Show HN: WebStickies – Sticky notes for the internet

Hah, I was actually thinking of this but couldn't remember what it was called. Thank you! This thing is really great!

thank you!

That they can't float over windows in all spaces is particularly annoying

these are good ideas, thank you

This is super cool. Any idea how Tris.com is able to get Google Search results?

That's a neat idea. Quite ambitious, but agreed it would be cool

You 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.

More 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.

I'm quite unfamiliar with Web3 so can't say that I do.

Thanks 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 :)

This was genius.com’s pitch at one point right after they secured a massive funding round from a16z I believe - “annotate the web!”.

Didn’t really work out for them: https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/genius-sold-medialab-w...

I used this for a while in 1999...

http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~orit/utok.html

I imagine nowadays all the notes would just be like any online comments section: fighting and name-calling about anything and everything

Hypothesis is one that has been interesting to use for web article annotation. It lets you save quotes and comments on articles https://web.hypothes.is/

A big problem from what I recall were legal ones. E.g., owners of a website did not fancy random comments graffitied over their content. I believe a few lawsuits were filed. Also spam problems arose. This caused the makers of such software to hobble functionality, making the resulting product less interesting and so these products were not successful.

This may be a good application for decentralized storage with free browser extensions that would circumvent much of the legal threads - although I imagine lawsuits could and would still be filed against Chrome, Firefox etc for enabling such extensions, even if they were free.

Back 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.

I 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.

StumbleUpon had something like this, you could go to a webpage and comment on it and others could see your comments. I stopped using it as it was a massive time waster/procrastination tool. But was pretty cool.

I recall this too. It was very controversial at the time and fizzled out.

Wasn't it one of the marketed feature of Microsoft Edge before it was scrapped and replaced with Chromium?

There 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.

Third Voice[0] did shared annotation in ‘99.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Voice

I remember something where you could doodle and comment on any website, but pages usually devolved into spam and drawings of... you can imagine.

I thought this was Google’s initial goal.

Thanks 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.

Interesting.. I took the color scheme from the Stickies application on MacOS, so hopefully 3M goes after Apple before me :)

Oh, 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.

Thank you! And thanks for the feedback

Awesome! Thanks for the comment

an intriguing idea :)

Unfortunately Apple has substantially more hoops to jump through in order to publish to the Safari extension store. Maybe in the future.

Thanks 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_Ref...

I 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.

For note taking I'd only ever use extensions with no permissions needed. "Tagged notes" is an example of a good, simple notes extensions for Firefox.

If I need sync, I'd prefer not to rely on the extension for that. Why would I pay for my own cloud service AND a separate payment for random apps that use their own sync? Most people have their own online storage, and should always be the number 1 way to backup things like personal notes.

If it is a well known extension i will trust it, but often i find myself to extract the extension and Look at the "source code" if it is not open source.

I only install extensions that are either have low permissions or are blessed by Firefox.

uBlock Origin is the only "access your data for all websites" extension I use.

so what if it reads your passwords if it has no network permission to exfiltrate?