

Rate my App HN: Minimal daily journal app. Just start typing. - awt
http://motodiaryapp.com

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gjenkin
Super simple. It just works. Given that it's a journal, it might be worth
thinking about how you would suggest to users that this service will be around
for longer than a few months, or how they can export their data to another
service in the event that this goes down. I wouldn't want to start keeping a
journal on a site that may be gone tomorrow.

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troutwine
Seems to force my hard-disk to sync every half-second. Not so very desirable
on a mobile device. For reference, I am:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.3 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome/6.0.472.59 Safari/534.3

Please do email me if you'd like more details.

~~~
mechanical_fish
It says that it's saving my work to local storage once per second. I do love
having seamless backups of my deathless prose, but this seems like overkill to
me. There are limits to how many brilliant thoughts I can type per second.
Every ten to fifteen seconds is probably fine.

~~~
awt
I hear you guys. Just trying to avoid the situation where you type something,
then close the tab shortly thereafter and lose what you typed.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I said to myself "man, isn't there a way to catch the tab close event in JS"?
And, lo, Google provides:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/138411/catching-a-tab-
clo...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/138411/catching-a-tab-close-event-
in-web-browser)

Mind you, I'm not the one who is going to have to debug this stupid idea
cross-browser, so please forgive the suggestion if it turns out to be stupid.
;)

~~~
troutwine
And a Jquery specific question/answer, as I note that our friend is using that
library: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1631959/browser-window-
cl...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1631959/browser-window-close-event)

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mechanical_fish
I went to click the "Sign In / Sign Up" link. It turns out that these are
_two_ links. The visual design and wording had led me to expect otherwise:
They're sort of close together, and worded with that alliterative wording and
the slash in between, and not distinguished by color or design.

Then, worse, I didn't have a link from the "Sign in" page to get to the "Sign
up" page. Even the classic, cheesy "if you do not have an account yet, please
sign up" sentence would have been welcome.

Fortunately I know about back buttons. But it is still a small rough spot in
an otherwise silky-smooth design.

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BenS
Could you explain what you see as the value over something like a google doc.
Not trying to be negative, just curious where you see it going.

~~~
awt
Simplicity -- Just one entry per day, automatically time stamped. Security --
Your entries are encrypted using JS before being sent to the server, so I, as
the sysadmin, can't read them and harass you as some google employees are
known to do.

~~~
whatusername
Don't you as the sysadmin have access to the keys though? Even using an
evercookie or something like that -- I fail to see what prevents you (Your
malicious twin lets say) from seeing these?

~~~
awt
The key (which is generated from the password), is stored using localStorage
while the user has the app unlocked. I could certainly send myself the key
somehow, but the concerned user should be able to snort that out fairly
easily. I guess one option would be to opensource all or part of the js.

~~~
whatusername
So if I blow away my local storage I'm hosed?

~~~
hachiya
Doesn't sound like it. The key would probably be regenerated from the password
and stored in localStorage again.

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stevedekorte
I dig the UI. Very clean.

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awt
FYI for those of you who are curious how many hits you get from a post like
this: 816 so far. (posted 2 hrs ago).

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d4ft
I'm not much of journaler, but I think the execution is excellent. Only
suggestion: include OpenID or OAuth option for sign up and sign in, so you can
have single click access if you want your own account. Should help keep that
streamlined feel.

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Nick_C
A small suggestion: allow for European date formats, or change the date format
so it is not ambiguous (10/1 = 1-Oct or 10-Jan?). Non-US users get their
knickers in a knot about things like that. Especially when they later want to
sort the data.

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swah
I clicked "Try now", it didn't asked for my email. YES!

~~~
swah
What about putting the front page as the initial content of the journal, and
skipping the "Try now" part?

~~~
christonog
You could have the initial text all highlighted, so after reading the user can
literally start typing.

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aberkowitz
Your use of browser detection scripts frustrates me. You should test for
features instead if you want to get conclusive data.

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shortlived
Maybe shrink the vertical space a bit so the "try it now" button is guaranteed
to be visible without scrolling..

~~~
shortlived
Also, support Firefox.

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awt
Will do :(. Right now there isn't great local js storage support in FF.

~~~
dpcan
You MUST say this on the website, otherwise, it's purely frustrating. My first
thought was "how dumb", and you really don't want that. Had I known this was
the reason, I would understand and try another browser.

~~~
awt
Done.

~~~
iliketosleep
i tried on IE8. no luck.

~~~
awt
Do you have chrome frame installed?

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awt
Anybody have suggestions as to how to market this app?

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tomcreighton
A tiny, tiny nitpick - it's 'no one', not 'noone'.

