PodNotes — Markdown Notes with Encrypted Pods

An ANU Software Innovation Institute demo project for Solid Pods.

Authors: Anushka Vidanage, Graham Williams, Jessica Moore

License: GNU GPL V3

Introduction

The podnotes app is an example of a Solid Pods app written in Flutter to read, write, and share encrypted notes stored on your personal online data store (Pod) hosted on a Solid Server. Since you control where your notes (in standard Markdown) are stored, other apps can also interact with your notes. You maintain full control over your data, not the app developer collecting and hoarding your data.

This first beta release (version 0.1.0) is functional and usable. Use cases include writing quick notes while on the move to come back to later on, capturing shopping lists that can be shared with your family and called up the next time anyone of the family is at the shops, and much more.

The current podnotes code base includes a lot of low level code that is being migrated to the solidpod package for Flutter. Once migrated it will be even easier to build your first Pods-based Flutter app.

Shopping List

Obtaining a Pod

To use the app you will need your own Pod hosted on a Solid server. To try it out you can get yourself a Pod at our experimental server, the Australian Solid Community Pod Server or any one of the available Pod Providers world wide.

Online Demo

Once you have your own Pod visit https://podnotes.solidcommunity.au and login to your Pod. Write and save a few notes, edit saved notes, and maybe share some notes with other users. That's it! Simple but useful.

Install the App Locally

You can install the app onto your own device using one of our installers. The app will then run locally on your own device rather than hosted on a web server. The installers are available for all platforms from <a href="https://github.com/anusii/podnotes/tree/main/installers">github. The installers we make available are ready to run executable files or else operating system specific installation packages. Stay tuned for links to repository distribution.

App Startup

On starting up the app you will see the login screen where a user's WebID is to be entered. Your login will be remembered through the browser for future app activity.

On clicking the Login button your browser will popup to authenticate you on the Solid server of choice, not on the device. The device does not get to know your login details.

Install Flutter and Podnotes

You can run the app directly from its source yourself with a little setup. You could then also modify the app to suit your own needs, or to add functionality that you may like to contribute back to the community.

Begin with the Flutter Dev instructions to install flutter for your preferred platform at Flutter Dev Getting Started

After setup, run flutter doctor to check your setup, and flutter devices to see which devices you have configured, with the device name in the 2nd column

flutter devices
Found 4 connected devices:
  iPhone 15 Pro Max (mobile)      • 8978937B-AC64-44B8-8B26-CA6142091678 • ios            • com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimRuntime.iOS-17-0 (simulator)
  iPad (10th generation) (mobile) • 6B849753-743F-4F66-8F46-0396CA4BCFBE • ios            • com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimRuntime.iOS-17-0 (simulator)
  macOS (desktop)                 • macos                                • darwin-arm64   • macOS 14.1.2 23B92 darwin-arm64
  Chrome (web)                    • chrome                               • web-javascript • Google Chrome 120.0.6099.62

Then git clone the podnotes repository from github.

Run the podnotes app in debug mode on your chosen device by specifying enough of the device name to be uniquely identifiable. E.g. for chrome use:

flutter run -d chrome

When you have completed the setup of your platform, you are ready for the PodNotes Getting Started exercises where you can create a Pod, make and share notes.

Extra setup for MacOS

Running the app on MacOS requires, additional configuration in Xcode. Open the project macos folder in Xcode with

cd podnotes/macos
xed .

Select Signing & Capabilities. In Team, choose Add an Account and sign in with your Apple ID account. In Network, select Incoming Connections (Server) and Outgoing Connections (Client). The latter is needed to login to your Pod.

Extra setup for iOS

For iOS, you will also need to set the deployment platform to match the iOS version on your simulator.

Open the Simulator app, select your simulated device with File -> Open Simulator -> pick a device.

open -a Simulator

Then in the simulated device check the iOS version number by clicking on the Settingsapp and going to General -> About to look up the iOS.

Open the project iOS folder in Xcode and add the iOS version used by your simulator.

cd podnotes/ios
xed .

Select General. In iOS, change it to match the Simulator iOS version, e.g. v17.0.

Useful resources

Packages:

These dart packages are under construction to support the development of Pods-based apps with flutter

solid package (not yet available on pub.dev): Implementation of the core high-level functionality.
solid-auth package: Implementation of the Solid-OIDC flow which can be used to authenticate a client application to a Solid Pod. Solid OIDC is built on top of OpenID Connect 1.0. Also provides a suite of tools and widgets to support typical app workflows.
solid-encrypt package: The Software Innovation Institute has a focus on the security of our stored data. This package implements data encryption which can be used to encrypt, on device, the content of turtle files to be stored in a Solid Pod. Data is also only decrypted on device.
rdflib package: A dart package for working with RDF. Features include find and create triple instances, create a graph to store triples, export graph to ttl, etc.

Related APps

https://notepod.vincenttunru.com/

anusii / podnotes

readme