[HN Gopher] Show HN: WebStickies - Sticky notes for the internet
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Show HN: WebStickies - Sticky notes for the internet
I made a browser extension that lets you leave notes on websites.
Some features: search by content, add tags, sync, export/import
Author : lawrencehook
Score : 146 points
Date : 2022-11-27 17:55 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lawrencehook.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lawrencehook.com)
| afusalan wrote:
| I've been pondering about the idea of a collaborative browsing
| lately like social browsing, figjam for websites, maybe like
| replit but for browsing there's a couple of examples but the best
| one so far is Tris.com, i used it for a while but UX is not the
| greatest so i stopped using it. Would be cool to have that.
| lawrencehook wrote:
| That's a neat idea. Quite ambitious, but agreed it would be
| cool
| ta3411 wrote:
| This is super cool. Any idea how Tris.com is able to get Google
| Search results?
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I had started work on something like this with another HNer ages
| back - the idea was to leave a distributed network of notes - so
| I could see what you notes in the site and vice verda - it did
| not go far but this is a great reminder - excellent work ! :-)
| chadlavi wrote:
| nothing for Safari?
| lawrencehook wrote:
| Unfortunately Apple has substantially more hoops to jump
| through in order to publish to the Safari extension store.
| Maybe in the future.
| mmastrac wrote:
| At least for the first few years, Apple kept changing the
| Safari extension tech enough that it wasn't worth keeping up
| with it. Has it finally stabilized to the point where you can
| build anything non-trivial and have it work for a few years?
| lawrencehook wrote:
| I don't know. The main hurdle for me is the $99 / year fee
| that's required
| turshija wrote:
| As a regular MacOS stickes user this looks very promising!
|
| Few requests:
|
| - save sticky position on a website with scrollbar instead of
| being position fixed (scratch that, realised there is an option
| for that using right click -> pin to page, nice)
|
| - change dimensions and position to use pixels instead of percent
| to preserve dimensions when changing browser size
|
| - "minimized" sticky should display first line of the note
| lawrencehook wrote:
| these are good ideas, thank you
| ortusdux wrote:
| 3M is reportedly quite aggressive about defending their canary
| yellow note trademark.
| lawrencehook wrote:
| Interesting.. I took the color scheme from the Stickies
| application on MacOS, so hopefully 3M goes after Apple before
| me :)
| splittingTimes wrote:
| Maybe Apple pays licensing fees or has permissions from 3M...
| lawrencehook wrote:
| * Just noticed the HOST variable in the extension code is
| pointing to localhost rather than my server, so login/register
| isn't going to work for a bit. Updated but it'll take up to an
| hour to be released. :facepalm:
|
| edit: the fix is released!
| s3000 wrote:
| Do you see a way to combine this with ActivityPub so that there
| are public notes for websites?
| lawrencehook wrote:
| I'm quite unfamiliar with Web3 so can't say that I do.
| ghewgill wrote:
| That's fine, ActivityPub[0] has nothing to do with the
| "Web3".
|
| [0]: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
| lawrencehook wrote:
| Ah, I misread the Google results. Looks neat, I'll take a
| look.
| [deleted]
| mywacaday wrote:
| Really like the implementation. Can see the corporate
| notification about not saving passwords on virtual sticky notes.
| taikahessu wrote:
| Feedback: I instantly tried moving a note around on my phone. Did
| not move. Then I tapped a note and it opened fullscreen and the
| closing x supersmall at the edge of the screen. Instantly left
| the site.
|
| I read the comments, oh this is for websites. Cool idea. UX just
| needs to be top notch.
|
| That security issue (requiring all data) is a bit too much, dunno
| if you can do anything about it though.
| lawrencehook wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback.
|
| I realize the mobile UX is terrible. It's only designed for
| desktop, for now.
|
| And yea, the security issue is tough. I'll see if I can reduce
| the required permissions.
| parentheses wrote:
| like everything else on the internet, this needs multiplayer ;)
| lawrencehook wrote:
| an intriguing idea :)
| TheFreim wrote:
| This looks very promising. I have one issue and one feature
| request for your consideration:
|
| 1. Could you allow us to change the key bindings? "Alt+Shift+N"
| is already taken for a feature in my browser and I cannot find a
| way to choose a different shortcut for creating new notes. 2. It
| would be very useful if this had a highlighting feature where
| notes can be attached to highlights. I am thinking of something
| along the lines of how Kinopio (https://kinopio.club) does things
| but with highlighting (could also take inspiration from Kinopio
| and allow notes to be linked together).
