Chrome notification re: Timimi

#41

In case anybody was wondering, I played with Obsidian and I like it. I also played with an HTML editor that I had ChatGPT create for me, thinking of my Giffmex materials. Neat, but would add a lot of tedious steps to writing.

I am going to do the following regarding TiddlyWiki:

  1. Keep using Timimi in Chrome until Chrome makes it impossible for me to keep using Timimi. Then,
  2. Use TiddlyStow in Chrome. If I find I am experiencing personal issues with TiddlyStow, like losing work too much because I keep forgetting to save, then,
  3. I will switch to Timimi in Firefox for as long as it’s supported. Then,
  4. Switch to Obsidian and a good HTML editor as last resort.

Hopefully in the meantime, you all will do what is really needed:

  1. Either figure out how to contact the Timimi person and convince him to update his Chrome extension, or
  2. Assign someone to reverse engineer Timimi and put out a Timimi clone that will work with Chrome.

Most of the other options you all listed are way beyond the time and patience needed for me to learn and adopt. Imagine Microsoft Word or Obsidian telling me I need to use the command prompt or a WebDAV server, whatever that is, to continue using their program! For many of you that would be a quick fix. But it won’t work for me.

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#42

I’m a new user of TiddlyStow as well and I’ve got the feeling that it works exactly like “TiddlyWiki apps” TiddlyDesktop and Tiddloid (for Android): whenever I click (v) after finishing to edit a tiddler, the whole single file wiki is saved back to disk. Am I wrong?

Most of the other options you all listed are way beyond the time and patience needed for me to learn and adopt.

IMHO this is more a matter of attitude and willingness to accept responsibility for own choices from multiple options, but YMMV.

#43

Well, I’ve very glad to hear that this hasn’t chased you away from TW altogether! You’re a very valued member of this community!

One more to consider trying out. The brand new Tiddlywki-app. I don’t know if it will turn into a well-maintained system, but it’s promising so far, running a Node Server in the background of a standalone wiki-viewing application.

I’m hoping you didn’t mean it that way, but this comes off very condescending. I know Dave has not been around as much in the past six months as he sometimes has, but he is a long-time member off this community, maintaining, among other things, the Tiddlywiki Toolmap and the Stroll Edition. His is a friendly, helpful voice on the forums.

If he finds that his skills and interests do not tend toward programming, it’s still great that TW can be there for him. My skill do tend that way, so I simply use the Node version for most serious work and I personally have never tried Timini. But if the tool he’s been using for years suddenly breaks (thanks, Google :frowning: ) and the community has no fix for it, he has a legitimate gripe. Of course, in an unpaid, open-source community, a fix has to interest someone who can perform it. If we don’t come up with something, it would be very sad to see Dave leave us.

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#44

https://ibnishak.github.io/digital-garden/?stackedPages=%2FNotes%20by%20Category&stackedPages=%2FNote%20taking%20and%20Workflows&stackedPages=%2FTiddlywiki%20-%20An%20exit%20interview&stackedPages=%2FTiddlywiki%20-%20Conclusion

From reading this part of @Riz post, what I understand is that he may continue to support Timimi. Hope he is seeing all these messages.

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#45

Indeed, one of the reasons I started writing the TiddlyWiki app was because I saw this post. I am quite disappointed that the official saving method for TiddlyWiki doesn’t have a perfect solution (at least for regular users). Even now, when I approach TiddlyWiki from a beginner’s perspective, I don’t have much patience to go through the website’s introduction. For newcomers, they just want to instantly find the download button and then understand what TiddlyWiki is through their own experience.

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#46

Hi guys

I am doing this by email because when I go to talk.tiddlywiki.org on my laptop it is showing me a several day old version of the thread and not letting me post. I am having trouble with Airbnb, too.

Is this site down for anyone else?

