

Aaron Swartz's Jottit has been officially released - rob
http://jottit.com/
"Hi there. Sorry to bother you, but you asked me 
to send you an email when Jottit was out for you 
to take a look at. Well, after a lot of hard work 
by my creators, Simon Carstensen and Aaron Swartz, 
I'm happy to say that things are finally ready.<p>Take a look at<p><a href="http://jottit.com/" rel="nofollow">http://jottit.com/</a><p>and let me know what you think. (Just reply to 
this email!)<p>Thanks so much,
 - Jottit.com"
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tx
Awesome. A Web 2.0 version of 'echo'! My old joke about Web 2.0 version of
"hello world" is not funny anymore.

~~~
dhbradshaw
What tx says is funny. The site is absolutely simple.

I love it though. I just started learning html and javascript last week and
now this thing provides an instant compiler. I change the border size on a
table and, BOOM! Right when I finish typing the border shows up with the
correct size. I see what it looks like instantly and can change what I want
when I want. There isn't any clicking, switching windows, sftp-ing,
downloading software, or anything.

It's simple and I love it. Since it handles Javascript I now have an instant
way to deploy simple functions and tables. I can figure some useful relation,
put it up using html and Javascript, and suddenly anyone anywhere has easy
access to my results.

This thing also provides an instant way to write and test content for Google
Gadgets, something even more useful than the editor Google provides.

And I think the design is clean, nice, and simple.

~~~
axod
If all you want is a preview functionality, how about

<textarea name=foo
onkeyup="document.getElementById('preview').innerHTML=this.value;"></textarea>
<div id=preview></div>

Hardly rocketscience is it...

~~~
breck
Or try the Web Developer Extension for Firefox:

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60>

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henning
Allows links, doesn't have nofollow or CAPTCHAs in place. Anyone wanna take
bets on how long before it turns into a giant cesspool of spam?

~~~
pg
I'm sure they'll make links nofollow. It's not hard.

~~~
mojuba
Since Jottit doesn't link to its users' pages, their rank in the beginning is
0, and so is their attractiveness for spammers. Once Jottit builds a catalogue
of user pages, it's dead.

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forgotmylastone
Now maybe his co-founder will leave, and the founders of Digg will be so
impressed that they invite him to be a co-founder--on equal terms.

~~~
palish
Oh, give it a rest. At least Aaron's still creating value even though he's
already rich. He could just sit by the pool all day.

~~~
bluishgreen
He could have or he could waste his time. He chose the later and why is that
impressive?

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thomasptacek
Why is this interesting?

~~~
mojuba
In the first place it shows how user registration should look like.

~~~
thomasptacek
You mean, like Mediawiki?

~~~
mojuba
Have you tried jottit? I can't imagine anything simpler than that, I mean the
registration process. Although the idea itself is probably not new.

~~~
thomasptacek
I don't get it. Can you really "win" with an application just by making
registration easier? I know the "every field, half your users" rule, but... is
there anything more to this application?

~~~
Goladus
Here are my observations.

It's clean

A demonstration of what the site does happens in one click.

The editing view is responsive and fun to play with.

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cstejerean
Wow, I'm quite surprised that so few of the people that have commented see the
value in this. I just took a look at the site and I have to say it looks
awesome and I can definitely see exactly what it was trying to address. It's
not a blogging tool and it's not anything like Wikipedia. IMO it's simply a
place to take notes, have them be available from anywhere else and I'm
guessing to share them with others. As the name implies you simply jot
something down. I love the fact that you can do that right on the home page,
no annoying clicks. It reminds me of OneNote which I used to use on Windows or
Google Notebook.

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garbowza
I too am struggling with the value of this site. However, I think the
minimalist design is very compelling.

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dallasrpi
I'm reminded of the story "The Emperor's New Clothes". Jottit is the emperors
invisible clothes.

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crxnamja
another pointless project. yawn.

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kcl
Hey, Google has this same layout but when I click the button it gives me back
something useful

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create_account
At least you guys got to see it.

Right now, this is what <http://jottit.com/> says:

 _500 - Internal Server Error_

What, no customized error page?

~~~
jamongkad
I checked it it's up again. Tried using it but I can't seem to find the value
in it....

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imp
I like the user interface a lot. The color scheme picker is sweet, and it's
fun to see changes in real time. Since it's so easy to use, I'm sure there
will be people who find it useful.

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Kaizyn
This site is neat in that it works simply. However, since this site is largely
geared to hackers AND startup founders, what is its target market and how can
they make money off of it? Or is the object here to be purchased by Google or
one of the other sites that have bad HTML editors as their default?

~~~
rob
I don't think Aaron started it with the idea of how to make money from it.

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dfranke
Dangit, Aaron beat me to the punch with the idea of creating a globally-
modifiable page and then later creating an account to claim ownership. The
demo I'm working on right now works the same way. I'm still one-uping him,
though -- just a button on the front page, no text box.

~~~
mynameishere
Really? I'm doing the same thing, except it's just a button. When you click
the button, a page comes up and says, "You have clicked the button. To click
the button again, click the button" When you click the button again, it says,
"You have clicked the button again. To click the button again, click the
button again."

I'm trying to get it down to the absolute _minimum_ of annoying configuration
and deployment options. I don't think I'll ever match the masters though:

<http://www.zombo.com/>

~~~
dfranke
You have way too much text on your front page. It should just say, "Button
clicked. Click again to click again." Better yet, why not just click it for
them automatically? If they intended to do something else they'd have already
gone to another page.

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mojuba
I'm missing the comment functionality here though. Jottit may become a perfect
semi-blogging platform once they add commenting. "Semi" is because articles
won't be linked to the date of publishing - something that always annoyed me
on all other blogging platforms.

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ptn
What's the point of Jottit? I don't get it...

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electric
I actually like the simplicity and usefulness of this website. Congratulations
Aaron -- well done!!

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gustaf
So nice and so simple. I'm amazed

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brlewis
It's a good site in its own subtle way, but where's the purple cow?

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tiswaldo
Anyone know what they've written it with?

~~~
rob
Probably Python and web.py.

