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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
- s3000 4y agoDo you see a way to combine this with ActivityPub so that there are public notes for websites?
- lawrencehook 4y agoI'm quite unfamiliar with Web3 so can't say that I do.
- ghewgill 4y agoThat's fine, ActivityPub[0] has nothing to do with the "Web3". [0]: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
- lawrencehook 4y agoAh, I misread the Google results. Looks neat, I'll take a look.
- afusalan 4y agoI'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 4y agoThat's a neat idea. Quite ambitious, but agreed it would be cool
- ta3411 4y agoThis is super cool. Any idea how Tris.com is able to get Google Search results?
- MikeSchurman 4y agoI 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- greybox 4y agoI 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 4y ago[deleted]
- lawrencehook 4y agoThanks 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_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
- CTDOCodebases 4y agoIf 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kixiQu 4y agoReminiscent of https://hypothes.is https://hypothes.is, but with a distinctively fun UI :) Cool project!
- lawrencehook 4y agothank you!
- RamblingCTO 4y agoHah, I was actually thinking of this but couldn't remember what it was called. Thank you! This thing is really great!
- ortusdux 4y ago3M is reportedly quite aggressive about defending their canary yellow note trademark.
- lawrencehook 4y agoInteresting.. I took the color scheme from the Stickies application on MacOS, so hopefully 3M goes after Apple before me :)
- splittingTimes 4y agoMaybe Apple pays licensing fees or has permissions from 3M...
- erickhill 4y agoThis 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 4y agoAwesome! Thanks for the comment
- billsmithaustin 4y agoWasn’t there a startup that did this in the late 90’s?
- EvanAnderson 4y agoThird Voice[0] did shared annotation in ‘99. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Voice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Voice
- lawrencehook 4y agoSay Yes to WebStickies :P
- bjelkeman-again 4y agoThere 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 4y agoThat's very cool.
- xattt 4y agoI thought this was Google’s initial goal.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lawrencehook 4y ago* 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!
- TheFreim 4y agoThis 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 https://kinopio.club) does things but with highlighting (could also take inspiration from Kinopio and allow notes to be linked together).
- lawrencehook 4y agoThanks 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 :)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- turshija 4y agoAs 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 4y agothese are good ideas, thank you
- gala8y 4y agoalso... in menu you have 'close', where in fact it deletes.
- chadlavi 4y agonothing for Safari?
- lawrencehook 4y agoUnfortunately Apple has substantially more hoops to jump through in order to publish to the Safari extension store. Maybe in the future.
- mmastrac 4y agoAt 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 4y agoI don't know. The main hurdle for me is the $99 / year fee that's required
- tambourine_man 4y agoThere'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 4y agoOh, 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 4y agoThere's a way to get Chrome extensions working in Safari. I haven't tried it out though.
- lawrencehook 4y agoThank you! And thanks for the feedback
- drye 4y agoI 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 4y ago[deleted]
- bobbylarrybobby 4y agoThat they can't float over windows in all spaces is particularly annoying
- taikahessu 4y agoFeedback: 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 4y agoThanks 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- atum47 4y agoI 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.
- andyjohnson0 4y agoBack 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 4y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Voice https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Voice
- xeonmc 4y agoWasn't it one of the marketed feature of Microsoft Edge before it was scrapped and replaced with Chromium?
- reaperducer 4y agoI 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.
- prawn 4y agoI recall this too. It was very controversial at the time and fizzled out.
- lawrencehook 4y ago
- parentheses 4y agolike everything else on the internet, this needs multiplayer ;)
- lawrencehook 4y agoan intriguing idea :)
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoI 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 ! :-)
- mywacaday 4y agoReally like the implementation. Can see the corporate notification about not saving passwords on virtual sticky notes.
- _HMCB_ 4y agoThis 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.
- wahnfrieden 4y agoMore than two years ago, Apple told the FBI that it planned to offer users end-to-end encryption when storing their phone data on iCloud, according to one current and three former FBI officials and one current and one former Apple employee. Under that plan, primarily designed to thwart hackers, Apple would no longer have a key to unlock the encrypted data, meaning it would not be able to turn material over to authorities in a readable form even under court order. In private talks with Apple soon after, representatives of the FBI’s cyber crime agents and its operational technology division objected to the plan, arguing it would deny them the most effective means for gaining evidence against iPhone-using suspects, the government sources said. When Apple spoke privately to the FBI about its work on phone security the following year, the end-to-end encryption plan had been dropped, according to the six sources.
- rob74 4y agoWhat I immediately noticed was the similarity between this extension's logo/icon and the Microsoft logo (https://www.logodesignlove.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/microsoft-logo-02.jpeg https://www.logodesignlove.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/mi...) - four colored squares arranged like window panes. It even uses the same colors, albeit in a different order. IANAL, but that might get you into trouble with Microsoft...
- thih9 4y agoYou could change the color of one of the notes in the logo to violet (also used by your app). To offer another opinion, I didn’t think about the Microsoft’s logo at all. I guess I see MS logo as a single object (used to be a flag) with a pattern, whereas this one as a collection of sticky notes.
- Philipp0205 4y agoI like to use single file for that. The approach differs, it downloads the website as a single file and allows annotations like sticky notes as well. https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile