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Show HN: Personal website inspired by Apple notes (alanagoyal.com)

66 points by alanaan ↗ HN
i stan apple notes, so i built a new personal website to look, feel, & work just like it. it's fast, fully interactive, & can be navigated entirely via keyboard shortcuts. it was a lot of fun to build. i wrote more about the implementation in the linked page.

check it out!

30 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 75.4 ms ] thread
ashryan
This is really cool. I didn't expect to be able to make my own note.

I wondered what your top page would be, and it seems to redirect to /about-me. Did you try any other ideas for a top page? I guess that's an interesting problem since the Notes app doesn't have a top page.

alanaan
yeah it just redirects to the first note. i thought about having a welcome page but it took away from the apple notes feel. open to suggestions tho!
gnicholas
nit: the word "accessibility" is misspelled in your acknowledgments. Looks like a cool project!
kody
Very cool. I appreciate the breakdown of how you built this.
alanaan
thanks! just added to it about some of the perf and security changes i made after launching :)
ecjhdnc2025
Now you just need a typeface with the distinctive alternate lower-case A :-)
pimlottc
I tried to click on the gear icon, thinking it was settings menu. It's not very clear that it's an icon associated with the post.
Zanfa
Looks nice, but scrolling is buggy on iOS Safari. There seems to be a nested scrollable area which doesn’t scroll properly when flinging up or down.
alanaan
thank you! fixed this :)
eps
On an older iPad it shows up as a blank page. Just FYI.
alanaan
oh no! looking into this. are you just on safari??
eps
Yep. iOS 14 though >_<
moioci
I see a flash of white text on a dark background, then "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)." in black on the same very dark background. Chrome on Win 10
alanaan
this is probably happening if you're viewing a note that has been deleted. since i had 10000+ notes created on the day it launched i set up a pg_cron batch to delete empty notes that are >30 min old.

if not, can you share the url you're seeing it on? thanks for letting me know!

ankrgyl
Cool to see the balance between UX and security. I really like the UI!
alanaan
thanks! i wanted anyone to be able to create notes and be able to share them with others, so tried to come up with the most secure way to accomplish that :)