by julian_digital on 9/6/20, 1:31 PM with 24 comments
by gumby on 9/6/20, 2:52 PM
Why do mail programs maintain their own database of messages? It used to be quite handy to organize your projects by directory or tree, with mail files, presentations, code etc all kept together, greppable and with some choice of which program to run. Now if I am working on a couple of projects I have to search around (was that a slack note? An iMessage? Mail? Or perhaps it was a comment in a document?
by webmaven on 9/6/20, 9:05 PM
Attaching a reminder to a door only captures part of the intended context, it very much matters whether you are reminded upon leaving, arriving (or both). In meatspace, we can capture that additional context by placing the note on the inside or outside surface of the door (placing it outside also has the effect of making the note public, but we can ignore that aspect initially).
I think that in order to show up in most of (and mostly just in) the relevant contexts, true digital sticky notes would have to be both pretty smart and shoulder-surf your activity, which could be quite invasive.
Relatively benign example: should you be reminded of the 5-year-old note you posted for a hotel if you're booking a flight to the city the hotel is in? Does it matter if the note's sentiment was positive or negative? How about your note related to a person who lives in that city? After booking the flight? While making a hotel reservation in that city? How about while reading a Wikipedia article related to the history of that same city? What if the hotel is a historical landmark? What if the person is a historian?
All too easily, you could end up wading through a flurry of your own notes, reducing the odds you will notice the one you would want to see, but a false negative ends up negating the utility of the note entirely.
You can categorize notes and show or hide whole categories as "layers" over whatever you are doing, but now you are mostly back to having to interact with a silo to deal with that.
by catchmeifyoucan on 9/6/20, 3:40 PM
With Amna, you start with a task, and for each task start pulling information. Email is just one of many sources of action. Everything from a GitHub PR to Slack Message is an action waiting to be taken and notes to write. A todo app that connects everything better can be really powerful. It becomes the point of entry to get running. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780781)
by garrettm on 9/6/20, 9:18 PM
by mellosouls on 9/6/20, 2:28 PM
Mentioning this, as the title might be off-putting in the seeming banality of its question; it's not necessarily about Stickies or similar products..
*EDIT: original title here was "What’s the digital equivalent of sticky notes?"
by bschne on 9/6/20, 4:59 PM
The idea is fairly fundamental - ultimately, each application should know about whatever is relevant in their context, especially if other applications already know it (Victor goes into applications making smart guesses through ML methods or sensor data as well, but a big part of it is having access to data from other apps).
Of course, if you actually want to get all your apps to talk to eachother without causing a babylonian mess and/or compromising privacy completely, things get extremely tricky. But I do feel like OSes could develop further in this regard, at least for fairly standard data like events, notes, etc.
by eternalban on 9/6/20, 3:11 PM
by howmayiannoyyou on 9/6/20, 3:12 PM
Would be a killer Chrome extension if such an extension can work across domains in this manner. Take my money.
by lcall on 9/6/20, 5:04 PM
by voiper1 on 9/6/20, 2:25 PM
Also, I would send myself an email within the email thread.
Things that have been possible for quite some time.