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Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

Hi everyone

I could write a whole book about this project and what i had to go through to get it out but finally I think its there.

Ghostnote allow you to add notes to almost anything on your mac. Files, folders, applications, websites and even documents open inside applications (ex a photoshop document).

I made it because I am not good at structuring and often just need notes for specific context but soon realized that this approach actually has quite a lot of potential.

Next update will have support for applescript so you can customize context.

Let me know if you have any kind of feedback. Everything is appreciated.

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I like this. I may try it out in spite of having too many note-taking strategies already (and this wouldn't replace everything else). Please do share your story - it's good marketing and it makes people feel better about paying (a measly) $5 when they understand what and who is behind it. Given the value and the ongoing work you'll be doing to add support for different contexts, I think you could raise the price to $10.

Are you using the extended attributes to store notes in each file? If so, that'd make it easier to pass the notes along to other people. I could easily see this being useful across art departments.

You probably have this on your to-do list, but you could use the new capability to badge icons in the Finder so I know there's a ghostnote attached.

Wow some really great ideas there.

We will be using the ability to store notes in files and folders. This will be especially helpful if you use ex. dropbox. that way you can share notes and dropbox takes care of the syncing.

It would be great to have the note kept in sync with the comments section on a file/folder when you Get Info on it so it's easily passed along to others. But i'm not sure if that supports formatting/bullets, etc.

Currently if a file is moved around, does it keep the note? Can you add a note to any URL, or only ones you've bookmarked?

Very slick looking and great idea, i'll be buying

Where exactly would you be storing the note? Curious as to how durable/invisible it would be to the user.

In the assets themselves

Sorry to be dense - I'm curious about the implementation. Can you give more detail? Is this in the extended attributes or file comments? Because I understand if the file moves to a non-HFS+ file system, you can lose those.

I tried searching, but couldn't find a definitive answer: are resource forks still a problem when transferring files to non-os X systems? If I understood what I found correctly, dropbox handles resource forks (presumably just copying hidden _-metadata-files when using the app for os x) -- and apparently smb/cifs support resource forks (but I don't know how eg samba3/4 would store them on an ext4/zfs-backed file system).

It's one of those great little features that really lose out to the least-common-denominator effect... I'd kinda hoped that Apple just found a way to push/force apps to use fileformats that included metadata (but that would of course create other problems, like no more plain text files)...

Does anyone know of an up-to-date article that details the current state of resource forks and cross-platform issues (or lack thereof)?

Yeah so one idea we are hoping to push with Ghostnote is to use it to store notes for sharing.

So if you are using ex. Dropbox ghostnote will detect that and and the notes to the actual asset itself. That way others can see those notes and dropbox handles the syncing issues.

You could even send attach files to emails and send them with notes embedded if you wanted. We are looking at some of these things and I am thinking with a little bit of luck this might be a good way to promote it.

I'm sorry if I'm a bit dense, but I'm not sure what you mean by "it" above. Do you mean resource forks?

And how does that work if the email/filesync stops by a Linux/Windows machine or two on the way? Is there a "bundled" file-format that would allow something like a PSD to survive an email round-trip between eg. a designer running OS X, and a developer running Linux (err... in the case of a PSD, maybe windows -- even if Gimp's handling of PSDs are much better than it used to be :-)?

Thankfully it's been a while since I had to deal with "mac"[1] files so I'm not updated on the current state of affairs.

[1] Actually problems I've had had little to do with Apple per-se, more Adobe's lol-lets-throw-this-undocmented-binary-serialized-stuff-in-a-box-and-call-it-a-day hobby fileformat PSD -- that they apparently don't even understand how works themselves -- leading to some hair-pulling when going mac-windows-linux-mac etc.

This is a really great idea, was there anything specific to OS X that allowed you to get the contextual information you need, or do you think you'll be able to port it to other operating systems in the future?

No doubt OSX is a little easier. I have been looking into windows and have some solutions for it but OSX just have some easy ways to fetch the context.

It was not without issues because of the sandbox so we were also rejected once (for unknown reasons still) but found another way to do it.

We literally is building a whitelist with app ids and how to speak with each of the different apps. However we have only explored a tiny fraction of whats possible.

In the next update users will be able to script things themselves. But we are looking at Windows.

It looks pretty awesome! I think it could be even better if you allowed notes to be attached to a particular web element.

Also, imagine the possibilities if you could attach categories. Say you have someone new joining a team, you could essentially give them access to a category and they could see all the notes. It would be like Slack channels except you have the context built in :D

Yeah we are looking at that too.

In theory with the next update where you can customize your scripts you could write it yourself. We of course hope people will and will share stuff we don't get around doing.

But lots of little things are on our list.

With regards to the categories. Great idea!

We are working on a solution where you can share notes via ex. dropbox. So i add some notes to a folder or a file and you can read those notes. Dropbox deals with the syncing.

Is there a shortcut key to create a new note or open a note (if one exists for the current document)?

Not yet but coming up

Thanks for this app; I've been wanting exactly this for years: I need to multi-task and I often forget what I was doing, so I need a TODO attached to specific windows.

Before you start adding big features such as Applescript, I recommend that you address basic problems and missing features (that you might have unearthed with an extended beta program). Please go check out the reviews at the App Store.

Thank you very much for your kind words.

We have three priorities

Bug fixing

Applescript

Dropbox Team Access

In that order. So don't worry we aren't going to drop or turn this into bloatware :)

My concern is not that that it could become bloatware. My concern is that it suffers from basic usability issues but you're prioritizing things that I won't ever use.

Seconded

I hear you and I promise you they wont be affecting the usability at all :)

Applescript is something you can use to do but wont have any affect on the usability.

Dropbox support also wont have any affect on the interface.

Our primary priority will always be bugs and user experience first, features second.

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