Show HN: Pastel, build better websites with sticky-note feedback | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Pastel, build better websites with sticky-note feedback

usepastel.com

14 pointsalokepillai10 comments

If you're looking for a free alternative, Genius has a web annotator service [0], available either through their site or self-hosted. Registration is required to make annotations, though.

[0]: https://genius.com/web-annotator

Genius is definitely a great way to annotate and share text on the web. Our tool is built with web creators in mind (think freelance web developers, web designers, agencies, startups etc), and is more optimized for that use case.

This is a really cool idea!

However, I don't think this works very well on websites where you have to interact to get to other pages.

I just went to Google, searched something, and left a comment on one of the results, but I couldn't view the comment afterwards.

I can imagine many websites that this could be a problem for, such as an authenticated experience or a wizard where the step isn't captured in the URL explicitly.

But I'll keep this in mind for getting feedback on static pages for sure!

Hey thanks! One of the founders of Pastel here. Re: viewing comments on apps with complex state, it's something we've thought a lot about, and it's tough. Our current solution is to take a screenshot and attach it to every comment so that you can view the application state as it was when the comment was left. Not necessarily ideal though. Do you have thoughts on this?

Very cool! Almost like Mixpanel in that any event can be caught, only this is for tagging notes on sites. Well done, it looks very promising. Does it work on full JS Single Page Applications?

Thank you - I love the comparison! To your question, Pastel does work on JS SPAs. I'm actually using it currently on a React SPA (we like to dogfood our product internally).

Hot diggity that's awesome dude. Was it hard to make? You strike me as ninja-on-the-stratosphere with something like this

Haha thank you! Honestly yes it has been, and continues to be a tough product to build. The first proof-of-concept iteration was not bad, but getting the thing working correctly in most browsers has been difficult. We've learned a ton about browser internals along the way though, and it's been a lot of fun. :)

I love it. The design is beautiful and the tool makes perfect sense. Pricing seems a tiny bit prohibitive to me seeing as there are free alternatives.

Thanks! We're actually exploring creating a free tier with a link creation restriction. Additionally, we have a 50% discount for students, teachers and non-profits on our paid plans.

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