I’ve started using vertical tabs in Firefox as soon as I got the notification. I never thought I would have liked them so much.

Why are you asking for decent vertical tabs? Are they inferior to some other browser you have in mind?

I am a novice, so if someone else is going to give different advice, consider disregarding mine.

If you want precise collisions you could manually add 2D Areas and align them with your map. Otherwise if you are happy enough with an approximation you could add a tilemap (collision only, no sprites) and use a different tile for each region.

I would go for the first option, considering that you don’t have too many regions. You don’t need any external program, as far as I remember, you can create polygonal shapes directly in Godot.

[…] re‑engineered flash physics by replacing silicon channels with two‑dimensional Dirac graphene and exploiting its ballistic charge transport.

By tuning the “Gaussian length” of the channel, the team achieved two‑dimensional super‑injection, which is an effectively limitless charge surge into the storage layer that bypasses the classical injection bottleneck.

That’s some seriously technical jargon.

ChatGPT seems to be able to explain, not sure how accurate it is though.

Flash memory traditionally uses silicon channels to move charges (electrons) into a storage layer. These researchers changed that by replacing silicon with Dirac graphene. Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb structure. It’s called a Dirac material because its electrons behave like massless particles, moving extremely fast and with very little resistance.

This leads to ballistic transport: electrons move without scattering, like a bullet in a vacuum. This is far more efficient than silicon, where electrons bump into atoms and lose energy.

Tuning the “Gaussian length" likely refers to modifying the shape or spread of the electric field or potential in the channel (possibly shaped like a Gaussian curve, i.e., a bell curve). By adjusting this, they control how charge flows.

Achieved two-dimensional super-injection means they were able to push a large amount of charge very efficiently from the graphene channel into the memory storage layer, and in a 2D way (across the flat graphene surface), rather than through a narrow point.

Effectively limitless charge surge: normally, in flash memory, there’s a bottleneck where only so much charge can be injected due to energy losses and scattering. But with graphene’s ballistic transport and this super-injection method, that bottleneck is gone—or drastically reduced—enabling faster and more efficient memory writing.

I agree with you, but I would say you can’t assume everyone has the same goals. I can tell you, my Nintendo friends are not idiots nor mindless zombies. They simply are not interested in learning about how the other options work, and I would say that’s totally fair.

I have a dear friend who has most of his games on Steam, but still, he told me he prefers the Switch. “Why?” I asked him. “Because Nintendo makes exactly the kind of games I want to play, and because unlike with the PC, I can just pick up my Switch and start playing” he answered.

I have a ROG Ally with Bazzite (so, basically equivalent to a Steam Deck) and I have to admit that, while 90% of the time every game works out of the box, sometimes some games misbehave. Although, to be fair, this only happened to me with Epic Games games ran through Heroic.

I would say it’s totally fair to prefer Nintendo. It gives you great games that don’t require tinkering. If that’s what you want, then Nintendo is a great option for you.

I don’t think that will happen. I share your vision, but that’s not how “Nintendo people” reason.

I have a few Nintendo friends and all of them share two reasons for going Nintendo:

1. Great games
2. No tinkering

I have to admit that I didn’t really think about reminders. That would perhaps make more sense for Simple Calendar, perhaps in the future I might consider linking notes and reminders. Or maybe it would make sense to implement it directly in Simple Notes? I don’t know, I’ll keep that in mind for later, thanks!

the number of clicks/menus/presses it takes to create a note

I strongly agree on that. It must be at most as many clicks as on Google Keep, i.e. two clicks (plus a few to open the app).

import existing Keep notes from a Google Takeout into your Simple Notes

I didn’t think about that. That shouldn’t be too hard. After the MVP (minimum viable product) will be ready, imports from various common formats should be implemented, and I guess Google Takeout for Google Keep should be supported too.

Thanks for the suggestions!

use case is a shopping list for my SO and I. I want to be able to add stuff throughout the day, and cross them off once I grab them from the shelf, and separately be able to clear completed tasks

Sorry for the late reply. Oh yes, that’s what I like about Google Keep, the collaborative aspect. What do you mean by “separately be able to clear completed tasks”? Do you mean being able to do it from multiple devices which are synchronized in real-time?

