When I showed my app to my friend and mentioned that it supports export in MD format, he immediately asked: “Markdown? What is it?”
I didn’t have time to explain back then, but the question stuck with me. So here’s my attempt to give a simple answer – and explain why Markdown became the format of choice for TrackLab.
The reason is quite simple. Before starting development, I tried to find out whether my theory would work or not. I used Obsidian for that purpose. Obsidian uses the MD format. That’s it.
That was for TL;DR lovers. Details below.
About Obsidian
Obsidian is a note-taking app that stores all your note-files locally in an open text format – Markdown. That means you always control your notes and can open them with any text editor.
About MD
But what is the MD format? It’s just plain text where you can use special symbols for formatting. For example:
# Header 1
## Header 2
**Bold text**, ==highlighted text==, *italic text*, ~~strikethrough text~~
- list item 1
- list item 2
> Here's some quote
- [x] task 1
- [ ] task 2The code above will look like this:
Pretty simple. Of course, you can create an MD file with a regular notepad, but to view it with formatting, you need some sort of MD viewer, like Obsidian.
MD is used a lot by developers for documentation, readme files, changelogs, and other purposes. It’s popular because of its simplicity for editing and tracking changes with Git. MD is also good for writers. They can focus on text with minimal formatting (headers, bold/italic text – what else do you need to write a book?).
Why it’s used in TrackLab
To check a theory, you don’t need to start development right away. First, you should try to collect data and make some calculations without an app. If you feel that it would work, then you can start coding.
So I just started to track my activity in MD files. I collected a lot of data, and I knew that one day I would import all the data I had into my app. That’s why the data needed to be in simple and open format. Also, I was already using Obsidian for my notes, so all my data was stored in one place.
It’s easy to create a table in MD:
| Header 1 | Header 2 |
| -------- | -------- |
| Cell 1 | Cell 2 |
| Cell 3 | Cell 4 |
That’s how was created the first table, where I tracked all my activities.
Alternatives
There are formats specializing in table-based data like Microsoft Excel’s xlsx or LibreOffice Calc’s odt, but they seem too heavy and hard to parse. Besides, I don’t need formulas or any of its functions.
How about CSV-like formats? They are also plain text, but on the contrary, they are too simple. I need to save some additional information like app version and date. I might need to add something else.
Future
For now, Markdown gives me the freedom to experiment quickly, but TrackLab will grow – and so will its data formats. For full backups (not only activities) I need something different.