The Telegram bot is an amazing idea/feature! Especially because I noticed that a lot of how much I use these apps depends on how little friction there is to using them. I'd love to organise the random notes I take throughout the day better but always end up writing random google keep notes because it's just so fast and convenient.
An important part of my workflow[1] is similar to this approach. I believe it's got a lot of potential if done right. One concern I have is the lack of file upload support (I only see images) and that querying relies heavily on tags. WRT the latter, it didn't work until I was able to create new projects that only held notes related to a specific project/topic. The current trend of dumping everything into one big database and hoping for the best when it comes to review and retrieval just does not work for me.
[1] Based on what I can tell from the linked page, which doesn't give a ton of detail.
File upload is indeed a useful feature! Added to my todo list.
On the second concern, nested tags are supported so you can have something like #project1/tag1, #project1/tag2, #project2/tag1 etc. - does this work for you?
I personally don't care for nested tags. It's too cluttered, because even if focus on tags starting with project2, there's a lot of verbosity. What I do is analogous to a "working directory" where everything is relative to that directory. For instance, rather than #project1/tag2, if I click on #project1, the project1/ is prepended to all the tags automatically inside storage but hidden in the display of notes. Implementation is simple. If using Javascript, store the current project name in a variable and prepend it when relevant.
Edit: Another advantage of this is that cross-project tagging stands out because the full tag is displayed.
This looks like something I am looking for; not quite sure yet, though.
- Does it support writing code?
- Can I use it in an European corporate setting (privacy, data protection, SSO, etc.)? Or given that it is in beta, do you have plans in that regard?
- Does it support concurrent editing?
- Markdown-formatted code snippets are supported. Or for something long, there's the Notion integration (https://docs.windi.app/taking-notes/notion) that allows seamless linking to Notion docs.
- All data is hosted in the EU. Haven't got time to review the legal side but I'd love to make it compliant with EU regulations (if not already)!
- Not yet; the usage pattern I was imagining is that people take their own short notes and link to each other, forming a network.
Feel free to contact me using the email address at the bottom of the landing page! Would love to know your use case.
That is a beautifully simple and informative landing page! I especially like that there isn't a clutter of menu options. You scroll and click on what looks interesting to you. I'm guessing someone will complain the link to the documentation is at the bottom, but for an early stage where acquisition matters, this is so clean. It forces me to learn about the app rather than making me focus on the site structure. Another bonus is the lack of complex movement and parallax effects.
RSS is a nice extra.
Is there a way to demo the example in graph mode without logging in?
One annoyance: in the web example, the full row is clickable for tags to expand, but then you have to click the text on the sub-tag (despite the full row being highlighted).
There isn't currently a way to display the graph without logging in because graphs require a bit of computation on the server side and I'm a little hesitant to open up a potentially computationally heavy API endpoint to unauthenticated sessions; but logging in with any user should be enough to view the graph of another user's public notes.
Personally I love the idea of a local replica along with server-side data (maybe end-to-end encrypted). It hasn't be implemented in Windi because it needs some design to play well with sharing features (inter-user bidirectional links, global tags, etc.) but this is definitely on the roadmap! Specifically:
- real-time log replication (that allows to maintain a local database consistent with the server state)
I started making something similar back in the time when I was trying to learn some php (self-hosted LAMP setup). Stopped mostly because I wasn't able to find a proper English dictionary for NLP.
Second reason was the inconvenience of opening my local webpage and clicking "new entry", then selecting from my tag suggestions or adding a few more new tags.. every time I wanted to add a new note.
Creating a new text document, copy-pasting into it, then closing it and clicking yes to save, then drag and dropping it onto my "notes" folder on my Desktop, somehow seems easier... No titles, no tags, but I could always rest assured that, when I'll need it, It would be there, somewhere in that "notes" folder, even years later.
Jokes aside, I didn't actually realize people are into these "knowledge management" systems.
I was wondering if one were to open source a self-hosted app like this, what license you could chose such that individual people would be able to install/modify/use/etc a copy for personal use, even commercial, even if employed, even work computers. Yet disallow a company from modifying/customizig/deploying it for multiple employees, have the company pay a formal fee? Are there any examples of such licenses in the wild?
I don't think that's the case. AWS regularly runs AGPL-licensed systems as service in direct competition with the developers. AGPL, for the most part, patches some holes in the GPL license.
I could be wrong, but there seems to be a good amount of content regarding projects releasing AGPL to prevent commercial competitors from using the source code against the creator.
