
A Meta-Layer for Notes - julian_digital
https://julian.digital/2020/09/04/a-meta-layer-for
======
gumby
The author is correct that notes function best when they aren’t soloed, but
that’s true of applications in general.

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?

~~~
whoisthemachine
That's an interesting observation. An e-mail client that would allow you to
route e-mails to different folders on your system (not folders within its own
filesystem or database) would be very powerful, especially for developers. Do
you know of such a program?

~~~
euoia
On a similar vein, how easy is it to programmatically process emails? I
receive a report every day as an email attachment that I would like to process
automatically. Right now, I’m doing part where I open the email and download
it manually.

~~~
gumby
You could retrieve it from your mail server via IMAP (say with tiny program
like fetchmail) and pope them through whatever program you like.

I run my own server so info stuff like this automatically as the mail comes
in.

The people saying “use smtp” don’t know what they are talking about: SMTP is
the protocol for _delivering_ mail to a host. You want to process the message
as or after it arrives.

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webmaven
The proposed functionality of attaching a note to a semantic context (eg. a
note attached to a person, popping up in email, LinkedIn, chat, etc.) is well
taken, but the spatial aspect hasn't been thought through enough.

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.

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catchmeifyoucan
You can achieve this with Amna! (disclaimer: I built it). The described sticky
notes approach can actually fall flat on two levels. One is that notes lack
order. We learned this from our user interviews. Users lose track of post it
notes all the time. Things just “slip”. The other side effect is that it can
be overwhelming to have a bunch of notes everywhere. You’re back at square 1
if notes exist in the apps. Rather, the app must exist in the note (idk if
that makes sense, I can clarify)

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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780781))

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garrettm
I love that this problem space is getting more attention! I totally agree
information is way more useful in context and in a common place. A meta layer
would be very interesting, but I struggle to see how it would be technically
possible to implement (outside of the browser) -- maybe for anyone except for
Apple. We've been approaching a similar problem to what hey is tackling from a
different angle, at [https://www.twobird.com](https://www.twobird.com)

~~~
nwienert
We built a sub-100ms OCR system for Mac and built an accompanying app that
sort of did this, but eventually pivoted away. It’s on my GitHub though, two
different versions of it.

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mellosouls
The obvious answer to the title* "er, sticky notes" would miss the more
interesting observations of the article, particularly wrt spatial and event
based note taking.

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?"

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bschne
Reading this reminded me of part of Bret Victor's 2006 "Magic Inc" [1]. The
utopia Victor envisions is somewhat related to this post, but taken further
and extended to all kinds of data - not just notes.

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.

1\. [http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/](http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/)

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eternalban
I just submitted this for the related (but oft-forgotten) project -
_Lifestreams_ :

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24391846](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24391846)

~~~
catchmeifyoucan
another gem: [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aura/](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aura/)

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howmayiannoyyou
On target.

Would be a killer Chrome extension if such an extension can work across
domains in this manner. Take my money.

~~~
althaffe
Working on something similar for a while now. Soon!

~~~
lachlan-sneff
I'd be grateful if you could notify me when you release what you're working
on. Email is in profile. Thank you :)

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lcall
The best I have found is ... not like sticky notes, but rather to form a habit
of using lists, a few alarms, and a calendar (and anki or the like), using
whatever tools (such as my [http://onemodel.org](http://onemodel.org) , but
there are many choices). This way I make a "self program" so I am reminded of
the right things at the right times and not distracted by them otherwise. Some
people also appreciate the whole GDT thing.

~~~
lcall
Edit: I also treat email like a to-do list, but it defers to my knowledge
management system (linked in my parent comment) which tries to be complete
like the OP suggests, but is AGPL, and has a similar but broader vision (not
all features present yet, but hoping, and I use it every day). In it, every
bit of knowledge is treated like the real-life "thing" that it is, and linked
with everything else desired.

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voiper1
I've hard the first part for years with boomerang (there are other similar
things, and google baked in most of the functionality) to get emails back when
you're ready for them.

Also, I would send myself an email within the email thread.

Things that have been possible for quite some time.

