No login required, and local-first
Most software that holds your information keeps the real copy on a server and shows you a picture of it. That arrangement is convenient right up until the moment the network is unavailable, the company loses interest, or the account is closed. Then the information is gone, even though nothing about it was ever inherently remote.
Zicarium is built the other way round, and the plainest version of that is this: you do not have to sign in at all. Without an account — on any version, the web one included — it runs entirely on your own device, and the copy sitting there is the only copy that exists anywhere. Nothing you write reaches us. That is not a trial or a degraded mode; it is a way to use the application for as long as you like.
Signing in is what puts a copy on our servers, and what you get in exchange is syncing — the same library on your laptop, your phone, and the web, kept in step. From there it depends on which application you are using.
On the desktop and mobile applications, your device still holds a complete copy of your data and can read and write it with no connection at all. Syncing is how copies are reconciled, not a precondition for using your own notes.
The web version is an exception to local-first. It works against the server by default, for a few reasons. Pulling your whole library down onto every browser you happen to sign in from — a computer at the library, a friend’s laptop — is not usually what you want, and leaving it there afterwards is worse. There can also be a great deal of it. And browser storage is less dependable than a real filesystem: it can be evicted without asking you first.
The capability is still there. If the machine is yours, you can turn local-first on in settings.
This is a more difficult way to build software. Two devices editing the same thing while offline have to be merged sensibly afterwards, which means every change carries enough history to work out what happened. Search has to run locally as well as on the server. Nothing can assume the network is there.
We think the trade is worth it. It means the application keeps working on a train. It means an outage on our side is an inconvenience rather than a lockout. And it means that if Datacea ever disappears, the data on your machine is still yours and still readable.