Notepad.cc - a piece of paper in the cloud

by jacobbijani • 16 years ago

134 67 16 years ago

jlgosse2• 16 years ago

While I don't personally have a reason to use this, I'm sure a lot of people will find it quite useful.

One suggestion though, the user should be able to select their own URL if possible, and if they want to. I know it'll pose some security risks, but having a totally ridiculous address is going to make your notepad less than memorable.

jacobbijani12• 16 years ago

There is a link to change the URL below the notepad. It validates and confirms that the name isn't taken and then renames your notepad and redirects you.

Alternately, you can just visit any URL you want and (as long as it's available) start using it.

jlgosse2• 16 years ago

I think that means you win, then.

Great job!

kylebragger• 16 years ago

This one in particular is hilarious: http://notepad.cc/hello

barrydahlberg• 16 years ago

Cool. I has to type something and reload to see if it saved automatically. I like that it does, I just didn't trust it.

Some basic formatting support would be awesome too.

jacobbijani12• 16 years ago

Currently, if you add a + to the end of any URL it will switch to a monospace font.

I like that its impossibly simple, but I've thought about adding some more filters like that.

I might also just add support for cmd-b and cmd-i to make the font italic, but right now it's actually just a styled textarea. If only -webkit-user-modify was already supported outside Webkit :(

aik• 16 years ago

Cool.

How long does it retain the note once you close it?

jacobbijani12• 16 years ago

Indefinitely. I might eventually go through and remove notepads that haven't been touched in months and only contain a few characters.

andrewcamel2• 16 years ago

What database do you use for storage?

mahmud• 16 years ago

Why introduce an arbitrary limitation that does no good and save you nothing?

http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

charliepark• 16 years ago

Very nice. I love how many projects you churn out, Jacob. And how good they look. It's inspiring. And humbling.

jacobbijani12• 16 years ago

Hey, thanks!

duck• 16 years ago

While I have seen this done several times before, this is the first time it has been done with a clean interface and limited options... making this the clear winner already.

As a developer though I prefer http://gist.github.com

jacobbijani12• 16 years ago

Thanks. Gist is really awesome for some things, but it definitely servers a certain form of "composing and storing text online."

greyman• 16 years ago

Jacob are you planning to add some formatting options?

What you consider to be the main use cases for notepad.cc?

Raphael• 16 years ago

Takes forever to save.

xtacy• 16 years ago

Any plans of open sourcing this? What other features have you planned for it? Versioning? Like gist.github.com?

andrewcamel2• 16 years ago

I can definitely see myself using this in the future. It has a very similar feel to dropbox in that it "just works". If you need some support developing an iPhone/iPod/iPad app for it, which I think would be a great idea, I would be happy to lend a hand.

alanthonyc• 16 years ago

That's pretty cool.

I went and immediately tried it on my iPad. Unfortunately, the links don't show up when I pull up the page there. (The text does autosave though.)

jacobbijani12• 16 years ago

Yeah, definitely want to make the mobile version a ton better. In the very least I wanted to make it actually work first.

epynonymous• 16 years ago

pretty simple, i like simple user interfaces. one thing that kind of sux is that you have to manually erase everything in the canvas if you want to start a new document. would be nice to add something to the effect of "start new txt". noticed that with a new tab, it seems to save the session data.

need to fix the multi-document feature. otherwise i like it, "share" rather than save. abstraction of the storage layer is great, i don't even want to know where it's stored, just give me access.

jacobbijani12• 16 years ago

The idea was sot of just that you go back to notepad.cc (the index) to get a new auto-generated URL, and then you have two that you can edit. "Start a new doc" is just notepad.cc, or creating one in on the fly by just going to the URL you want.

In that regard, your browser offers multi-document support (via tabs or bookmarks, or delicious, whatever you use to remember the URLs).

chime2• 16 years ago

You could still make a notepad.cc/new link and call it "Start new doc." The /new page just does the same thing as main index page (i.e. creates a new page and forwards to a new url).

babo• 16 years ago

I like your decision, that makes the whole UI useful and simple. It's also nice to open any URL, even notepad.cc/share works.

chime2• 16 years ago

Great job jacob. It's very clean and straight-forward. I like how it instantly creates a shareable url. I've been working on a similar (though not exact) concept on the side for a few months now. Demo: http://bulletxt.com/demo

d0m• 16 years ago

I really like how you can add a password in a non-intrusive way. I mean, it doesn't force you to use it but when you need it, it's really easy to add one :)

And by the way, when I want to save things for myself, I hacked a little snippet:

my-ip/whatever-category-1/category-2/whatever i wanna save -> And it saves it. I can then access it on my-ip : )

techsupporter2• 16 years ago

It looks neat, and is the sort of thing I both wish I'd thought of first, and wish had the source available so I could run it (for myself) on my own server. This would be a lot better than my current solution for saving scraps of code, notes, or other digital ephemera, but most of that I can't put on someone else's storage.

Time for me to get coding, then, I suppose? :)

omarchowdhury• 16 years ago

http://code.google.com/p/etherpad/

techsupporter2• 16 years ago

I'd thought about etherpad, but it seemed too busy to switch from my current Editpad setup. The UI on notepad.cc is fantastic, and it's a great idea, so I'm thinking about whether this itch should be scratched a second (third, fourth, infinite?) time where I code it and the release the source, since that's a "feature" I'd like to see.

