Show HN: JournalBook – Privacy centric, offline first, personal journal app • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: JournalBook – Privacy centric, offline first, personal journal app

#31

Post by asien » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 1:18 PM UTC

tomerbd wrote: post #25

Any tips for a server side developers on how to create similar user interface? how was it created? fully custom? based on some frameworks?

Looking at the source code it’s done with Preact and the css seems to be written by hand.

I was a server side centric dev for a long period before being able to design decent apps.

Here are my tips:

- Spend as much time as possible on Photoshop / Adobe XD / Paint.Net or whatever software design you are using. Do not start to write any HTML or CSS before the design has all the pages done.

- Spend time in Design Network like Dribbble to be inspired by top notch creators

- Code stuff you see . If you see a design you like on Dribbble you should try to do it in HTML and CSS.

- Frameworks will not make you a good front end developers. The majority of front end devs just use Flexbox these days, frameworks are less and less important for CSS you’ll be faster if you just learn the behavior of html and css without frameworks.

- Be patient

Re: Show HN: JournalBook – Privacy centric, offline first, personal journal app

#32

Post by ClashTheBunny » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 1:20 PM UTC

aosaigh wrote: post #29

This is great, but I'd be worried about easily losing all of my journals by simply clearning my browser history and wiping everything unknowingly. Any plans to wrap this as an Electron app or something that could be installed on the desktop?

There is import and export in settings.

Re: Show HN: JournalBook – Privacy centric, offline first, personal journal app

#33

Post by vectorEQ » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 1:21 PM UTC

tomerbd wrote: post #25

Any tips for a server side developers on how to create similar user interface? how was it created? fully custom? based on some frameworks?

there's so many frameworks etc to create interfaces, in so many languages..

this is made mostly in JS so it runs clientside / offline (i think that would be the motivation to do it in js).

click view source in the browser :-) or 'inspect' if you use chrome, and look into the .js files which you find from there.

Should get you on your way :)

though if you are server side developer, maybe php is more interesting as it processes on server side and will be easier to interact with your server side developments

css language is used for style related things in any case (where elements might be generated from code like js or php, but css still reflects the style in the browser)

Re: Show HN: JournalBook – Privacy centric, offline first, personal journal app

#34

Post by vectorEQ » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 1:24 PM UTC

pretty_bubbles wrote: post #9

trys wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no sync (at this point) and no account creation by design. It's all stored in your browser - I suppose in that regard it is not 'online'! Sync may well be coming, but I'm not yet certain how to do it securely. That being said, import & export is available now, so it can be manually sync'd.

Client side encryption with a passphrase derived key and synchronization to Google Drive? That would work great for me.

it would be easiest yes to use something avalablee to people for free where good encryption things are present. but i suppose a lot of the world is waking up to the fact these things aren't so nice really, and offline storage for personal things is better.

it would be cool to have some export or import button to save everything into some kind of archive, then you can move it between offline machines and import it into the browser to use it there.

Re: Show HN: JournalBook – Privacy centric, offline first, personal journal app

#35

Post by tga » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 1:34 PM UTC

Angostura wrote: post #18

tga wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about because it directly works on all platforms, mobile + desktop? Also it looks like it's the platform the author was most proficient in, which is always a good reason when choosing your stack.

An RTF document would be more portable, surely?

Definitely, only with less functionality and not as pretty.

Re: Show HN: JournalBook – Privacy centric, offline first, personal journal app

#36

Post by sandrobfc » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 1:36 PM UTC

mcless wrote: post #24

_mischief wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> real offline alternatives How about https://tiddlywiki.com/ ?

I thought the parent comment was referring to real offline journals made of treeware.

Exactly. It's not that I don't see value in online alternatives, but in this case, if the main point is to access it offline, I don't see how different it is from a physical journal.

Re: Show HN: JournalBook – Privacy centric, offline first, personal journal app

#37

Post by iElectric2 » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 1:42 PM UTC

+1 for syncing support between mobile/laptop. This is a must to have ability to write quick notes on mobile and prose on laptop.

Re: Show HN: JournalBook – Privacy centric, offline first, personal journal app

#38

Post by shpx » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 1:44 PM UTC

Here is my privacy centric, offline first, personal journal bash script

    EDITOR=vim
    journal() {
        mkdir -p ~/journal/`date +%Y`
        $EDITOR ~/journal/`date +%Y`/`date +%m-%d`
    }
    alias j=journal

Re: Show HN: JournalBook – Privacy centric, offline first, personal journal app

#39

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 1:47 PM UTC

shpx wrote: post #38

Here is my privacy centric, offline first, personal journal bash script EDITOR=vim journal() { mkdir -p ~/journal/`date +%Y` $EDITOR ~/journal/`date +%Y`/`date +%m-%d` } alias j=journal

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: JournalBook – Privacy centric, offline first, personal journal app

#40

Post by unicornporn » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 1:49 PM UTC

From time to time I try these fancy journaling apps. A few weeks later I have to go through the hassle of converting the data to my good old plain text file journaling format.