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Nottingham 3 is Now Available

I’m pleased to announce that Nottingham 3.0 was released two weeks ago. (I’m just now getting around to writing about it.) This is a brand new version that has been rewritten from the ground up, with a focus on speed and stability.

As many of you might have found out, Nottingham 2.0 does not run on macOS Sierra. The technical reason for this is that prior versions of Nottingham were built with Apple’s (now-defunct) garbage collection technology. It’s certainly possible I could have just converted the project to use ARC, but that wouldn’t have solved the stability and speed problems that have plagued the app from the beginning.

With large collections of notes, more than 1,000, the app could really bog down. Especially when searching. And double especially when using WikiLinks between your notes.

This new version has been tested from the very beginning with a corpus of 50,000 notes - each a few KB in size. And now that I’m using Sqlite directly as a storage engine, I’m able to take advantage of its full-text search capabilities. The result? Search results appear as fast as you can type.

It was also a lot of fun simply rewriting the app as it gave me a chance to dive deeper into the latest version of Swift than my other projects have thus far.

I believe in releasing early and releasing often. That said, I wanted to get this new version out as quickly as possible since users who upgraded to Sierra were stuck without a working app at all. To make that happen I had to cut a few features. Notably, Simplenote syncing and Markdown previews. I know that both of those features are very important to many of Nottingham’s customers. So they’ll definitely be returning in the coming weeks and month(s).

So, if you haven’t already, download the latest version of Nottingham and take it for a spin. I’d love any feedback you can offer.