Zakuzaa3• 16 years ago

Well I can see myself paying for such a tool.. as in my-username.notepad.cc, all files saved under a master password.

Is it possible to get the files sync to dropbox? may be through dropbox api?

jacobbijani12• 16 years ago

Paying for your own namespace...now that's an idea!

Zakuzaa3• 16 years ago

I am sorry, was that sarcastic?

s2r22• 16 years ago

Nice project. Reminds me a little of http://htlm.org

But what I really wanted to say: there's a link to http://www.tumblr.com/?notepad that's kind of dead (?)

LaPingvino• 16 years ago

http://notepad.tumblr.com

s2r22• 16 years ago

thank you

oskee80• 16 years ago

Neat. I tried viewing a note in IE7 and it didn't display right. http://i.imgur.com/pKdJG.png

omouse• 16 years ago

does it work for mobile devices such as nonsmartphones?

(written frm samsng impct)

lars512• 16 years ago

Not from my iPhone...

ComputerGuru• 16 years ago

So, pastebin.ca reborn?

keane• 16 years ago

Sort of like http://txtb.in/ as well

SQueek• 16 years ago

check google notebook. like their more powerful notebook for the web

alisey2• 16 years ago

Jakob, you did a great job. A couple of suggestions.

1. Make it visible when the text cannot be saved. Nobody wants to lose his work because of Wi-Fi glitch. In my version of notepad I implemented this with a light yellow frame around the textarea. I'm sure there's a better way to do it.

2. Imagine you could type a note into an address bar, hit Enter and have it added to your notepad. It's easy to implement, and it works really great for saving page URLs. Here's how I did it with a similar service of mine. Define a keyword search (e.g. "g hello world" - Google Search, "s hello world" - add a note), in Opera it's trivial - right-click the text area, select Create Search, and pick a keyword, I guess in other browsers it's doable too. The POST request carries the name of the page and a note to be added. It might sound simple, obvious, useless, but try it and there's a chance you'll love it.

3. List of my pages in the sidebar. Like, when I prefix my pages with "alisey." they go to the sidebar. E.g alisey.links, alisey.snippets.

mitjak• 16 years ago

Note through URL idea is superb. Clearly you've lures me over to your service, so what's the URL?

alisey2• 16 years ago

Well, it's a quick hack for private use, please be gentle. http://pisets.org.ua/hn

stefs• 16 years ago

don't forget about ubquity!

xom• 16 years ago

In fact, for a high-latency connection like mine, it'd be nice to have one color to mean "trying to save" and another meaning "failed to save". Or maybe copy Gmail's "server request pending, are you sure you want to navigate away?" pop-up.

PawelDecowski• 16 years ago

I did a similar project a few months ago: http://zonewriter.com/

If you hover to the right of the text box, a sidebar with basic formatting options appear.

corin_• 16 years ago

Looks great, hoping to see source released sometime :)

altano• 16 years ago

This is great. I love the simplicity.

crocowhile• 16 years ago

So, I tell here what I am looking for: maybe someone will find it interesting and want to implement that.

I have android phone and few linux desktop. I want to be able to record notes (simple unformatted text is good) and maybe even voice recording on my phone and have them appear via widget on my desktop transparently.

There are webapp that kind of let you do something at least remotely similar (oi notes, astrid, springpad, evernote) but none of them offer a good set of API that would allow me to have a transparent client.

mustpax• 16 years ago

Simplenote, http://simple-note.appspot.com might be what you're looking for. It has a pretty good API and a nice web interface.

I really like the iPhone app but I don't think it has any other native apps.

patrickryan• 16 years ago

This is great. Simple, well designed, and just enough features. I especially enjoy the vanity url and password protection. Good work!

hellweaver666• 16 years ago

Stupid question... but if I put something personal in there... what's to stop you from reading it? I mean... you could steal my million dollar startup idea. Or is that the plan?

_bfhp• 16 years ago

the "add password" feature?

samdk• 16 years ago

Doesn't mean the data's encrypted on the server-side though. The person running this could probably access anything written here pretty easily. That's a trade-off you make with almost any cloud service though.

If you have a super-secret million-dollar startup idea or something really personal that you don't ever want anyone reading, you probably shouldn't be putting it anywhere on the internet.

thebigshane2• 16 years ago

Awesome... but what is the difference between the URI of the page (notepad.cc/test) and the "share this" link URI (notepad.cc/share/ASDF123)? Why aren't they the same? Different security? Different expiration lengths?

jacobbijani12• 16 years ago

The share URLs are read-only.

thebigshane2• 16 years ago

That's a great idea, but not very obvious.

deadkenny• 16 years ago

Great idea. Is there a write up on this? A blog entry at least?

Some sort of 'about' so users can find out who wrote it, and what (if any) T&Cs and privacy there are, is probably in order, at least to keep the lawyers at bay.

Out of interest, where is the data stored? Cloud?

mtnchkn• 16 years ago

just came across this as it was being used for the froyo port to cdma hero by xda folks, and think it's awesome. something cool to do might be to make it like tomboy notes where you can link between notes, though this probably defeats the purpose.

and as an aside, would make for a great faceplate page, or at least humorous. or be able to add some code to the <head> and let it redirect to an OpenID Oauth so that the addy could be used as an openID. might need to specify admin versus guest on that (like a drop.io type setup). speaking of, is this searchable by search engines (or hidden like a drop.io)?

Notepad.cc - a piece of paper in the cloud

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