Jjot.com launch - take notes online, fast
I’ve just launched a new service that helps you take notes online. It’s like sticky notes on the web. If you’ve ever emailed yourself a reminder note so you could have it on more than one computer, or if you have tons of small text or Word files scattered across your computer, then this is for you. It’s good at keeping small notes (meeting notes, todos, class notes, web research) in one place, which you can then access from any computer. They’re very easy to edit.
I wanted Jjot to be as fast as possible, because I hate having to click on links and suffer page refreshes just to write something down quickly, or see all of my notes. With Jjot, you can type in just eight characters (”jjot.com”) and have all of your notes in front of you (not just links to them — the whole note), fully editable and ready to print or email to people. The only thing faster is to directly read your mind, and we’re working on that for the next release.
There are lots of desktop applications for taking notes, and a few on the web. I made Jjot because they all seem to suck in some way. Can’t we just keep things simple? I don’t need social video blogging in every app I use! For me, Jjot by comparison is refreshingly simple. When you go there, you get a page of note-like objects (looking like actual notes is important!). It does exactly what you’d you expect: you can type in them. No links to hunt through, no weird interfaces to figure out.
I admit, I get frustrated easily, but I don’t want to load a new page just to see the contents of my note, and I don’t want to have to worry about clicking a save button. Any slowdowns really hurt the effectiveness of an app that you use every day. Speed is key; we’ve got speed.
Give it a shot; I think it’s a very useful app. You can drag notes around, create bullet points, create noteboards, email notes to people or share a whole noteboard with them, print it, whatever. It’s fun just to play with it =) Try the search — it searches-as-you-type, and it’s wicked fast.
After 5 months of hacking, I can say something like this is damn hard to make, if you want to do it right. Designing a good UI is always hard, but the client-side scripting on Jjot needed to be very sophisticated. Here are a few examples:
We could have used one of the rich text editors on the web, but they are slow, poorly coded, and hard to extend with the feature set we need. So we wrote our own; it has capabilities no other editor has, like really fast initialization (important when you have tens of these editors on one page), drag and drop abilities, and support for those blue titles we use. That was really hard, but it’s made a big difference.
We could give you a save button or a “wait” cursor whenever you change something, but that would slow you down to a snail’s pace. So we’ve made everything save completely asynchronously, in the background, without bothering you at all. Much harder, but it’s the behavior we want as users.
We’ve engineered something that springs up quickly even on dialup and satellite connections. It’s easier to say “forget users with slow connections”, but we hate waiting. So we’ve made our site really slim.
Please, let me know if Jjot works for you — bug reports, usability comments, feature requests, or anything else can always be sent here:
or just leave a comment. Enjoy!