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Three Offline Desktop Wikis

Thursday, February 26, 2009

In a previous post titled The Personal Wiki, I espoused the benefits of using a wiki for keeping notes, ideas, tasks and whatever else comes to mind. Though I have traditionally used EditMe, my wiki of choice, for this purpose, I thought I’d give some of the many offline desktop wikis that are available for the sake of review. For 5 consecutive days each, I have used three different desktop wikis to gather input for this post.

Why use an offline wiki? There are benefits and drawbacks, and your individual usage patterns will dictate whether offline is appropriate for you. As I see it, the benefits of an offline wiki are:

• Speed - this is the biggest benefit as desktop software has a significant speed advantage over web based software that has to send and retrieve data over the network.
• Security & Privacy - you’re not sending your content over the Internet or storing it with a hosted service.
• Reliability - if your network goes down, your desktop wiki will still work just fine.

Of course, there are drawbacks as well:

• Portability - if you hop around between multiple computers, having your personal wiki data stored locally will make it inaccessible to other computers. There are work-arounds, like syncing your wiki file to the network or storing it on a network share, but these typically feel like more work than just using an online wiki.
• Collaboration - an offline desktop wiki won’t be available for viewing or contribution from anyone but you (or somebody else sitting at your computer.
• Integration - most online wikis provide easy integration with other online services, such as embedding your Google calendar or display content from your favorite RSS feed. None of the offline desktop wikis reviewed here can do that.

I did some research of offline desktop wikis before selecting three to include in my review. My criteria were such that many wikis that claim to be useful as personal wikis were disqualified:

• The wiki had to be simple to install, like a small desktop applications setup program. 1 minute, tops.
• The wiki could not require a web server, even if it included its own web server in the installation. Having to run a local web server complicates configuraiton and defeats many of the offline benefits.
• The wiki had to be free and open source.

With those qualifications in mind, I selected TiddlyWiki, WikidPad and Zim for my review. Here’s what I found.

TiddlyWiki/MPTW

TiddlyWiki is really in its own class of wiki software. Neither a hosted online wiki, nor desktop installed wiki - Tiddly is a stand-alone HTML file that contains all the HTML, JavaScript and CSS required to implement a wiki within your browser. You really have to use it to fully grasp this concept, but I’ll try to explain.

When you download Tiddly you get a zip file containing a single HTML file. You simply extract this HTML file, place it somewhere on your computer, say your Desktop, and open it up. Your browser will display the wiki and you can get started using it. Tiddly does not require any Internet connection, and in Firefox or Internet Explorer will automatically over-write itself with changes as you make them. I didn’t think this was technically possible, but apparently it is. (I have a TO DO to dig into the code that saves the wiki and see how they’ve done it.)

Another very peculiar aspect of Tiddly is that each “page” in the wiki is a section that gets stacked on top when you open it. This creates an ever-growing stack of pages, one on top of the other, as you browse through the site. I was not a fan of this behavior and didn’t see the utility of it. Though I didn’t try it, there is a plugin that claims to disable this feature to make Tiddly display pages more like a traditional wiki.

Tiddly uses wiki markup that loads into a simple text box when you edit a page. When you’re done editing you click a link and the text box is instantly replaced with an HTML rendering of the content. This traditional edit/view sequence is familiar to wiki authors, but doesn’t compare to the immediacy offered by the other two desktop wikis I reviewed, where the line between viewing and editing is blurred.

The attractive aspects of Tiddly are it’s extreme simplicity, the ability to synchronize your wiki with online services such as Tiddlyspot.com, and the thriving open source development community surrounding it. There are dozens of off-shoot projects that customize Tiddly and gear it towards specific uses. I actually tested Tiddly using MPTW, an offshoot project that bundles the standard Tiddly distribution with several popular plugins. Some are focussed on being task managers, some are note takers, some are just prettier and some, like MPTW, provide a customized “distribution”. The Tiddly community has build an impressive array of modules that can be added onto your little HTML file. It’s quite an ecosystem, and one that I look forward to exploring more.

At the end of the day, I don’t find myself using Tiddly reguarly because both of the next two products provide a more streamlined editing method than the two-step edit/save sequence found in web-based wikis.

wikidPad

wikidPad is a more traditional desktop wiki - an application that you run totally separate from your browser. The main wikidPad interface includes an index of pages in a right column that forms a tree as new pages are linked to and created. This is a nice way to navigate a wiki and one you don’t often see in online wikis. If you create a link to SomePage on the home page, SomePage becomes a child of the home page in the navigation tree. This panel can also be hidden from view so you can focus on the content and use contextual links to get around.

The content area provides two tabbed views: Edit and Preview. Edit provides a full size text area where wiki markup can be entered and edited. What’s really cool is that CamelCase words are linked as you type them, and you can follow links in the content without leaving the editor using a keyboard shortcut. The Preview tab shows the wiki content formatted and read-only like a web page. But the convenience of being able to both edit and browse within the Edit tab gave me little reason to switch to the Preview. The prettier read-only mode would be useful in situations with lots of browsing and just the occasional edit.

wikidPad stores its content in a binary database file, but does provide several nice export options.

I ended up thinking of wikidPad as a Notepad-like text editor that supports wiki links. If you use Notepad or a similar editor to jot notes and ideas down throughtout the day, WikidPad will add a new dimension with fast and keyb0ard-happy hypertext features.

Zim

Zim is another stand-alone desktop wiki. It has many of the same features as wikidPad, including a tree view, automatic page saving and automatic CamelCase linking. It has a few key differences, however that really make it stand-apart.

First, wiki content is stored in simple text files, one per page. This makes it automatically integrate with a desktop search tool like Google Desktop or Windows search, but probably isn’t as fast as wikidPad’s embedded database for very large data sets. Assuming this is being

Second, it has no separate wiki markup and formatted view. Instead, it formats the wiki markup as you type it. This is the closest thing to an inline editable web browser I’ve seen, and makes a huge difference. When creating bulleted lists, asterisks automatically become indented bullets, headings become big and bold, and the default font can be set to your choice of size and type.

A toolbar at the top can be configured to list a breadcrumb history, or a hierarchical path from the root. Both are handy for different purposes. And built-in support for to do lists with check boxes (using [], [v] and [x] respectively is welcome for use with personal task lists. And a calendar pop-up window allows one-click creation of journal pages attached to a specific date.

My only gripe with Zim (and the same goes for wikidPad) is that it’s written in Perk-GTK, so the interface isn’t native Windows. This means the window dressing has a dated feel and the file dialogs are a bit cloodgy. Also, the “Attach file” feature, which I thought might have a lot of potential, doesn’t seem to do anything at all.

A Welcome Improvement

At the end of the day, I’m still using Zim. It’s a great tool to jot down notes during phone calls, manage tasks for the current day, to do lists across ongoing projects, and general long term memory storage. I still use my online wikis for content that I need to access when away from my laptop or need to collaborate on with coworkers or clients, but the desktop wiki replaces the litter of text files in my c:temp folder, and that’s a welcome improvement.

I know there are more offline/desktop wiki tools out there, but three seemed like a good number to start with. Which do you use, and why?