A place for thinking through ideas

Your best thinking shouldn’t disappear into a notes app. Waypoint gives your ideas a place to grow, connect, and lead somewhere new.

Learn more about beta testing

What is Waypoint? Here’s the tl;dr

Waypoint is a Mac app for creating a collection of networked notes in the style of Zettelkasten. It distills the concepts of Zettelkasten into an easy-to-use form that removes a lot of the complexity many apps in this category tend to have. Use it to grow an interlinked body of knowledge that will help you in whatever it is that you’re studying or researching.

Every bit of it has been designed to get out of your way and be a joy to use. Things work out of the box without the need for customization.

Create notebooks on your Mac (they’re just Markdown files) or use the iCloud-based notebook for storing things you want automatically synced to your other Macs.

What makes it different

Notes connect to each other here in more than one way, giving you many ways to stumble upon seemingly unrelated ideas.

Subnotes

Write a note, then add subnotes beneath it, and subnotes beneath those. Subnotes relate ideas the way an outline does, but with one topic in front of you at a time. Use them to take an idea and expand on it, either right away or months later when something new occurs to you. Or, reorder them like a list and reorganize them into other subnotes like you would an outline or a folder tree.

Notes can go anywhere

Subnotes are just notes themselves that happen to appear in another note’s list of subnotes. A note can even appear in more than one list.

Waypoint makes it easy to navigate to any one of a note’s parent lists, so if you’re not sure if a note should go on one list or another, put it in both!

Every note has an address and can be linked

Like a page on the web, each note has its own unique address. Copy it, paste it into another note, and you have a link. An address belongs to a note for good: rewrite the note, file it somewhere else, and every link to it still lands.

Link to any other note right in your text, the way you’d link to a page on the web, but using a convenient wiki-style link format.

Backlinks

Every link works in both directions. A note shows what points at it as well as what it points to, whether that’s a subnote sitting above it or a mention in someone else’s text. Connections you made from one end are waiting for you when you arrive at the other.

Navigate like a browser

An address bar to go straight to a note, and back and forward through everywhere you’ve been. Jump from note to note by link, by tag, by date, or by filter.

Effortless Note Entry

A note is just text. There’s no title to invent, no filename to choose, and no folder to decide on before you’re allowed to write anything down. Have a quick idea? Hit ⌘N, type it and you’re done.

Tags work the same way. Type #brainstorming in the note itself and the app picks it up. No having to jump to a tag entry field while you’re writing to break up your flow.

Drag and drop, copy and paste

Dragging is how you organize notes and place files. Drag one note onto another to file it as a subnote, or drop it between two rows to put it at that spot in the list. The same gesture reorders subnotes that are already there. Copy and paste does the same jobs from the keyboard.

There’s also a side tray to park notes in while you’re rearranging things, and dragging a note into the editor makes a link to it.

Pictures and files, right in the note

Notes can embed images or other files in the text body itself or you can put them in a gallery to keep it out of the way, while still attaching them to the note.

Ways back to an old note

Waypoint offers many ways to stumble upon old notes.

• Tags. Filter to #reading and every book note you’ve ever tagged is in front of you.
• Dates. Filter by when notes were written, to walk back through a stretch of time instead of a topic.
• Search as you type. The list narrows with every character, so the whole notebook becomes the one note you meant.
• Shuffle. Your whole notebook in random order, reshuffled once a day, so you turn up old notes you weren’t looking for and wouldn’t have thought to search for.

The notebook itself

Files are first-class

Each notebook has an asset library holding the files its notes use. Each file has its own address, the way a note does, so a file is something you can link to and come back to, not just an attachment buried in one note.

Revisions

Previous versions of a note’s text are kept, so you can look back at what it used to say. A note you keep for years gets rewritten more than once, and none of those earlier drafts disappear.

Two ways to store your notes

You get one Personal Notebook, synced across your Macs through your own iCloud account. Nothing to configure, no separate account to sign up for, and no third-party service between you and your notes. That’s the one for the notes you’re keeping for the long run.

Everything else is a Project Notebook: a folder of plain Markdown files on your Mac, with no sync and no cloud involved at all. Have as many as you want, for projects and for anything you’d rather keep on your own machine. The files stay readable without the app, and your Personal Notebook can be exported to that same format whenever you like, so nothing is ever locked in.

Sharing a Notebook

If you want to share your ideas with someone else, you can use the app to create a shared copy that they can open up and read themselves using the app (minus your revision history). It’s just a zip file, so they can unzip the contents and view them using their favorite Markdown editor.

Beta Testing

Waypoint is Mac-only and in active development and I’m looking for beta testers to help find bugs and provide feedback. Beta access is limited: email me at support@ussher.ca to request TestFlight access. You’re welcome to join the Discord to discuss the app.

There’ll be a free tier with every feature in it, capped by how many notes a notebook holds, with enough room to find out whether it changes anything for you. Details on the pricing page. One-time payment only.