I haven’t written a non-Oracle post into my blog yet, so here’s one for you :)
I recently developed a little web service with a friend. Shortly, check out http://n.otepad.com and any feedback is appreciated (especially about the parts which suck, so we could improve those :)
The longer story is that for years I used to have a notes.txt file on my Windows desktop (or Linux desktop, whatever I happened to use at that time) for writing down my notes, addresses, code snippets, URLs etc etc. I created a keyboard shortcut CTRL+ALT+N for my notes file, so I could easily open up the file without needing to navigate around with mouse or switching between applications. I could open the file and search its contents in matter of 2-3 seconds.
Then this notes file got too big, Windows XP’s notepad.exe started getting slow when I had more than 10000 lines of text in the file. So I split my notes up to notes.txt, oracle.txt, unix.txt, etc. Each had a different keyboard shortcut, like CTRL+ALT+O for Oracle stuff (damn, I just realized this post is loosely related to Oracle :)
Anyway, the obvious problem which came from that split was that often I didn’t remember into which note file I had put a particular note (e.g. some Unix script for Oracle could have been in Unix file or Oracle file). So I ended up looking through multiple files, getting frustrated and sometimes giving up.
Oh, did I mention that I also used to send emails with notes to myself, just to keep them (or maybe deal with them later). And then I went to client’s office and realized I couldn’t access any webmail through their proxies, so had to rewrite couple of scripts from scratch.
I guess you get the picture. Finding my old notes got ineffective, time consuming (and lame!). I wanted to find my notes in matter of couple seconds, not give up after minutes.
So we decided to write a solution for ourselves with a friend.
A lightweight online note keeping system. And by lightweight I mean lightweight!
Not bloated with completely unnecessary clutter like imitating post-its on screen, why the hell would I want that?! We did our homework and looked for sites which would solve the problem for us. Found none. Even the google ones weren’t simple and easy enough to use.
I just want to quickly note down whatever’s on my mind (or on screen). And then quickly look it up again whenever I want to and wherever I want to. And preferably with an easy keyboard shortcut.
So we started coding http://n.otepad.com.
When developing, we realized this service could be useful to others as well. So we made its appearance and stylesheets suck less and added some more features.
For example, I wanted to have a place where to keep my private scripts which I use at my consulting assignments.
However I usually publish my scripts whenever I have time to tidy them up and document them. Now I (and you) can use n.otepad infrastructure for doing so. I posted the “sample.sql” script of my last blog entry at n.otepad: http://tanelpoder.otepad.com/script:sample.sql
Also we added one more convenience function – if you have signed up to n.otepad, you can just send emails from your registered email address to n@otepad.com and these will become notes in your n.otepad “inbox”.
Anyway, check it out and feel free to give feedback. Bear in mind that this service is written by couple of geeks in their spare time, we are still in beta and most of the cool stuff what we want to put in there isn’t in yet.
In other words, if we suck, let us know, but don’t blame us ;-)
Tanel,
I can relate to this post so much. A great idea!! Keep up the good work.
Cheers!!
Comment by A reader — August 27, 2008 @ 2:04 am
I like the concept. A couple quick things based on my 2 minutes of playing around… It would be really nice to be able to search the notes themselves (instead of just the title). Otherwise you have to put some thought into the title (which to me defeats the purpose of a quick note keeping system).
Also (a much easier fix), when selecting your time zones there are what appear to be duplicates. For example, Canada/Eastern and US/Eastern both show as Eastern in the drop down.
Comment by Craig Martin — August 27, 2008 @ 3:41 am
I am also using emails sent to myself to keep notes but this “n.otepad.com” service is much better solution.
When I have important note – I leave that mail as unread to distinguish that mail from others. So probably I would miss that in your service. Maybe you should add labels (just a suggestion).
Thanks and keep on good work ;)
Comment by msutic — August 27, 2008 @ 6:23 am
Thanks for the comments so far!
Craig, please use ?keyword for full text searching for now (with leading ?), currently the default search goes through the titles only.
But you’re right, we should make the full-text search the default and make title-only search optional. I’m on it :)
Msutic, great idea. I often mark my emails back unread if I want to follow up them later. So, we’ll introduce a way to flag notes as done/not done in an easy way.
