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Comment by ptato | Hacker News Reader

The design is really cool, but the tool is useless (to me) if I can't use it offline and store the data on my own hardware. For some reason everyone in this space is building cloud tools!

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From https://help.kinopio.club/posts/how-your-data-is-stored/:

" Without an Account

Your user and spaces data lives entirely on your own computer, in your browser localStorage. Because it is not sent to a server, you can't share your spaces or access your spaces from another device.

If you clear your browser's cache and delete your cookies you will be removing your kinopio data.

To keep your data safe, share and collaborate, and edit your spaces from all your devices sign up for an account at any time.

With an Account

Your user and spaces data lives on both your own computer and on the kinopio servers.

You can safely clear your browser cache and cookies without losing any data. "

Working on a project in a similar space and the vast majority of people I have spoken to have said they don't care if it is in the cloud and find managing files on their devices to be a huge hassle. I think the Hacker News audience is a bit out of touch with the ways most people use their tools and devices.

I did say "to me"!

web apps can be totally offline via localstorage and some PWA APIs, it's just not widespreadely in use unfortunately

localStorage is nice but what I really love are files, in a folder, on my computer :D

localStorage is in a file, on your computer ;) For Firefox/Linux, it's in webappsstore.sqlite (guessing the same file exists for Windows/macOS too but can't verify, and Chrome probably have something similar).

Less fun: many "offline-capable" web apps that leverages PWA APIs/localStorage usually often allow you to download/upload a JSON representation of your data. I think I remember a graph drawing tool that allow you to do just that, but can't find a link to it right now.

It wouldn't have been draw.io / https://app.diagrams.net/, would it? I use that tool frequently, and loved that feature at a company where data couldn't be stored on external servers

in the case of Kinopio, you can also export your data to a JSON file. But I think the OP may be referring to something like obsidian where each document corresponds is an individual markdown file which is always up to date

You might wanna consider the file system access api on chromiums https://googlechromelabs.github.io/text-editor/ There is both a public and a private filesystem mode.

It's a hidden, opaque file. As far as I can tell, my browser doesn't tell me what its path is on my file system. That path and the file format could change with a browser update. Again, localStorage is nice, but this whole setup isn't comparable to a .pdf or whatever that I can have on my desktop.

capableweb isn't telling you how capable the web has become, see https://googlechromelabs.github.io/text-editor/

note: probably works best in chromium browsers

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