levmiseri

Yeah, that's a nice touch. Though the reading experience is also important. Notion is obviously super powerful and a more cluttered UI is hence probably unavoidable.

I wonder how a real-world pen/equivalent of this would feel like to write or draw with.

For me one of the biggest issues with Notion (and to a smaller extent with Obsidian as well) is its ever present UI. When I write (or read) something, I don't want to see 20+ buttons scattered around distracting me from the content.

IA writer got this right, but it's too local and doesn't have colab or better online sync features. Shameless plug – I'm building https://kraa.io/about that's trying to be a writing app with a minimal, yet feature-rich, UI. (better offline and local-files functionality planned)

I feel the same way. The initial magic of real-timeness felt like a glimpse into a future that... where is it?

I'm still excited about the prospects of it — shameless plug: actually building a tool with one-of-a-kind messaging experience that's truly real-time in the Google docs collaboration way (no compose box, no send button): https://kraa.io/hackernews

> Anyone is free to make a website with whatever content they want, they can invite people to it and grow your own community.

This is very hard to do. But hey, I'll give it a try.

Starting now a new community for AI-assisted coding: https://kraa.io/vibecoding

Thanks! This idea was brewing in our heads for a while. And some of the use cases Kraa supports and we wanted to use simply didn't exist.

Hello!

Kraa is a web-based markdown editor with some unique features and philosophy. It's aiming to be the writing app for 'everything' without trying to be a Jack of all trades. A digital paper that one can use for simple note taking, collaborative documents, blogs, but even chats or communities.

We would love to get your feedback in hopes to keep improving the product!

Example of a chat inside Kraa: https://kraa.io/hackernews

Example of a blog article: https://kraa.io/kraa/examples/echolibrary

> It reminds me a bit of the skeuomorphic days, where we went to flat design overnight and thanked the designers goodbye

This didn't happen. Even if you consider only the 'aesthetic' part of design and ignore function (impossible, but for the sake of the argument) — the striving for reduction and removal of unnecessary real-world metaphors was a natural evolution driven by designers, not PMs, not engineers, nor any higher-ups. 'Flat' design was in hindsight inevitable, but you can't just get rid of decorations, ornaments and gradients and call it a day. All major digital products were and are designed by designers. Not by engineers who got tired of waiting for a button sprite.

Lovely window into the history.

Sometimes I wonder how I (or generally people of that time) would react to seeing the modern web. At least — the 'good' modern web and design. Awe? Confusion? Understanding that this is the future in the very same way that we understand that 'that' was the past?

Being competent in determining how design is going to be understood and used by users IS being competent at design.

There is a massive amount of bad design out there — made by designers. There is a large amount of bad software implementations. By programmers. And awful chairs, food, and ...

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Designers don't critize Comic Sans's usage when it's appropriate. It's when it's not. Like a funeral service's signage. Or a lawyer. And the massive amount of such objectively wrong usage in the wild is where you see designers crying about it.

Kraa can't properly compete with Notion, yet. Not on the feature-set. That being said, if you value simpler interface that still has all the core editor features, give it a try!

We are also not trying to be a Notion clone/alternative, but rather a different kind of text editor that's highly customizable, has unique features (like the writer role) and keeps strong division between writing and styling.

Here is a public leaf to showcase how chatting works with Kraa's unique 'writer' role: https://kraa.io/hackernews

WPM and other attempts at putting a one specific number/metric to point to is imo only mudding the waters. Better way to think about just how awfully slow natural language (on average) is as an interface is to think about interactions with {whatever} in terms of *intents* and *actions*.

Comparing "What's the weather in London" with clicking the weather app icon is misleading and too simplistic. When people imagine a future driven by conversational interfaces, they usually picture use cases like:

1. "When is my next train leaving?"

2. "Show me my photos from the vacation in Italy with yellow flowers on them"

3. "Book a flight from New York to Zurich on {dates}"

...

