Joplin is looking into joining Google Summer of Code next summer. The application period as organisation is expected to happen in the second half of January 2020. Until then Joplin hopes to have multiple active discussion and may even have some easy commits in regard to the application and potential projects.

For those who don’t know, GSoC is a summer internship sponsored by Google, where open source organisations get full-time students as interns (paid by Google) to help take care of tasks. It’s a huge boon to many open source projects, allowing potentially some impressive progress to take place, and therefore many organisations try to qualify.

In order to apply, we'd need:

• A list of good task suggestions for students. These tasks need to be things that can be realistically done by someone working full-time over a single summer. Students can suggest other tasks, but we are going to provide some suggestions.
• People volunteering to mentor a student. Mentoring requires continuous communication and contact with the student, as well as responding to requests and questions. I’ve mentored in the past, and it’s a fun experience.

Fell free to make a suggestion or offer support by creating topics in the Features category of the forum and tagging them by #GSoC and #2020, if it is directly related to the upcoming coding season. More details on how to contribute will be published soon.

In general, Google wants to know that its money is put to good use, so we, as the Joplin community, need to show active involvement in this, leading to a solid schedule of desired deliverables during the coding phase.

The GSoC application is managed by @PackElend. He is an open source enthusiast with a big believe in a fair economy. He has recognised that Joplin has the potential to become one of the best note taking apps, and he sees the GSoC has a great opportunity to bring certain essential features to Joplin. PackElend mentored students in the past for another project and thus is aware of the pitfalls. He would appreciate if he could get support in giving the documentation the final touch.

After much discussion and votes and new logo and icon for Joplin has finally been decided:

In the end, it is an icon relatively similar to the previous one but with a unique style for the "J", which gives it a distinctive look.

Perhaps that's the best way - evolving and cleaning up the icon rather than radically changing it. Another advantage of this icon is that it does not represent any specific object (it's not a note, or notebook), so it does not restrict the scope of the project, which as it grows, is becoming more than just a tool to take notes.

Finally, this icon scales well at different sizes, including down to 16x16 pixels which we need for tray icons. It also works well inside circles (for Android) and square shapes.

Over the next few weeks, the icon and logo will be updated in the various apps and websites. That will give an opportunity to refresh the icons used throughout the apps, as several of them have incorrect dimensions, in particular on desktop and Android.

For information, this was the final tally, with Patreon and forum votes combined, with more weight (2 points) given to the first choice:

A 30

B 45

C 115

D 135

E 61

Many thanks to everyone who's contributed to the votes and discussion!

We got lots of great contributions for Hacktoberfest 2019, including:

• 48 pull requests opened
• 39 pull requests merged

This year, one small issue is that we got 11 "spam" contributions, as in pull requests that are created only as a way to get a the Hacktoberfest T-shirt. It's not too many, thankfully, but it still makes us lose time as we need to review the code, and sometimes ask questions, to which we get no answer, etc.

On the other hand, the total number of valid pull requests is high, at 48 it's nearly twice as many as last year (we got 26 in 2018).  Many of these are great improvements to Joplin and they will be part of the coming release.

Thanks a lot to all the contributors! Also many thanks to our admins, tessus, for his valuable help reviewing and commenting on many pull requests, and foxmask for organising the event.

The quest for a new Joplin icon continue - first many thanks for the votes and feedback! It definitely helped getting a better sense of what would make a great icon.

Taking all this into account, the remaining candidates are the 5 following icons. The first three were the top voted icons, and the following two are based on the feedback here and on the forum.

Again that would be great if you could vote for your top 2 icons. I expect the winner among these will be the next Joplin icon. Also of course general feedback is welcome too!

The next version of Joplin will feature support for chemical equations using mhchem for Katex.

For example this mhchem syntax will be rendered as below in Joplin:

$\ce{CO2 + C -> 2 CO}$

///BLOCK_QUOTE_END//////BLOCK_QUOTE_START///

$C_p[\ce{H2O(l)}] = \pu{75.3 J // mol K}$

///BLOCK_QUOTE_END//////BLOCK_QUOTE_START///

$\ce{Hg^2+ ->[I-] HgI2 ->[I-][Hg^{II}I4]^2-}$

A word form @foxmask, our community manager!

Hacktoberfest is back this year again for our great pleasure ^^

here are the rules to participate:

To qualify for the official limited edition Hacktoberfest shirt, you must register and make four pull requests (PRs) between October 1-31 (in any time zone). PRs can be made to any public repo on GitHub, not only the ones with issues labeled Hacktoberfest. This year, the first 50,000 participants who successfully complete the challenge will earn a T-shirt.

To participate go to https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/, log in (with you GitHub account) and you are ready to get in.

Next, go dive into the Joplin issues list labelled "Hacktoberfest".

Start hacking, submit the PR from the 1st of October, not before.

We hope you will enjoy that event this year again like the previous one  🎃 🎉

PS: the 4 Pull Request don’t have to be done only on Joplin project, those can be done on any FOSS projects. Even PR for issue not tagged as 'hacktoberfest'

The Joplin icon is going to change soon. The one we have now is something I put together quickly, not knowing if the project would interest someone, so I didn't want to spend too much time on it. Now that the project is more mature, it makes sense to start improving the visuals - first the icon, then the logo font, the website and finally the app UI (although these have already been improved little by little over the past year).

Before picking an icon, I'd be interested to hear about your feedback and whether you have a preference among those below. They all share the same idea - which is something that looks like a note, and that contains a "J" too.

Feedback is welcome! And if you have a preference please answer this post and put your top 2 or 3 icons in your post and we'll do a tally in a few days.

Icon A

Icon B

Icon C

Icon D

Icon E

Icon F

Icon G

Icon H

Fountain is markup language for screenwriting. Similar to Markdown, it is a lightweight markup format, which allows editing screenplays in plain text.

The desktop and mobile Joplin applications now support Fountain, allowing you to write and read your screenplays on your computer or on the go. To add a Fountain screenplay to a note simply wrap it into a fenced block, with the "fountain" identifier. For example:

\*\*FADE IN:\*\*

A RIVER.

We're underwater, watching a fat catfish swim along.  

For example, here is Big Fish on mobile:

and on desktop:

In Joplin desktop, it has been possible to customise the appearance of your notes using CSS for quite some time.

An issue however is that it is difficult to know what CSS to write and how to select specific elements with CSS. The development tools that were just added allow figuring this out. They are available under the menu Help > Toggle development tools.

Then, from the "Elements" tab, it is possible to select an element and view the corresponding HTML as well as styles. It is also possible to modify the style in real time and view the changes before adding them to userstyle.css.

One issue that came up frequently in the forum is that Joplin's data can be very large, especially when the note collection includes many attachments (images, PDFs, etc.). This happens in particular when using the web clipper a lot, as each web page usually has many images included.

The recent versions of Joplin (Desktop, mobile and CLI) attempt to mitigate this issue by providing an option to change how attachments are downloaded during synchronisation.

The default option is to download all the attachments, all the time, so that the data is available even when the device is offline. However, more importantly, there's now the option to download the attachments manually, by clicking on it, or automatically, in which case the attachments are downloaded only when a note is opened.

These changes should help saving disk space and network bandwidth, especially on mobile.