Show HN: AirClick – Note taking/sharing designed for developers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: AirClick – Note taking/sharing designed for developers

airclick.io

26 pointsBrightHill24 comments

I really like the core idea behind this – an easy way to permanently save & categorising important messages from ephemeral team-based services such as Slack and Teams is an ongoing problem.

Breaking information into smaller pieces managed by individual users instead of large team knowledge bases is a lot more maintainable. It also makes sharing knowledge a lot more useful and flexible – that's something I've learnt from building my startup [1] based around short-form note-cards rather than long-form documents.

I know it's early days, but it did take me a little while to figure out what AirClick actually does just looking at the landing page. Maybe have some specific examples of different use cases instead of "Topic 1", "Topic 2". You've already done the hard bit with the UX!

Also I would encourage you to distinguish your logo a bit more from AirTable. Your name is already similar, and the last thing you want is new users thinking all your hard work is another AirTable product. Hope that helps!

[1]: https://supernotes.app/

Amazing website and app! I am glad that we have the same core idea! As you said, the small pieces are easy to search and maintain. We also add a contributor for each card. So a viewer can always find a contributor to ask if they do not understand the content.

Other than Slack, we are working on the VS code and Chrome. We want to make a developer to take the code snippet and useful websites more convenient.

Your suggestion is valuable! I really like your website and the community. We totally redesigned the website based on your suggestion. For example, we start to use the real cases rather than `Topic 1`, `Topic 2`. All the cases are from our daily use to develop AirClick .

We are the huge fan of AirTable. We use AirTable to do the tasks management. But our icon comes from the idea as three people work together hand in hand. We want to create an inclusive working environment by encouraging helps and thanks. It is our fundamental idea from the beginning. Take a look at this [1]. The `click` means `taking notes with a few clicks.` The easier the developers take notes, the more they collect.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC62Wg3NkJqHYWBwFitH1zpQ

I really appreciate your feedback, thank you! We are updating it as fast as we can right now.

I have to agree with the others. This might be awesome, but, if I can't view it easily on a mobile device, for me it's a hard fail in 2021.

Totally agree! Your suggestion makes us rethink the mobile friendly. We just released a mobile friendly website. Please let us know what we can improve! For the web app, we still stick on the desktop version because we focus on the developers and the developers only code on the desktop. The mobile version is not the highest priority but it is on our roadmap.

Thank you for the feedback, updated website is already up and running.

So it is basically like you took an open source trello codebase and cloned it and rebranded it as a notes tool even though it is still card based and taggable and groupable like trello? I don't get it.

Hey, James. Sorry for your misunderstanding. We should make our website more clear. It looks like Trello but we have the thanks system and the magic term.

The thanks system can generate the contribution board for each person to know who is better at what (check out this 1 min video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmUbCQQgcu8). However, Trello can only track tasks.

The magic term optimizes for the software company. When you search for `view controllers`, we also search for `ViewControoler` or `view-controller`. You can even make `VC` as an alias for `view controllers`. However, Trello does not optimize for the developer world.

We are building a completely new todo system now. You will see more differences when it comes out.

You can also try our `Slack app`. The more you use, the more different you will see.

I hope it can solve your problem. And thanks for your suggestion! We will show more difference on the website!

If you are still interested in AirClick, I am more than happy to show you our ideas through a 30 mins Zoom meeting.

A bit confused here. Small teams doesn't keep notes or at least store information in readmes. Big teams use wikis like Confluence. For whom it would be the most useful?

Based on my experience on AirClick, I also found I took much more notes than before. I reduced a lot of time to search the chat history or the wiki doc. It also helps me understand the system better. For example, we use `Expert` as `a member who can help on a certain topic`. With this knowledge, I found I am easier to understand the internal wiki because I know `expert` has the special meaning in this project. If you are interested in this idea, I am more than happy to show you our ideas through a 30 mins Zoom meeting.

I'm sorry for the confusion, Whether it's readme or Confluence they both have a common issue of the documents being very big, and usually they have multiple people contributing and maintaining them. So if you have an issue while reading the documents, its hard to know whom to ask and even if you know whom to ask, the person could have left the company already. Our solution is to get away from writing big documents with multiple contributors instead we write smaller notes, with a single person assigned to maintain each of them, just like twitter. This way we can find out whom to ask right away and if the person leaves their job it's easier to transfer their knowledge to the rest of the team.

Thanks for answer, I got why it can be useful

On mobile and couldn't browse very well - what's pricing after 20 users ?

Thanks for your suggestion! We totally redesigned the website and just pushed it online. To be honest, we have not considered the price yet. Our first goal is to make developers take notes more often. I often search in the chat history or the wiki to find the right answer for hours. It is a painful experience. I do not have this feeling now since I start to use AirClick! I hope all the other developers can work happier by using AirClick.

Yeah… in 2021 it really hurts your credibility to not have a mobile-friendly site. Most of my HN browsing happens on a phone… if something is really eye-catching or I feel like I need a bigger screen, I’ll save it to a reading list or airdrop it to myself.

We are still at an early stage right now so it's free no matter what.

Still a bit confused after going through each step, what does this do?

Sorry for your confusion. Currently, you can use Slack to collect and share the messages to your team. You can also add the magic term to connect all related notes together in one page. If you set the magic term `view controller` and the alias `VC`, we will search `VC`, `ViewController`, `view-controller`. We are working on the VS Code extension and the Chrome extension. We want your notes are always on your side when you want to search or collect. Also, all our notes are a small piece of the information and bond with a person. So you can always ask a person. If a person is going to leave the company, we also can generate a transition plan to make sure all the knowledge are transferred correctly.

You can create a space for your team or yourself on this web app, and you can collect any information from Slack, Ms teams, link websites or write notes on it. People can rate the information collected as helpful, like an upvote, so if the information you collected gets a lot of upvotes the web app will show you as an expert in that field.

Right now we haven't built a functional tutorial yet, if you want to have a thorough walkthrough of all the functions available right now, feel free to email me at alexqiu@airclick.io we can setup a voice call to explain everything.

Surprised how many devs don’t check mobile browsers these days. iOS Safari.

Sorry for the bad experience. We focused too much on the pending features, like VS code extension, Chrome extension, the task system, etc. We paused our feature development and totally redesigned the website. I hope it makes you understand more about our app!

Still working on it >_<

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