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Show HN: A Chrome extension for fast, contextual notetaking
tl;dr - I built a fast and low-frills notepad which helps me keep a flow state.
I spend a lot of time in the browser: in calls, managing stuff between SaaS apps, or consolidating info from multiple tabs. Usually, I'd bring up an editor and side-by-side it, or switch between my current tab and a notion tab. This extension lets you hit a hotkey and bring up a notepad in-place. It's a scratchpad for thinking in the moment - key points and questions as I'm working. If I want to hold on to the memory, I can export it to another app - if not, I'll just delete the note. It's kind of like the RAM to Notion's hard drive.
A couple more details:
- It works in videos, pdfs, and most sites. Startup friends use it reviewing their Figmas. Investor friends have been using it on Docsends. I use it to pull important parts from documentation, and writing call notes.
- A note can be used across tabs (e.g. I've used it to cross-reference product reviews)
- It keeps a bibliography for each note.
- It can stash its notes if you want to keep things in-house. If not, you can export to Google Docs and Notion
- If you connect your Google Drive, you can search your drive. It's faster than the web interface.
Anyway, the point is to be a really fast way to manage your current thoughts. I feel like memory decays rapidly, and the faster I can record things, the lower my mental burden.
I've got a video showing some of this at https://getjotter.com/ https://getjotter.com/. There's no signup needed to try it, and I'm happy to take feedback and suggestions!
- Leftium 5y agoVery nice! Right now I use https://simplenote.com/ https://simplenote.com/ for a similar purpose, so export to SimpleNote would be nice (with search).
- daveed 5y agoCool, thanks! I'll get search working at some point. It looks like simplenote doesn't have an API, but there's just a native copy button that'll copy both your notes and the reference sections, to your clipboard.
- Leftium 5y agoActually SimpleNote does have an API: https://simperium.com/ https://simperium.com/ It's what all the 3rd party SimpleNote apps use. However, they stopped accepting applications for the SimpleNote API key. Compare documentation from [2018] and [now]. You can still find the API key in the source code of other projects like [1]. I think the same API was given out to all 3rd party apps. (Or all the open source apps copied the same original key.) [2018]: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107153543/https://simplenote.com/developers/ https://web.archive.org/web/20181107153543/https://simplenot... [now]: https://simplenote.com/developers/ https://simplenote.com/developers/ [1]: https://github.com/cpbotha/nvpy/blob/844e8e5ad67cbae91603e95703b5fc34e78675ab/nvpy/notes_db.py#L31-L33 https://github.com/cpbotha/nvpy/blob/844e8e5ad67cbae91603e95...