I’ve been dreaming for a while for a note taking app where I could research ideas from many of my ‘collections’ and put them together visually in a sort of canvas. My collections here refer to everything I save: my personal notes, but also Readwise (affiliate link) highlights, Pinterest saves, twitter bookmarks, my own substack notes…
(I've talked about the first hurdle here -> i only wish for rss on social media profiles).
There are many tools that already have a sort of canvas where you can put stuff:
- the Freeform on mac (but it’s not plugged in my collections directly)
- the Obsidian canvas feature (I had much hope there, but it’s very clunky, and I don’t like the way it looks, and it would require me to make a single file per saved readwise highlight, which.. no)
- Sublime has a canvas, but it felt like building on borrowed land
Sublime is actually a tool I like a lot (ive unlocked sublime), but it’s ultimately a social media. Which I don’t want to add more of in my life.
So I built an alternative for myself.
I started with the first part of the solution : somewhere where I could save pictures and quotes and have collections. Basically an online database connected to a browser extension.
And I was already impressed with this.
Over the first few weeks of use, I started adding more stupidly personal features (permission software) :
- having the browser detect if it was my own tweets or Substack note and tag it in the right collection
- make the text-only entries show on a nice colored background (and choosing my own color palette for this was FUN)
- had a filter to check only text entries or only image entries
I've decided to add my own substack notes and replies here too, because I'm a believer in archiving your own stuff (if only for quick AI access). Ultimately, I'd like this to be automated but for now it's just manual saving through the browser extensions (see again : i only wish for rss on social media profiles).
Another point for improvement will be to allow me to save stuff from my phone. But I had a system that was working enough to make the second part worth building : the canvas.
The idea was dead-simple : have a place where I can search and drop the items of this database onto an infinite canvas system. It's a way to think a little more visually.
It took Codex 10 minutes to do this, to which I then added a couple of added features :
- saving and having several canvas
- being able to add extra notes in there (like neon green sticky notes)
- search by collections
- that same 'image/text/all' filter that we had on the database front
And then I thought I'd have a hard time adding another source of 'cards' : my readwise collection. One because it's an external tool and I was already seeing myself having to export a CVS every other day to get my latest entries. And two because my readwise highlight collection is MASSIVE (10k+ highlights).
But honestly, again, 10 minutes of work and Codex had a running automated readwise collection in there. Separated from the main database, which was what I wanted. And that syncs with a simple button.
Again, this is all synced between my devices since it's basically a web app.
Now I'm at the phase where I'm going to use the shit out of it, and grow a list of 'silly personal things I'd like to add to this' and see what's actually worth building.
The listing has already begun:
- a mind map function into the canvas
- the ability to draw on there
- find alternate solutions to automating the saving of my substack notes (and replies)
- saving from phone
- exporting my canvas in png (though this is simple enough with a screenshot)
I had SO MUCH FUN thinking and building this. And I'm ever so impressed with what can be done by just... asking how stuff can be made and then do it.