Hyperliner runs in your browser and keeps your work on your own machine. No server holds the original – the copy in front of you is the original. It carries on without complaint when the network doesn't, because it was never waiting on one.

What you actually do with it

You write cards. A card holds a note: a paragraph, a quotation, an image, a thought you don't yet know what to do with. Cards nest inside one another and gather into outlines.

Then the material starts telling you what it is. Notes that turn out to be rows become a table. A table whose column holds place names will draw itself on a map; one whose column holds dates will lay itself along a timeline. You declare what a column means when you know, and not before – and nothing you wrote earlier is thrown away when you do.

Two convictions underneath

The first is that knowledge and navigation are different things. What you know can be shared with others; the path you took through it is yours. So cards are shared substance and outlines are personal, and moving something across that line is always deliberate, and always tells you first exactly what will travel.

The second is that data outlives software. Every card body is markdown and leaves as markdown, legible on a day when no Hyperliner process is running anywhere in the world. I would rather you could leave than have to keep you.