The graph view for notes is not helpful because it shows a bunch of gibberish like date, url?, etc. Perhaps add a Title field on notes so that we can control what shows up on the graph view?
Also [this page](https://docs.windi.app/taking-notes/bidirectional-links) does not actually explain how to create a link. I guessed and put a notes URL into a different note's markdown link. Is there a shorthand for linking notes or do you just use the note's full URL?
Added to my task list. Will detect the `#`-prefixed Markdown title and display it under graph nodes when exists.
The current way for linking notes is by using the URL - I'm working on integrating search to the process so that it's possible to search for the note you want to link directly in the input box. Or do you have another idea on how this can be improved?
I think you should add a link button. When I highlight text, I can click the link button, then it should bring up an auto-complete search box for what I am trying to link.
“ You don't need to have a structure in mind before writing. Just focus on ideas; the structure will emerge.”
I’ve been obsessing over this idea for a while now. Never got around to implementing anything, but I really like the thought of just barfing things into my keyboard and having it all available at the speed of thought.
Meta: this has been bugging me for ages as I see it becoming more and more common (I think it’s over half of such “Show HN” sites with their own domains now that are blank for me, a JavaScript-disabler-by-default mostly for performance), but I’ve never asked anyone; why do you use Next.js for the marketing website, rather than just writing HTML? As it stands, the page is blank if one doesn’t execute JavaScript, and it’s executing almost a megabyte of JavaScript where as far as I can tell the only thing it’s doing that straight HTML with no JavaScript couldn’t do is the spinning globe. This just seems like a terrible fit for client-side rendering, unambiguously worse for the client (slower to load, less reliable, and excluding various users and bots—even Googlebot doesn’t always execute JavaScript, only after a while in general, I think), and I wouldn’t have thought that it would be any easier for the developers. So I’m curious: firstly, am I missing something and the use of Next.js actually does make life much easier for the developers, even for what should be simple HTML like this? And secondly, is there some reason why almost no one seems to be enabling server-side rendering or generation when they use Next.js like this? (I thought those features were a key part of why people would choose Next.js, and would have assumed from what I had heard that SSR would be enabled by default, but maybe not?)
(Personal context: plenty of web frontend and backend experience, but no React, as I’ve favoured lighter things, such as Svelte for the last few years; and I tend to just write straight HTML, possibly with simple templating. I’m not seeking to criticise or condemn here, just to understand. I understand why you’d depend on JS for web apps, just not for simple marketing sites.)
I definitely think Next.js is a great option for such websites. The main reason is that it can do static site generation with React, as well as SSR. It's really simple to set up, and very flexible.
It means you can build quickly and even if you start static, you can later add more functionality, go SSR, or even build out a full on web app without actually migrating or rewriting.
People have opinions about React, I will not go into that too much, but personally I find it a very effective and enjoyable tool to build things with.
Imo something like Next.js is easier to develop with than "just HTML" as you get templating, hot reloading in development, routing, image optimization, i18n options, and all the other goodies that come with it, or are already solved by someone. It's imo not to be underestimated how much work all the little things are when you have to do them manually.
That said, I have to agree that it's strange not to enable SSR and not to make a static export, I think it's pretty much the default. I find the export functionality one of the best things about Next.js as it makes sites blazing fast and really easy to host.
With next.js you don't need to build 2 projects if you want a landing page + your actual app. You can have routes with no JavaScript if you're not fetching data. I think it basically comes down to simplicity for the developer.
But seriously this is not just a privacy thing. It's also an accessibility problem. Why is it that we have lost the art of just making a web page that does stuff, and then enhancing that functionality?
To me, and presumably other parents in NA and the EU, a Windi is a small plastic tube device that you insert into the rectum of a baby to relieve gas pressure: https://frida.com/products/windi
Call me old school, but I don’t want this kind of stuff on someone else’s server.
My company’s IT policy agree as well. We really need all these SaaS apps in containerized forms as well.
You might want to rethink the name. There's a weather phenomenon called "wind" where difference in pressure causes air movement between two locations. The name collision between two so obviously related things might cause confusion for people.
Since this isn't reddit I suppose I should get off my facetious horse and provide some useful feedback huh?
I really like that you can click the image and see a live demo of the application. I found that quite by accident but it was more informative than the site itself IMO. It's probably worth calling out that it is clickable with an arrow or something.
In fact, since you can publish the notes, it might even make sense to dogfood and use the tool itself for the documentation rather than using Docusaurus.
