean-up to be useful in some other application. But the documents in your files should be Markdown based text files which are lock-in proof. Incidentally, one of the main reasons I moved away from Obsidian is the Canvas introduction. That was a bridge too far away from Markdown for me. It is still a good Markdown based editor and it does wonderful things with Markdown but I didn’t want to introduce non-portable files to the mix.
I am not so sure about Curio. From my recall, Curio does some unique things and there is significant lock-in. It is a great program but I moved away from it only because it did things which were particular to it and I was not going to adopt that into my digital life. It does have a comprehensive export system. So you might be able to get your data out of it in a format useful to you. But it will not be as friction-less as you would like.
Tinderbox is a program which is unique in the marketplace. I am sure you can export some or all of the data out of it. However you can’t replicate the functionality of Tinderbox in any other program. It is the work of one major developer and I don’t know how sustainable it would be if Mark Bernstein, the developer, for some reason, decided to stop work on it.
iThoughts. I was sad to see its demise. I owned the application but I didn’t use it much. I think in lists and not in visual maps. So, mind-maps are not my thing. I use Scapple for that. It is a proprietary format but it has well implemented export functions. It is also not a particularly comprehensive mind-mapping program, so its ability to lock you in to it is minimal at best.
I would recommend Mermaid. You can use Mermaid documents in most text editors. BBEdit is a notable exception. VSCode, Zed, Vim, NeoVim, and Emacs all support Mermaid. It is a different language to learn and the experience of using it is different from a dedicated mind-mapping program. But it is widely supported and you are not dependent on the whims of a single developer.
The Broader Question
How do you avoid lock-in? How do you avoid depending on the large corporations? How do you avoid depending on the small individual developers who probably do the best work?
I ran into this problem with the launch of Microsoft Word 6.0. At launch it had a bug. If it found a funky font (or what it considered, a funky font), the program would get into a loop and not start for a long time (more than an hour, sometimes)1. I was in the middle of work and had a whole host of documents I suddenly had no access to. I had to reinstall the previous version and that got me thinking. Wanted to be independent of the reliance on one product to produce my work. That led me to text files and BBEdit. The writing got done in BBEdit and I used a plethora of other programs to make the work look pretty. I think PageMaker and in a little while, InDesign, became the programs in charge of that. The writing? That got done in BBEdit.
A little after that, I discovered Markdown and the fantastic plug-in for it written by Brett Terpstra for TextMate. I moved on to TextMate. Then it was Sublime Text. The cornerstone was Markdown based text files. There are countless editors which can deal with Markdown and text files. I was finally rid of the scourge of Microsoft Word.
The moral of this recounting of my history? Concentrate on the base format. Choose a format that is universal. In my case it is text files. Obsidian implements a kanban board. It is useful and beautiful. But at the core of it is text files. I love that. Obsidian can close down tomorrow and my files are still readable and available to me. They will not look as pretty, or be as useful for task management, but they are accessible and mine. The data in it is not dependent on Obsidian.
Another Example
I love outlines. I live in outlines. For the longest time I used OmniOutliner. Got scared when I noticed that the developer seemed to have lost interest in the product. It wasn’t getting as much attention from them. Scared the hell out of me. I moved on to TaskPaper.
I seem to try every outliner launched in the marketplace. It is one of my favorite categories of software. Now I use org-mode in Emacs. Org-mode is heavily reliant on Emacs for its goodness, but it is a text file. If I can’t run Emacs I can convert the org files to any format I want, thanks to Pandoc. I will lose functionality but the text files will contain everything that I wrote in it.
If you want to reduce your reliance on developers, big and small, you have to move your work on to formats which are not tied to them. You have to get rid of lock-in.
I am not saying that this is the easiest thing to do. Hell, it took me almost a year to get moderately comfortable in Emacs, which is a requisite for org-mode. But I am not worried. Emacs will outlive me. Even if it doesn’t, I will move back to Markdown and things will be fine. I will not have lost work. It is a text file.
Hole In My Argument
All the categories of software do not have an easy answer like the “use plain text” solution. For instance, I have no idea what to do about Excel. This is not a category which is relevant to my life. So, I am not the most versed in the nuances of Excel and its competitors. But if it was an important category to me, I would explore The 11 Best Free Microsoft Excel Alternative Programs in 2025.
There are large categories of specialized applications which are not easily avoided or replaced. Statistical software is a category which comes to mind. Although R The R Project for Statistical Computing is a good alternative. This might be true for a lot of categories of software. There is no easy solution to this problem.
Size of the Developer
I don’t think the answer is “stick to products from the large companies.” I don’t trust them. They are ultimately beholden to the shareholders and Wall Street. They don’t care about the users. We have enough data-points to make that axiomatic. Can’t rely on small developers. They do great work, but they are not reliable. Too many of them abandon their products, or sell them to other developers who have trouble continuing the development of the products they2 bought.
Use any product you like, make sure that you have a bailout plan. Make sure that the data is portable. It might not be as useful in some other program, but you will still have the contents of the files. Of course, in some cases, the process will entail rebuilding the functionality and features in some other program, and that is a huge pain. However, you are not going to lose all your work.
For me, with my focus on writing, the solution is “focus on the format.” Text formats are my focus. I don’t veer from that. That is my cure for the pitfalls of depending on a developer, big or small.
Conclusion
I don’t have an easy and simple solution to the problem that Skywatcher raises. I think text format is an answer that I have come up with for my own work. Universal formats might be the best solution for other categories. If you have a better solution, I am willing to listen.
macosxguru at the gmail thingie.
Notes: Thanks to Photo By: Kaboompics.com: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-woman-hammering-a-screw-6920086/