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I struggle to convince myself that I’d find a lot of use for this. For context, I run a few TiddlyWikis (one main one, plus a few experimental ones) and use them regularly. I love the concepts behind TiddlyWiki, and consider it without equal as a super-powered (personal) documentation system. It’s the mobile app bit I find myself doubting (iOS or otherwise) - reasons given at point 7.
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My main TiddlyWiki use is as a personal documentation system for all kinds of things I learn, discover and achieve, and wish to be able to review and come back to indefinitely. I’ve also explored using it as a more structured cataloging / “database” system, which implementation is fantastically promising, and only limited by my own lack of wiki-skills.
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Hard to answer given my uncertainty about whether I’d actually use it. I currently run TW (nodeJS) on my home-server, which is externally accessible. So in a way, I already have access on all devices. But I almost never access/use from my iOS devices.
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The main thing I can think of (assuming I was to use a TW app) would be the device-specific advantages one might obtain. For example, the facility to take a photo on my phone camera and add it directly to a chosen tiddler.
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I err quite hard towards the world of FOSS tools. But I’m happy to pay for useful tools either as a voluntary contribution (e.g. openstreetmap.org - extremely useful, high value community driven project), or that extend of FOSS service I use in a valuable way (e.g. I run my own audibookshelf.org server - I recently paid for the app Plappa as a well built iOS client for accessing my server).
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Much prefer upfront pricing
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My doubts about an iOS (mobile) TW app fit into two main categories:
i) very much in agreement with @Springer, usability would be a huge concern for me on any kind of touchscreen device, and doubly so on a phone-sized device. It’s not just the normal plain text entry, but of course wikitext makes heavy use of various punctuation symbols which would make it an immediate write-off (for me) on anything less than a full physical keyboard. Editing one’s errors (copious in my case) without a mouse / track-pad / arrow keys for details cursor manipulation would add a whole other level of stress.
For me, these considerations would seem to suggest that app-based use would be largely limited to retrieval / review of existing wiki content, rather than generation.
Even then, on a phone sized device I think I’d personally get limited value. As mentioned above, I self-host my wikis and can access them from any browser. I almost never do so through my phone. The interface simply isn’t sufficiently optimised to give a good user experience on a small screen.
ii) my second doubt comes specifically when I extrapolate my mind to the new TW user. I think for a lot of people looking for a note-taking / journaling app, if they downloaded the TW app and were simply presented with the current Empty - Getting Started TW, the required learning curve might be substantially too steep. As we all know, part of the power and the beauty of TW as it currently exist is that one can use it as a “platform” to build a system meeting one’s own requirements. But this is a non-trivial journey, and from the viewpoint of someone downloading an app to “see if it’s any good”, I can see this being a very difficult hurdle to clear.
Perhaps this might be eased through the inclusion of a more “complete” starter wiki for new users - something a novice user can “get the idea of” and start using within the first couple of minutes of trying the app.
Having said all that, I’d be very happy to see myself proved wrong, and see a TW app take off and become mainstream - will be watching this space with interest!