Comment by tanelp — August 27, 2008 @ 10:12 am
Tanel, did you have a look at Backpack? http://www.backpackit.com/
Comment by Yas — August 27, 2008 @ 4:39 pm
Thanks Yas,
Yep we checked the backpack out too, it has some very nice features. But it’s bloated just like google notes.
I just want to write notes down – quickly, not create pages, lists or figure how to use a yet another content management system. Too much mouse-clicking around, while I just want to “open->write->save”, nothing more :)
Comment by tanelp — August 27, 2008 @ 4:55 pm
I think this is awesome, and I share the “open->write->save” totally.
Perfect place for me to keep a copy of scripts and such.
Thanks,
Magnus
Comment by Magnus — August 27, 2008 @ 8:56 pm
Good stuff.
With the consulting assignments in mind and inaccessibility of webmail, it would be nice if you could register more than one email address to the “otepad” – one that you normally post from and one from the latest client site?
Comment by dombrooks — August 27, 2008 @ 9:25 pm
“, I just realized this post is loosely related to Oracle :)”
Ooh, double use from one parens
Comment by Brian Tkatch — August 27, 2008 @ 9:32 pm
Looks like a really nice tool… I’ve been managing similar stuff with unsent draft e-mails in my gmail account (which has been kind of annoying), I’ll certainly give this a shot. Thanks!
Comment by Chris — August 27, 2008 @ 10:18 pm
Thanks Magnus!
I haven’t had a chance to write a note about creating a keyboard shortcut for n.otepad.com URL (of course it’s easy)… but there’s one more cool use case in addition to just bringing up n.otepad front page.
You can drag an *edit* link of a note to your desktop (or add to browser favorites) and create keyboard shortcut for that.
That way, whenever you press the keyboard shortcut and *edit* window with that note pops up immediately. You can search within it using CTRL+F, edit it and then hit TAB and ENTER to save. No mouse involved and no need to navigate around in some favorites menu :)
Comment by tanelp — August 27, 2008 @ 10:24 pm
Dominic, yes, I have the muliple e-mail feature high on my todo list! That’s also the classic issue of sending notes from office to home and vice versa. I’ll keep you updated!
Comment by tanelp — August 27, 2008 @ 10:27 pm
Brian, yeah, this saved me couple of keystrokes ;)
Comment by tanelp — August 27, 2008 @ 10:29 pm
[...] Tanel Poder is working on an online version on notepad that I think is pretty cool. You can read about it here. [...]
Pingback by Magnus’ Tech Blog » Blog Archive » Online Notepad — August 27, 2008 @ 10:40 pm
Couple experimental features:
1) You can take notes by sending email to n@otepad.com from your registered email address (I have re-mentioned this because I think it’s cool :)
2) Quickly create notes by accessinng URLs like
http://n.otepad.com/+this is a new noteAnything after the + is added as note.
So when you happen to be at an interesting webpage and want to bookmark it, you can just type otepad.com/+ in front of that URL.
Or better yet, use the Javascript snippet for n.otepad bookmarking as explained in feature 3:
3) n.otepad bookmark creation in javascript, as demoed here:
http://tanelpoder.com/note.html
make sure you check out the single line of source code of that script, it’s kind of fun and self-referencing :)
4) URL-bar searching
want look up that old note, but no n.otepad window open?
you can open up a blank browser window and just type n.otepad.com/blah if you want to search for “blah” in note *titles*.
if you want to do a full text search for “blah”, then you can do it this way: n.otepad.com/?blah
5) so basically anything you can write into n.otepad searchbox, you can type directly to the URL. so this acts as a extremely simple API to n.otepad.
this leads me to the coolest feature I’ve come up with this week (at least in my opinion).
check out this windows .cmd file snippet:
@start /min "n.otepad.com/%*" "http://n.otepad.com/%*"save this to a n.cmd for example in a directory in your PATH.
this means that whenever you want to add a note, you don’t even need to open a browser yourself, you just hit WINKEY+R (which is equivalent to Start->Run) and then type “n +my new note” to insert a new note or “n ?oracle” to search for notes with oracle in them.
so, even less keystrokes and mouse moves (brrr..) needed!
the last feature is easily doable in x-windows (and im sure in macos) as well. in KDE i think the shortcut is ALT+F2 for opening the “start->run” box. Instead of “start” command you’d be using “firefox” for example.
phew… i need to properly document these features.. but heck there’s so much to do first :)
your feedback and feature wishlist (and definitely-do-not-do-this list) input is highly appreciated! :)
Comment by tanelp — August 27, 2008 @ 11:02 pm
I like the idea of this tool, especially sending notes by mail (I usualy write draft and not send them).
