by David LeMieux
If you know me or frequent this blog often you know that from time to time I get a silly idea in my head and then bring it to life. In fact, if you are my friend you can't escape knowing this because following a project completion I do nothing but talk about the recently completed project for the next two weeks. I apologize. Anyway, it is time again for me to introduce another silly side project and talk about it like a jabbering fool. Like a child on Christmas morning I am only excited about a new toy for a brief period of time, then I start to unwrap the next. E.gg Timer is sooo two weeks ago.
Without further ado, I would like to introduce J.ot Down - a cousin of sorts to e.ggtimer. In a word, J.ot Down is a notepad. There is, as always, more to the story.
J.ot Down's idea came from an observation I made that people are spending more time in their Internet browsers. Many modern browsers allow the user to have multiple tabs of web pages open at once. People use browsers (or web pages loaded in the browser) to communicate, to research, to read, to write, edit photos, watch video; for just about everything.
It has long been my thought that the Internet is creating a shift in how we think about computing. In many ways a traditional operating system (Windows, OS X, Linux) is just the backing behind the web browser. This isn't true always, nor is it true in niche situations, but the things I did outside the browser eight years ago, write text documents, edit photos, send email, watch video, etc., were all done in the OS in different applications. Now I do all of those things in Firefox.
With a few understandable exceptions the browser is where I spend my time; however, I did notice one thing that I was not yet doing in-browser. Jotting down notes. I often use the OS default text editor (Notepad, Text Edit, Nano, Emacs, whatever) to write down quick lists of things to do or to help keep my thoughts straight as I work throughout the day. These text documents I create I hardly ever save or return to. They are disposable. Like a pad of notebook paper. Though occasionally I keep them because they contain valuable information. I realized the other day that there did not seem to be a way to do the same on the web.
Sure, I could have used something Google docs, but then my documents would be cluttered with files I no longer needed.
That is why I made J.ot Down - so there would be a simple way to write down throw-away thoughts in the browser but optionally save them and share them when needed.
J.ot Down is pretty simple. You open j.otdown.com and start typing. When you pause or hit save you are forwarded to a secret URL which serves as a permalink to your recently created note. The note then continues to auto-save as you edit. You can then keep it open in your browers as a tab and return to it as needed. Because it creates an unique URL for you, if the browser crashes or you close it accidentally you can always restore it or go back to it through your browser history. (more info here)
Simple? Yes!
Pointless? Maybe. But so are many of my other projects so this is totally on par with my other work.
Now, I will point out that there are some missing features.
1) You can't currently add a title. You just get a date-based URL.
2) No way to secure a note. While it would be hard to guess at the unique URLS, it is not impossible. Securing them is a high-priority iteration task.
3) Since "releasing" it in to the wild, I have caught my self wishing that it had some kind of collaborative editing feature. I am trying to figure out the best way to solve that issue. Do I even need to add that as a feature?
4) There isn't a way to keep track of past notes other than your browser history (or emailing yourself the links all the time). This one is hard. Not technically, mind you, but I don't want to bother users with creating an account. I really want this service to be as simple as: show up, type, and you're done! Also, the idea behind this site was to enable users to create disposable, one-time notes that would auto-save just in case something extreme happened. Any suggestions would be great.
I plan to iterate and make improvements. I do this with all my projects. The E.gg Timer of today is not the same from three months ago. I am excited to see where J.ot Down goes. It may go nowhere. I think it has some potential, but doesn't everyone that creates anything think their creating has potential? Most the time, I think.
I welcome J.ot Down to my side project family.