[HN Gopher] Show HN: Fingernotes - handwritten notes which becom...
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Show HN: Fingernotes - handwritten notes which become their own
preview image
Hi HN, I've lurked here for ages and decided to come out of the
shadows for my latest side project which reached the point where
it's sort of fun to use and hopefully not totally embarrassing to
share. Hacking fingernotes.com together over a couple of weeks was
a creative outlet when work got stressful. I think of it as digital
sticky notes. The goal was to make notes with a personal touch that
are easy to write and share. I also wanted them to appear as their
own link preview image on supported platforms. That way when you
send the link to a note, the person sees the message without
following the link. Let me know what you think! I drew
inspiration from Apple's quick notes: low latency made scribbling a
pleasure, and sending notes to friends felt warm and original
compared to a typical exchange. It was also intriguing to see my
handwriting printed in a message chat. In a time of rising
artificial generation, spreading my clumsy handwriting feels like
an act of rebellion. But I dislike the light background in Apple
notes, which I don't think you can change when sharing. More
importantly, no one sent a note back. With fingernotes the low-
friction interaction is meant to make creating notes simple. I also
find the image previews aesthetically more pleasing. For
implementation, fingernotes are publicly accessible links to
collections of strokes that have been persisted to a Cloudflare D1
database and rendered in SVG. Like pen on a sticky note, each
stroke is immutable but anyone can add to a note if they have the
link. You can't undo strokes, so if you mess up your note just
throw it out and start a new one. Having append-only collections
avoids handling order of operations when multiple people edit the
same note. Hosting it as a Cloudflare worker made it easy to get up
and running. There's some latency in Safari on iOS which is absent
on desktop. It's noticeable compared to Apple notes and I'm afraid
it's a limitation of the browser.
Author : sumolessons
Score : 40 points
Date : 2025-03-23 06:32 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (fingernotes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fingernotes.com)
| coreyh14444 wrote:
| Can't get it to do anything using Edge on Windows. Does it only
| work with touch?
| sumolessons wrote:
| I've used it successfully with Chrome and Safari on macOS but
| it was originally intended for touch.
| ttyyzz wrote:
| very cool and simple idea, i like it. funny thing, first try i
| got a note-id that already had been used by someone :-)
| sumolessons wrote:
| thanks! Oops, I just realized the link at the top is to a
| specific note instead of fingernotes.com
| tetris11 wrote:
| https://fingernotes.com/note/e8f2e029
|
| Let's see how this evolves
| npodbielski wrote:
| Pretty cool. Though I was a bit sad that preview does not work on
| Signal.
| sumolessons wrote:
| Thanks! I just tried it out on Signal with a new note and it
| does work. The image is not as large as the WhatsApp preview
| though.
|
| I accidentally linked to a specific note at the top which I
| guess Cloudflare is struggling to preview due to traffic.
| jzellis wrote:
| Very cool, though it doesn't seem to work on Firefox on Android -
| I had to use Chrome to get it to work. Dunno what API it's using,
| but worth mentioning.
| speerer wrote:
| Worked for me (firefox on Android, Samsung OneUI6.1)
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Hey, thanks for sharing. It looks neat! Here's some
| (unstructured, rushed) feedback:
|
| Consider adding some PWA metadata (manifest) so there's a bit
| more space when the app is added to the home screen.
|
| Are you using perfect-freehand? If so, you might wanna give Steve
| Ruiz a shoutout!
|
| The latency is not bad (iOS Safari) to be fair. I'd check how
| this works with the Apple Pencil though (including the additional
| APIs and pen properties it opens)
|
| I have giant fingers, so this is nice for doodles, but writing
| gets frustrating. a basic zoom would fix that (problem: keeping
| the UI non obtrusive).
|
| Consider adding colour (even a pre-defined palette to keep this
| super simple, say 3-4 colours). I got some fun creations from
| people who played with a similar project
| (https://lines.potato.horse), largely because they had just the
| right amount of creative control.
|
| Also, consider adding an OLED-friendly colour scheme (with
| _perfect_ blacks #000). Some inspiration:
| https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/night-rider/ and
| https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/dark-mode-articles/
|
| (100% yak shave here, so not important) but: I'd check if the
| note content could be shared with the link (e.g. via data URIs)
| (mostly for fun)
|
| Ah, finally, make it plomk like mmm.page or potato.horse (disable
| silent mode and click on the nav)! THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT
| sumolessons wrote:
| 100% shoutout to perfect-freehand/Steve Ruiz!
|
| this is amazing feedback, thank you for taking the time to
| write it all out. I love the idea of audio feedback!
| factovar wrote:
| Very few tools write that smooth. Great Work!
| filcuk wrote:
| I really like the feel of the writing.
| YVoyiatzis wrote:
| I'm now able to sign my name with flair using just my thumb while
| holding my phone--seamlessly and effortlessly. Very well done on
| the implementation.
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(page generated 2025-03-25 23:01 UTC)