Also It’s make me discovered http://pygments.org, very interesting as I sometime make LaTeX documents (beamer presentations) it could be helpful for code highlighting in them.
Comment by Aurelien — August 28, 2008 @ 12:12 am
Tanel,
This is good stuff..
BTW, did you check out google notebook?? I recently started using it due the same issue you encountered and I like it.. YMMV..
It already has lot more feature like word like formatting, export, sharing etc…
Of course! I agree some sites may have some restriction on google too..
-Dharmendra.
Comment by Dharmendra — August 28, 2008 @ 2:15 am
Thanks Aurelien and Dharmendra!
Making notes via email currently works but needs some improvement. Right now we just store the plain text part of an HTML message for example. We need to figure out what’s the best (and safest) way for presenting HTML content in n.otepad. Also we currently don’t send error messages back if email is not loaded. This needs to be fixed ASAP :)
Yep I’ve checked google notebook as well. Like backpackit, it’s quite powerful, but misses the core idea of a notepad which is “open->type->save” and do it quickly. There’s too much navigating around needed with google notes and the note & subnote creation stuff makes the notetaking too complex.
On the other hand, our service is very, very basic right now, but we wanted to get it out quickly to get feedback from wider audience. I think we do have a niche where there are no other (decent) players right now.
Of course, YMMV :)
thanks for comments!
Comment by tanelp — August 28, 2008 @ 5:34 pm
Tanel,
Wonderful, I’m already addicted! just one simple question: I can, obviously, delete notes on the highest level, but in “history” mode it seems not to be working: is it as designed or on your to do list?
regards
Comment by Obfuscated Greek — August 28, 2008 @ 8:41 pm
We thought that the history would be useful in cases where you accidentially delete some of your note text and want to get it back. Also, we plan to have diff functionality between versions of a note.
We are thinking of adding just a “purge history” button so you could keep only the most recent version(s) of a note.
Or do you think every old version should have a “delete” link?
Comment by tanelp — August 28, 2008 @ 9:43 pm
Tanel, the fact that there IS, or appears to be, a ‘delete’ link for every version, triggered me to use it. Don’t know how other users experience this but for me it would be useful to have it, as well as a purge option; but both could be to much to ask for.
thx, Gert Jan
Comment by Obfuscated Greek — September 1, 2008 @ 2:54 pm
Thanks Gert,
I’ll keep this request in mind when we develop the next feature set. Not sure when we release the next version yet (as we do this from our spare time), but we sure will release a new version in near future :)
Comment by tanelp — September 1, 2008 @ 3:31 pm
Hi Tanel
Great, great, great!! Now I finally have the chance to go to customers without my own notebook, where I keep my Scripts and Notes. I also replaces my grep -irl searches ;-)
Today I finally found the time to read your blog entry from august 26 and immediately thought about a cool feature. I would be great if I could just add your public note to my private notes, so I would not need to copy&paste it.
It’s great to hear that you will implement the multi email address feature.
keep up the good work
Daniel
Comment by Daniel — September 1, 2008 @ 4:34 pm
Tanel,
This is pretty cool. I’ve been using the new version of EverNote for much the same purpose – available everywhere, copy and save from a webpage, quick & easy searching. It’s also free (for the basic version).
Yes, it has more features and therefore more clicking. But that’s sometimes a good thing. You can easily grab stuff from FireFox or ThunderBird and save it into your EverNote notebooks with addons that let you save things with just a button-click. There’s a Windoze and Mac client, but you can also use the browser interface. The best part is that you can sync them all easily. It will also read and index the text from inside a PDF document or JPEG image, allowing you to search on that text too. You can also organize your stuff into individual notebooks.
In a sense, it’s kinda like Google Notebook (which you’ve said is overkill for your needs). I just wanted to point out this alternative to others. I have no connection to Evernote other than a beta-tester/user.
Good luck with this. I think it has a lot of possibilities for many people.