| lawrencehook wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback.
|
| 1. I believe extension shortcuts are configurable through the
| browser settings. Here are some copy/pasted Google results
|
| Chrome: 1. Click the three-dot menu from the browser's top-
| right corner. 2. From the More tools list, open Extensions. 3.
| Click the three-line menu from the top-left corner. 4. Select
| Keyboard shortcuts. 5. Click the Edit icon below the
| extensions.
|
| Firefox: 1. Click the menu button. click Add-ons and themes and
| select Extensions. 2. Click the Tools for all add-ons cogwheel.
| 3. Click Manage Extension Shortcuts in the menu. 4. You will
| see the shortcut options (if available) for your installed add-
| ons.
|
| 2. That's a good idea. Not sure how I'd implement it. I'll put
| in on the roadmap :)
| erickhill wrote:
| This is going to be incredibly helpful for me to create reminders
| on my work's website and even hobby sites I visit often. Thank
| you!
| lawrencehook wrote:
| Awesome! Thanks for the comment
| _HMCB_ wrote:
| This is very cool. Thank you.
|
| I use Apple's Quick Notes in a similar fashion. It lets you
| highlight text in a web page and by choosing Create Quick Note,
| it will highlight the passage and next time you visit the site, a
| small modal appears in the bottom right of the page as you scroll
| by the annotation. Click the mini modal and Safari jumps you to
| the spot on the page. And what's nice is everything is stored in
| Apple Notes so you can always save it elsewhere.
| billsmithaustin wrote:
| Wasn't there a startup that did this in the late 90's?
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Third Voice[0] did shared annotation in '99.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Voice
| lawrencehook wrote:
| Say Yes to WebStickies :P
| xattt wrote:
| I thought this was Google's initial goal.
| rzzzt wrote:
| I remember something where you could doodle and comment on any
| website, but pages usually devolved into spam and drawings
| of... you can imagine.
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| There have been a bunch of these companies. We started one
| company in 1999, which we eventually moved to San Francisco. We
| built sticky notes which were stored together with a cash copy
| of the website on our servers. So one could collaborate around
| the notes in a corporate environment. Funding dried up in the
| dotcom crash, so we went home again. (An interesting side note
| to that was that the CIA wanted our stuff to build something
| for the presidents office, but decided against it, probably for
| security reasons. At least I got a trip to Washington DC out of
| it and meeting CIA CTOs or equivalents. Interesting times.)
|
| Other companies built public note systems. I think I have seen
| another four or five since then that have tried to make a
| business around sticky notes in websites, but nothing seems
| to... stick (ahem).
|
| People seem to want to give internal feedback to the content
| team on PDFs or in emails.
|
| One of the original browsers, maybe Netscape, had comments on
| pages, but it got removed early on.
|
| Edit: added note about CIA.
| lawrencehook wrote:
| That's very cool.
| atum47 wrote:
| I remember seeing something similar a long time ago. As I can
| remember you were able to scribble on a website, and everyone
| else using that plugin or website (I don't remember if it was a
| software or site) would see what you have drawn.
| vxNsr wrote:
| StumbleUpon had something like this, you could go to a webpage
| and comment on it and others could see your comments. I stopped
| using it as it was a massive time waster/procrastination tool.
| But was pretty cool.
| evross wrote:
| Hypothesis is one that has been interesting to use for web
| article annotation. It lets you save quotes and comments on
| articles https://web.hypothes.is/
| stereoradonc wrote:
| A terrible product (none for Firefox) and has a user hostile
| attitude to export your data. Avoidable.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I remember seeing something similar a long time ago._
|
| If memory serves me, something similar was very briefly a
| feature of Internet Explorer.
|
| Except with the IE version, everyone else using IE (which was
| everyone, even Mac users) could also see everyone else's notes.
|
| The project was discontinued over concerns about intellectual
| property and defacing other people's web sites.
|
| It was a long time ago (as illustrated by the reference to IE
| for Mac ), so I may have some details confused.
| rrdharan wrote:
| This was genius.com's pitch at one point right after they
| secured a massive funding round from a16z I believe - "annotate
| the web!".
|
| Didn't really work out for them:
| https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/genius-sold-medialab-w...
| prawn wrote:
| I recall this too. It was very controversial at the time and
| fizzled out.
| lawrencehook wrote:
| I'm a big fan of Streaks!
| netsharc wrote:
| I used this for a while in 1999...