As for vuk’s comment, I don’t take offense. He doesn’t know my contributions to the community, or how they were hobbled together based on the participation of many others because I had a vision without the accompanying knowhow. And he is imagining that I have a lot more technical background than I do.

What the TiddlyWiki communiity needs to realize is that if I find it difficult to jump these hurdles, the average person will find them insurmountable. And these hurdles are at the point of entry. Something needs to be done to get TiddlyWiki to save changes easily without having to resort to command prompt or anything to do with Github. Not just for me, but so that TiddlyWiki doesn’t become an isolated walled community unto itself, irrelevant to the rest of the world.

Blessings

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#47

Dave - I have a private Manifest 3 version of Timimi that I’ve installed locally, probably built the same way that you updated it for yourself also? I think all that is needed to share it is an account with Google for serving the plugin to users. I’m not much of a Google person so don’t really know what is involved in that last leg. I’ll take a look tomorrow and see what is involved. We don’t want to lose Timini. Chris.

P.S My current go-to is my dev copy of Quine running on macOS - which is really not ready for prime-time - otherwise TiddlyDesktop.

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#48

I just reactivated Timini after Google deactivated it. It still works for now if you activate it.

#49

There is a fundamental tension between the design goals of TiddlyWiki and the nature of the Web.

A simple answer to the quote above, is “Well, just use Tiddlyhost.” And Tiddlyhost is wonderful, no doubt about it, even with the occasional instability lately. But the first two bullets on the first tiddler most new users see are these:

  • TiddlyWiki stores its data and code in a single HTML file, requiring no installs, no external dependencies, just a web browser
  • TiddlyWiki lets you choose where to keep your data, guaranteeing that in the decades to come you will still be able to use the notes you take today

(If you haven’t looked lately that first bullet is relatively new.)

“Wait, you say that, and then want me to store my data in some centralized service run by a single guy I’ve never met?”

Well, perhaps. That is probably the single easiest way for a brand-new user to try things out and maybe fall in love with the most feature rich tool of its kind. But this is definitely in conflict with the statements above. Partly it’s the centralized/decentralized tension, but it’s also the notion of needing to save a backup.

But all the savers out there are part of a larger conflict. Since JavaScript was introduced, there has been a pendulum over how to serve content over the web: depending more on the server or more on the client. It feels to me as if the last three or four years has seen a push back to the server, after a long stretch of single-page apps on the client. Swinging along with this pendulum is the question of just how much browsers should be allowed to do. TiddlyWiki’s notion of saving the current wiki on the user’s machine is often in tension with the Web’s Security constraints.

Most of the other tools out there don’t try this, serving content instead from server-side databases. They won’t have a Firefapocalypse (sp?) when a browser changes the rules that had allowed their saving mechanism. When Chrome decides that they need to update a specification in order to restrict the ad-blockers cutting into their profit, these other tools are less likely to break.

But the security concerns that often stymie TiddlyWiki are not imaginary. Allowing the user to easily save web content is an invitation to malware. So Tiddlywiki’s saving mechanisms have had to adapt over the years, as the Web community decides that certain mechanisms are unsafe. This latest one sounds more like Chrome trying to restrict ad-blockers, but it’s likely of similar effect.

The good thing, as @Quine mentioned, and as discussed in a Timini issue, is that this can easily be patched. But it would be great if someone who understands the code would be willing to take over as maintainer, if Riz is no longer interested. @YakovL, might that be you?

I’m having no such issue. With Airbnb as well, I’m guessing this is something local to you.

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#50

Is it hard to compile that extension? Like do you just have to install Go and then run a command line to put the package together? It’s been 7 months without a response from Riz, so that’s not a good sign. Being able to offer and test a new extension offline (I mean not from the Google extension store) would be a good first step forward.

#51

I don’t know. I’ve never used golang, and there is nothing obvious like a make file, package.json, pom.xml, etc. to make it clear what needs to be built and how. It may be clear to a golang user.

#52

Sorry, I meant it to be an open question for anyone.