Comment by Stew — September 3, 2008 @ 7:52 pm
Hi Stew,
Yep, Evernote is very powerful.. definitely a strong productivity tool. But again, too much hassle getting a simple note written down (why a separate subject line box while the first line of note itself can serve as subject). also, why can’t i fully access all my notes on a single page, but have to view some thumbnails etc..
btw, we were also thinking about ability for adding tags and such to notes… but then we realized the subject line itself should be the tagline…
but sure – it’s matter of preference… (but n.otepad is better ;)
Comment by tanelp — September 4, 2008 @ 1:43 am
Nice Stuff.
Is there the function to create more than one notes, e.g. Oracle notes, Linux notes, etc…
It would be nice to have the option to tag entry.
Comment by mdinh — September 12, 2008 @ 12:35 am
Hi mdinh,
The idea is that you can put the tags into the subject line (which is just the first line of the note). that way there’s no separate tag entry required, but you can just put it all into the note itself.
and then you can do tag/subject search (using search box) or you can store multiple URLs for your notes.
let say for Oracle notes you always use Oracle somewhere in first line of the note and for Unix you use the word unix.
So, you can store/use different URLs for displaying different notes. for Oracle it would be http://n.otepad.com/oracle and for unix http://n.otepad.com/unix respectively.
Comment by tanelp — September 13, 2008 @ 12:05 pm
Thanks for putting together stack profiling with Dtrace. It’s been a great help for me.
Comment by Jeroen — September 18, 2008 @ 12:22 pm
Great thing!
Unfortunately our company policy does not allow to store work related information outside our own it infrastructure.
Are you planning to release the engine behind n.otepad under a commercial or opensource license.
Comment by Marco — October 6, 2008 @ 6:00 pm
Tanel,
what has happened to n.otepad.com ? It seems to have been down for migration for some time now.
Cheers,
Comment by Andy Helm — January 16, 2009 @ 5:45 am
I’ve finally managed to find enough time to get the otepad up on the new virtual server.
As the whole otepad thing is kind of a prototype, it took quite a lot to get everything moved to new server (lots of dependencies and issues with python & django & libraries which required troubleshooting. I was doing this from my free time and unfortunately I haven’t had much of that lately.
Note that note editing functionality isn’t working right now (it bombs with an exception) but you can access your notes and add/remove them too. I try to look into this in coming weeks.
Comment by Tanel Poder — February 8, 2009 @ 4:01 am
Great Idea, and I remembered it from seeing you demo it ages ago, hence my re-visit Today.
As a vi/notepad addict, I really need something like this.
but.. (there is always a but, or rather a request for help)
I’m currently on the look for something that will also allow me to run files such as “demo.sql” straight from the web…
SQL> @n.otepad.com/myname/demo.sql
Is that something n.otepad.com can do ?
(as a bonus, you would get plenty of ora-groupies storing their favorite SQL in your tool).
Regards
PdV
Comment by pdevisser — May 23, 2009 @ 2:29 pm
Hi Piet,
sqlplus’s http/ftp running engine can’t support (session) cookies as far as I know. So you’d need to publish your scripts… and we’d need to implement some plain-text download option.
However please don’t use this service anymore. Due some implementation decisions this service turned out to be very time consuming to maintain (and patch etc). So I’ll be shutting this service down some time. Sorry about this.
Comment by Tanel Poder — May 23, 2009 @ 2:44 pm
Btw I use my other hosting provider for storing my scripts… so you can run @http://www.tanelpoder.com/files/scripts/snapper …. for example.
I don’t recommend to run scripts from there (in production at least) as I can’t guarantee that the hosting provider won’t replace the contents of some script with shutdown abort for example ;)
Comment by Tanel Poder — May 23, 2009 @ 2:45 pm
Tanel,
OK, thx.
No problem, I’ll find another place to host my sql-scripts and take notes (I have a mailaddress to serve as my notes-archive already).
I just did another blogpost with links to scripts-ready-to-run. And I dare someone to run one of mine in a “live” environment (disclaimers in place … I hope ).
But a nice, easy to remember website to store scripts is welcome. I may need to officialize my web-presence to store mine somewhere…
Have a good Evening!
Comment by pdv — May 23, 2009 @ 2:55 pm