|
| http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~orit/utok.html
|
| I imagine nowadays all the notes would just be like any online
| comments section: fighting and name-calling about anything and
| everything
| lawrencehook wrote:
| this is fascinating, I was 4 years old haha
| max-ibel wrote:
| A big problem from what I recall were legal ones. E.g., owners
| of a website did not fancy random comments graffitied over
| their content. I believe a few lawsuits were filed. Also spam
| problems arose. This caused the makers of such software to
| hobble functionality, making the resulting product less
| interesting and so these products were not successful.
|
| This may be a good application for decentralized storage with
| free browser extensions that would circumvent much of the legal
| threads - although I imagine lawsuits could and would still be
| filed against Chrome, Firefox etc for enabling such extensions,
| even if they were free.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Back in the early 00s there was a browser plugin called Third
| Voice that did this. I seem to remember people got concerned
| that it would lead to "graffiti-ing" of websites. I don't
| remember what happened to it.
| helloworld wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Voice
| xeonmc wrote:
| Wasn't it one of the marketed feature of Microsoft Edge before
| it was scrapped and replaced with Chromium?
| MikeSchurman wrote:
| I know this is off topic, but how do people assess the risks of
| installing an extension like this? The permissions allow "access
| your data for all websites" which includes reading passwords you
| type into fields. This extension looks very useful, but in
| general I just don't know how to trust it.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| so what if it reads your passwords if it has no network
| permission to exfiltrate?
| lawrencehook wrote:
| FYI extensions don't need a network permission to make
| network requests.
| exodust wrote:
| For note taking I'd only ever use extensions with no
| permissions needed. "Tagged notes" is an example of a good,
| simple notes extensions for Firefox.
|
| If I need sync, I'd prefer not to rely on the extension for
| that. Why would I pay for my own cloud service AND a separate
| payment for random apps that use their own sync? Most people
| have their own online storage, and should always be the number
| 1 way to backup things like personal notes.
| lawrencehook wrote:
| I appreciate the comment.
|
| In my mind, the sync feature for this app is less about
| backup and more about maintaining a single instance across
| multiple computers/browsers.
| lawrencehook wrote:
| Thanks for the comment. It's a valid concern.
|
| Chrome and Firefox have a review team for their extension
| marketplace, though I believe there are instances of malicious
| extensions getting through anyway.
|
| And while rather labor intensive, another path toward vetting
| is examining the source code. I haven't obfuscated it, and
| Googling for "view extension source code" has many results.
|
| And for what it's worth, I can give an assurance that I'm not a
| bad actor.
|
| Maybe relevant:
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
| Blue111 wrote:
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| If you update the extension does it automatically update for
| the users or does the user have to manually install the
| update?
|
| Regardless I love the idea of this.
| lawrencehook wrote:
| There's an option in Firefox to disable auto-updates for an
| extension.
|
| Not as easy in Chrome, but there's ways to do it. For
| example here's one:
| https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-
| extensio...
| jonas-w wrote:
| If it is a well known extension i will trust it, but often i
| find myself to extract the extension and Look at the "source
| code" if it is not open source.
| kurt44 wrote:
| I only install extensions that are either have low permissions
| or are blessed by Firefox.
|
| uBlock Origin is the only "access your data for all websites"
| extension I use.
| [deleted]
| greybox wrote:
| I hit the same problem, however it does attempt to explain why
| it needs each persmission: Download files and
| read and modify the browser's download history -- Required to
| export data. Store unlimited amount of client-side data
| -- Required to save sticky note data locally. Access
| your data for all websites -- Required to load sticky notes on
| any page.
| [deleted]
| tambourine_man wrote:
| There's a bug where the click registers 100px so pixels below the
| actual target in Safari. Works fine in Chrome and Firefox.
|
| Great work btw, I could see myself using this daily.
| thewebcount wrote:
| Oh, it works in Safari? I wish they'd said that on the web
| site. I went there, saw "Chrome and Firefox" and immediately
| hit the back button.
| lawrencehook wrote:
| There's a way to get Chrome extensions working in Safari. I
| haven't tried it out though.
| lawrencehook wrote:
| Thank you! And thanks for the feedback
| drye wrote:
| I wish MacOS sticky notes would actually stick to individual
| windows and would move with them when you moved those windows.
| Instead, they just float, like all the other windows.
| [deleted]
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| That they can't float over windows in all spaces is
| particularly annoying
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| kixiQu wrote:
| Reminiscent of https://hypothes.is, but with a distinctively fun
| UI :) Cool project!
| lawrencehook wrote:
| thank you!
| [deleted]
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