Pivoting to Files

I've recently changed how I think applications should implement data storage: Applications should use the file system as data storage whenever possible.

This is a statement for myself and not to convince anyone: I don't have any wisdom or pragmatic reason on why this should be, it just feels better to me.

For example: I don't really like obsidian as an app, but I use it every day because its focus on files makes it very flexible and I can edit my data store in my VPS using text tools. I love things as an app, but it's impossible to use effectively outside of the mac / ios environment. I can write to my blog from a 35 year old computer because the tools I use to publish are based on simple files.

The only device I have that doesn't do that well is my phone, but I think that's a development choice rather than a platform constraint.

Moving forward I want to make my apps filesystem based. Captura already works that way, but there's no reason for Map, Do, and Ritmo to not use the filesystem as their main data source. iCloud sync is really handy to quickly roll out applications that sync data across devices, as long as they're apple devices.

I reckon I'll still be mostly targetting iOS and MacOS for the GUI apps I build, but I can at least make them interoperable with other tools by using simple well documented files.