Hi HN, I've lurked here for ages and decided to come out of the shadows for my latest side project which reached the point where it’s sort of fun to use and hopefully not totally embarrassing to share.

Hacking fingernotes.com together over a couple of weeks was a creative outlet when work got stressful. I think of it as digital sticky notes. The goal was to make notes with a personal touch that are easy to write and share. I also wanted them to appear as their own link preview image on supported platforms. That way when you send the link to a note, the person sees the message without following the link.

Let me know what you think!

I drew inspiration from Apple's quick notes: low latency made scribbling a pleasure, and sending notes to friends felt warm and original compared to a typical exchange. It was also intriguing to see my handwriting printed in a message chat. In a time of rising artificial generation, spreading my clumsy handwriting feels like an act of rebellion.

But I dislike the light background in Apple notes, which I don't think you can change when sharing. More importantly, no one sent a note back. With fingernotes the low-friction interaction is meant to make creating notes simple. I also find the image previews aesthetically more pleasing.

For implementation, fingernotes are publicly accessible links to collections of strokes that have been persisted to a Cloudflare D1 database and rendered in SVG. Like pen on a sticky note, each stroke is immutable but anyone can add to a note if they have the link. You can't undo strokes, so if you mess up your note just throw it out and start a new one. Having append-only collections avoids handling order of operations when multiple people edit the same note. Hosting it as a Cloudflare worker made it easy to get up and running. There's some latency in Safari on iOS which is absent on desktop. It's noticeable compared to Apple notes and I'm afraid it's a limitation of the browser.