Show HN: Nullboard – Simple, light, locally-stored to-do lists | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Nullboard – Simple, light, locally-stored to-do lists

nullboard.io

145 pointsapankrat37 comments

Something I made to replace an ever-growing pile of scratch papers with ToDo lists for everything under the sun.

It's a single html page, depends only on jQuery and a small webfont pack. It can be used completely offline, and it stores all data locally.

The UI is optimized for keeping things as compact as it gets and adding new notes as quickly as possible.

There are screenshots of the UI in action on the GH page - https://github.com/apankrat/nullboard

PS. Since we are showing things...

I also ended up writing a screen-to-gif recorder to make the gifs for the Nullboard's readme. I always assumed this was a rather involved matter, but it was a surprisingly simple thing to do. Just GetDC() + BitBlt() in a loop + some nuances.

It looks something like this - https://swapped.cc/tmp/giffer-screencap.gif

The release "page" is over at - https://gist.github.com/apankrat/14b28656236d78407b28aef3102...

If there's any interest I can clean up and publish the source.

I can strongly recommend ScreenToGIF [1]. It literally does as the name says but packs in some helpful additional features related to editing.

[1] https://www.screentogif.com/

One man's "helpful additional features" are another man's feature bloat. Specialization vs. Universality and all that.

I find that for a quick capture/re-capture grabs, with no editing, STF adds too many extraneous clicks and interaction. Heck, even GifCam [1] is too UX heavy for back-to-back captures.

The whole point of Giffer is that you launch it, size it, press F1, press F1 again. Done. To re-record do F1/F1 again. That's it.

[1] http://blog.bahraniapps.com/gifcam/

Finally remembered what it reminds me of: LiceCap from https://www.cockos.com/licecap/

Hey, thanks for this and bvckup2!

I'd definitely be interested in seeing the source.

OK. It won't be compilable, because of dependencies on the UI framework and utility libraries, which I can't yet release, but it still should be very much readable and easy enough to hack into a usable state.

That's a very nice project, congrats for something that is at least useful to someone! As you're already aware the mobile version isn't as straightforward as on desktop but it's still ok for read access at least.

If it's all stored in the browser, how durable is it ? If my computer restarts can I expect it to still be here ? If I switch browsers it won't ? I'm using workflowy for rapid note taking and one of the most important aspect is being able to access my notes on multiple devices. If you're using json I'm sure it's possible to hook it up to some couchdb and be able to see it everywhere. But that's possibly not even in your roadmap.

I don't know if it's just me but hamburger menus that appear/disappear on hover seems very frustrating to use for me, it's especially obvious on this where the font size is so small.

I find it fiddly to delete/mark as completed as the slightest missed movement means I have to start again.

I'd normally agree, but here the overall look and feel is meant to be that of a read-only list. Note-level menus aren't something that gets used to often, at least in my case, and having them visible at all times just makes the whole thing look like a field of hamburgers.

11px fonts, really? For the sake of the well-being of users, increase the default on size.

Using rem (relative em) for font-sizing would probably help. Not everyone is still using 1024x768 resolution (11px was most commonly used at that time).

I am at a high-dpi screen myself, but I'll have a look at switching to rem.

Hitting `ctrl/cmd +` solves that whole issue for you. But I am sure you already know that.

I found that just deleting all of the font-size and line-height css rules made the page much more usable. Let the browser's defaults take care of that. Use relative font-sizes if you must on board names to make them larger, but it's probably not necessary. For the menus, leave them at the default font size or make them _slightly_ smaller.

Really just came here to see if anyone else had already used this as an opportunity to plug Emacs Org-Mode

Absolutely, one tool to rule them all! Exports to a bunch of formats including PDF, HTML, TeX, ODT, etc.

- Notes - Lists - Papers - Cheat sheets - Slides - Documents - Books

Never need to learn new syntax/UI for different things.

Works in Firefox, tested in Chrome Thank you for putting Firefox first! A welcoming change.

Nice observation. I hope the trend lives for a long time.

I am a life-long Firefox user, been using it for at least 10 years. So not a trend, more of an outlier.

Bragging about my own: https://github.com/andrey-utkin/taskdb/

My take starts from the most backend thing - the database. Using PostgreSQL as data storage was a huge win, making all sorts of great features easy to do. Some highlights:

* I use Grafana with my own defined metrics, and it was a piece of cake to set up;

* I have two-ways sync with CalDAV calendaring, so I can see, and change scheduled date of a task in any calendaring app of my choice;

* I can have full power of SQL data management using SQL interface apps like OmniDB.

Cool, but having to manage postgres doesn't really equal 'Simple, light, locally-stored to-do lists'

Heads up, the "main" menu hamburger will cover the headline menu burger if the window is scaled right (half my monitor).

Another thought, would it be possible to implement keyboard navigation for this?

Aye, thanks. The hamburger issue is on the todo list.

Re: keyboard navigation - yep, I think it'd be a good thing to have. How do you see it work though? Right now, once a note is being edited, you can go up and down the list with Shift-Tab and Tab, but I'm not sure how to handle going left and right... something like Alt-Left, Alt-Right? But that's probably not portable between the browsers.

I honestly have no idea. I'm not super familiar with what a browser will catch before passing to the web-page (like Alt-left and Alt-right tell FF to go to the next / previous web-page).

I like it! Although the font is a little hard to read for me. Shameless plug for my to-do app built using client-side Blazor: https://do.lord.technology/ Everything is offline like your project and you can import and export using the todo.txt format.

Bravo! Nice work. I'd love to see a keyboard shortcut for adding a new note that would work from any state.

These things are stored in the browsers localStorage right? It can't be just me that have no faith in that, it /feels/ like the browser could purge it whenever it wants.

Am I wrong?

Right click -> View Source gives you clear, unminified complete source code + explanation + BSD license. Very nice, and decentralised. Who needs Github to distribute software?

How is storing and distributing the code on nullboard.io more decentralized than storing the code on github.com? They are both someone else's servers.

I like it!

I'm getting a "You don't have permission to access /~stacy/nullboard/ on this server" error. Permissions on the folder look ok, any ideas?

Thanks...

*Edit: Never mind, my error

Love it. Exactly what I've been dreaming of

Drag and drop doesn't work on mobile.

Yes, among other things. This is 100% desktop-oriented app.

Think mobile support can be added?

It's a lot of work and I personally don't needed, so chances are next to zero.

You can always pull in a library.

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