And a way to highlight what's faster/less-noisy is to compare how natural language vs. mouse/touch maps onto the Intent -> Action. The thing is that interactions like these are generally so much more complex. E.g. Does the machine know what 'my' train is? If it doesn't, can it offer reasonable disambiguation? If it can't, what then? And does it present the information in a way where the next likely action is reachable, or will I need to converse about it?

You could picture a long table listing similar use cases in different contexts and compare various input methods and modalities and their speed. Flicking a finger on a 2d surface or using a mouse and a keyboard is going to be — on average — much faster and with less dead-ends.

Conversational interfaces are not the future. Imo even in the sense of 'augmenting', it's not going to happen. Natural-language driven interface will always play the role of a supporting (still important, though!) role. An accessibility aid when e.g. temporarily, permanently, or contextually not able to use the primary input method to 'encode your intent'.

For something very similar — but with markdown, less features, and minimal UI — I made https://kvak.io

To add to this. UX Myth — Icons enhance usability: https://uxmyths.com/post/715009009/myth-icons-enhance-usabil...

Thanks! I plan to do a better pass over all cities with a new update to the site.

I guess it's more that knowing only vanilla HTML/CSS/JS transfers really well to Svelte than the other way around.

I can wholeheartedly recommend Svelte. As someone who can only do vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, it lets me build projects quickly and efficiently without having to learn something complex like React. Case in point this silly side project made in Svelte over a weekend: https://meoweler.com

Trying to expand on a quirky travel website populated by AI content. Working on adding countries, regions, areas (e.g. ski resorts), etc.: https://meoweler.com

The quality of the generated content is surprisingly good, but there are many stereotypes and mistakes that I'm fixing in the next mass generation pass.

As someone used to doing everything with vanilla JS and having troubles with getting deep into any web frameworks (especially React), Svelte has been a godsend. I'm in love with the philosophy and approach and its natural combination of JS/CSS/HTML is, in my personal bubble, second to none. Most recent experiment was https://meoweler.com, but I'm now trying more complex projects and can't sing high enough praises. I sincerely hope the future of Svelte is bright.

Designer News used to be an amazing community I used to visit almost as often as HN nowadays. Then https://twitter.com/awilkinson bought it.

Dribbble is another such site that designers used to aggregate at, discuss, share interesting ideas and engage daily. Then https://twitter.com/awilkinson bought it.

The quality of the GPT4 content for travel is surprisingly good, although there are of course plenty of hallucinations and I've a new pass for the content set up that gets rid of the worst offenders. This is really just a learning experiment, but building something of this content scale by 1 person was absolutely impossible a year ago.

The point was that content generation use cases might be a viable path give OpenAI's thin-wrappers-killing direction.

Some use cases are still valid I hope. E.g. content generation on a massive scale. An example of that that I'm tinkering with: https://meoweler.com

There is pixel-perfection and 'pixel-perfection'. One is a pointless fight against the nature of the medium while the other is love for the craft, sophistication, and actually giving a fuck that something isn't needlessly 2 pixels off of where it should have been. A certain attitude that will show its mark throughout the UI.

Fair enough. Calling it 'good quality' might be a bit of a stretch, at least for now (the bigger cities are generated with GPT4 while the smaller ones are GPT3.5 – perhaps you got the 'bad batch'). I'm playing with a different set of prompting that is producing better results, nevertheless — the point was that creating a travel site by one person like this was not possible before.

And there are no ads. It's really more of an experiment rather than a real product.

I have had a similar experience using ChatGPT to build https://meoweler.com – a travel website covering 5000+ cities with a surprisingly good content quality created over a long weekend. Something that was unfathomable for me 2 years ago.

Midjourney sadly doesn't have public API. The images were prompted manually via Discord. Thanks to permutations [0], I could do 20 images at a time, but it's still a painful process. (The generation of the permutation strings is in the shared code)

[0] https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/permutations

The AI generation code with all prompts is available on github as well: https://github.com/riesvile/meoweler-content