(I'm one of the authors) Love seeing this on HN today! It seems to get some front page attention every couple of years. Thank you everyone for the encouragement!
The five of us who built this spend a lot of time reviewing code each day and thought it should be less depressing and more fun. Let us know if you have improvement ideas, or even better, pull requests on Github. Thanks, and enjoy!
I wrote this for TextMate. Not nearly as good as built-in support, but I program 10 hours a day with it and it's saved me millions of keystrokes. https://github.com/philc/textmatevim
It's far simpler in that it just reloads your CSS continually. We use it all the time at Ooyala to put our favorite text editor and a web browser side-by-side and hack away.
Unfortunately Safari doesn't really have a well-developed extensions system. Until they add one, extensions like this will only be available for chrome and firefox.
I'm one of the developers for Ninjawords. Thanks everyone for sharing in our frustration. I thought this was a bit ridiculous as we were going back and forth with Apple, but I didn't know it would cause such public outrage. I guess Apple is really striking a nerve recently in exercising their totalitarian App Store powers. I hope they're interested in rectifying the developer experience, because it really is a great device to build software for. It's just that months of rejection over an innocuous educational utility tends to crush any excitement, you know?
Also consider Heroku if it's a ruby webapp you're building. It's free until you need more resources, and is zero-fuss to get something deployed and set up.
I've wanted a good implementation of web-irc for a long time. That alone is cool enough for me.
However, the UI is really bad; I'm not sure where to begin. Once I log into an irc server, how do I play games? I remember seeing a selection for it when I first came to mibbit, but now it is gone.
When I first start chatting my messages aren't visible (because they're scrolled offscreen).
And it's really, painfully ugly. You might want to recruit a UI designer, or steal some styles from adium or xchat.
stikkit is cool, but doesn't quite hit the nail we're aiming for. It turns out to be another wiki product, similar to BaseCamp, while Jjot is a light-weight WYSIWYG notes application. Try playing with Jjot for a few minutes to see what I mean. An example:
To edit one of my notes on Stikkit, I have to
- scan through the titles of my notes
- guess which one contains the info I need, click it, (hit back and click again if I'm wrong)
- find a small "edit" button somewhere on the page
- wait for the page to reload
- enter some text using some markup language
- hit save
With Jjot:
- scan the contents of my notes (they're all on the same page, fully editable)
- Edit the one I'm looking for, using a visual editor
That's it. No save buttons to worry about, no markup language (Jjot uses a rich text editor), and everything is on the same page. It really is sticky notes on the web.
I think Stikkit is a promising product, but I wouldn't say it meets the same needs as Jjot. If I wanted something heavier than Jjot, I might consider Stikkit, BaseCamp, or maybe an online word processor like writewith.
I also find it mildly annoying that they label my contacts "peeps," but to each his own.
Hey, glad to find this here. I was just about to post it.
This is my startup; I'm working with one other guy full time on it. We applied to ycombinator, got the in-person interview, but didn't make the summer program. You can't win them all.
I made this because I felt there's really no simple & fast way to take down short notes (meeting/class notes, todos, brainstorming, random links) online. I don't know about you, but I've been using Gmail drafts, writely, and 37signals stuff for some time and it's not really designed for this use case. I find myself thinking "just show me my notes -- don't make me click on a link to see each one" when I use products like Gmail drafts.
So here's our stab at this market. It follows the same design philosophy I try to use everywhere -- simple, lean, focused. If you've ever watched a casual computer user flounder when trying a new web2.0 app, you'll know the value of being brutally straight-forward and obvious. Jjot is obvious: you've got a bunch of boxes that look like paper notes, and you can type in them. There's a lot more to it, but that's the gist.
We launched recently and the reception has been pretty good. We were on delicious popular over the weekend, and were (inexplicably) moved from that list to web2.0 popular-
http://del.icio.us/popular/web2.0
There's been a few posts about Jjot on the web, including one from lifehacker. Now that we've got a few users to get feedback from and improve the service, we can really work on getting some more traction. Running a service with users is 5x as fun as the building stage. All of a sudden, a lot of people care about and take notice of each change you make.
I'd love to hear any comments/ideas/criticisms; news.yc always has good product feedback. If anyone is curious as to how this thing is built (it uses some fancy client-side coding), I'd be happy to talk about it.
Both of those sound just fine, and I think the extra clutter you'll have in your namcespaces will be worth the extra exposure you get from not forcing people to sign up.
Juwo, this is the most confusing thing I've ever looked at. I have a feeling the product is not very focused itself, and thus is hard to convey. If you can't convey it in a single page with a few terse sentences (ala skype.com), you might need to redesign and make it simpler.
I'm glad you're a Christian, but a company-about page is probably not the best place for pro/con links. It's distracting.
Related: last week I published a very similar extension, but for Google Sheets. https://github.com/philc/sheetkeys