But looking at the code, only the executable is in Golang. And hopefully the existing executable will work until MS adds some security feature.

#53

On Linux, with Google Chrome, it was only moderately difficult to load the manifest 3 changes from FSpark in the browsers’ developer mode.

There is actually nothing to compile for the extension. You just tell it to load the directory with the files that make up the extension.

There was one bit I had to do by hand, which the installer didn’t do for me. I don’t know if that has something to do with manifest 3, or if the installer wouldn’t overwrite the old setting from Manifest 2.

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#54

Well, difficult to say, although I now have some experience with Go, maintaining Timimi requires also some fundamental discussions, i.e. standandazing the event-based saving so that it can be implemented in TWC, and is extendable (for handling various cases of the saving itself, and also saving other files, including images, plus security topics). I’ve tried to start such a discussion, but didn’t get much attention/help. Currently, my preferred savers are MainTiddlySaver and the ContinuousSavingPlugin as a fallback (uses window.showOpenFilePicker and window.showSaveFilePicker, those looking for a way to save in Chrome may be interested in implementing a similar saver for TW5), and MTS is solid, i.e. won’t be hurt by further security restrictions (again, if we had a standart of IO interfaces, I could extend it to support TW5 as well). If I maintained Timimi, I’d probably rewrite it with Node.js, to allow more community members to collaborate on it. These days I’m focused on launching my own product, and it would be much more convenient for me to consult and help rather than be the maintainer of the Timimi successor.

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#55

One of the selling points on the Timini home page is how much faster it is because its written in Go. I have no experience, and little interest in the language. I do wonder how much of the extra speed is noticeable to end users, but I’m not a user of these tools, so I have little to offer.

OK. I only asked as yours was a name I recognized among the Timini contributors. I didn’t dig in to see whether that was one PR fixing a typo or months of active collaboration on major features.

Good luck on launching your product!

#56

I realized a while back that Timimi is a surprisingly complex piece of software to support and maintain, and that unless more maintainers joined the effort, it’s just a matter of time before it’s not usable anymore.

(I think we can say that it has been abandoned, since the last commit was June 2022, despite some apparent and not too hard to solve problems for Snap and Apple Silicon.)

As I understand it, Timimi consists of:

  1. A (built-in) TiddlyWiki saver plugin
  2. A Chrome extension
  3. A Firefox extension
  4. A binary, cross-platform host application that should work on and be compiled to Windows, MacOS and Linux
  5. A Linux installer
  6. A Windows installer for Chrome
  7. A Windows installer for Firefox (registers timimi.exe in the Registry in a different place)

The extensions must be updated when browsers require changes, and the installers and binaries when the different OSes etc change their requirements and assumptions.

Currently, the Manifest debacle should probably be prioritized, then a new Snap-compatible installer and an installer for Mac OS (maybe just Apple Silicon, I don’t know).

Are you as a community up for the challenge? :wink:

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#57

I’m not sure about the protocol here.

@FSpark Is it ok with you if I produce a side-loadable extension here based on your manifest-3 work ?

Backgrounder: Extensions can be side-loaded in Chrome’s developer mode (you just slide a switch to turn on the mode). This is how @buggyj distributes TiddlyClip, for instance. In the case of Timimi, there are additional tweaks to your system that have to be made.

For an extension to be available on the Chrome extension store, someone will have to register as a Chrome developer. Last time I checked this was $25 – a real bargain compared to apple, BTW. But extensions can also be side-loaded locally, though the intention was testing for development.

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#58

re: timimi on apple silicon, you’ve probably already tried Timimi extension not getting access to local TiddlyWiki (macOS Sonoma; Apple Silicon; Chrome 120.0.6099.129) · Issue #94 · ibnishak/Timimi · GitHub

is there something else that is not working on apple silicon?

#59

Of course, I mentioned it before in this post.

#60

Thank you very much!

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