[Simple Chat] Why not just use one of the other Matrix clients?

Yes, you have a point… let’s keep Simple Chat for later then. I had this idea of making an app for each of my needs and let them all connect to a single server with a single unified user. Good quality Matrix clients already exists, I guess there is no need to build a custom client for the chat if I end up adopting Matrix as the protocol.

[Simple Docs] This seems overly ambitious.

Let’s say that’s a longer term goal for the future. I might be underestimating the complexity of Google Docs, but if you think about it I would say it’s not much more than a rich-text editor. Basically it’s the same things as text notes, just with a bit more formatting options. I couldn’t say the same thing about Google Sheets and Google Present.

No. Matrix is designed for chat, not data, and self-hosting it requires a fair amount of resources.

Why do you think so? I have tried it and it seems to be as simple as any other server thanks to Docker. I have a script to launch it here (mirror). It seems to use 160MB of memory and about 1% of my CPU when idle. I haven’t done any serious tests though, maybe it wouldn’t scale as well as I think.

I’d personally just DIY it since it’s really not a ton of logic

Well… there must always be a protocol behind it, it can be as simple/specific or as complex/generic as you want, but there must always be an agreement of the format of data exchanged between client and server.

By adopting the Matrix protocol, there wouldn’t be any need to write a custom server, because Matrix servers already exist.

Matrix is designed for chat, not data

What’s the difference between chat and data? A chat is a list of messages. A collaboratively-editable document is a list of changes. As far as I understand, Matrix uses “events” to describe things happening. When a user sends a message, the server emits and event like “add user X’s message Y to your list of received messages”. It shouldn’t be too different than emitting an event “replace text at position X with Y” every time a document changes. They even have ephemeral events for temporary state, such as “the user X is currently typing”. That should be similar to “the user X placed their cursor at position Y”.

Do you think I might be oversimplifying or thinking it wrong?

Regarding multi platform targeting, have you considered something like React Native or Flutter

I have! I use Flutter in a professional setting and I do not hate it, but I am madly in love with React (not Native) for my personal projects. I tried React Native in the past and I found it a bit finicky, but it was just a “brief encounter”, so I might change my mind about it in the future. For now I would go with Electron to save time, but I do not exclude the idea to build a desktop + mobile interface in Flutter in the future. React (not Native) can also run on any platform, that should be more than enough for the MVP.

I absolutely do not want to go with Flutter for the web though, as I feel like it’s the exact opposite of what I would dream the web to be. I feel like Google built Flutter to give Android developers a tool to make apps with the excuse “oh yeah, it works on browsers too” and call it a day. Flutter basically bypasses most of the things that browsers do and in my personal opinion it re-implements everything more poorly than how a traditional web app would. Come on, they even built their own layout engine and even a rendering engine, was that really necessary? Browser extensions don’t integrate well with Flutter apps, and the debugging experience is subpar. I really like Flutter for Android and desktop apps, and I might even say it’s easier/simpler than Android Studio (Kotlin), but personally I feel like it’s just a big dirty hack in the web context.

Okay, I just realized that my reply sounds a lot like a rant. My apologies. Please consider this as my current view on these tools, it might change in the future. It’s not a criticism.

the company behind it shuts down or gets sold

That’s an important concern. Well, the source code is AGPL 3.0, so there is no risk of it disappearing. Also, this would be my hobby project and I absolutely do not expect it to ever become anything commercial. I do not even plan to accept donations or anything like that. Basically it’s something that I need, and since it doesn’t exist I am considering building it myself.

There is a big probability that I might stop working on it either because I find it “good enough” for my needs or because I won’t be able to work on it anymore, but I would say I’ll try to keep it as simple as possible, so it should be relatively easy to maintain. Also, relying on Element (Matrix) maintain the server code would mean I just need to maintain the client, which should cut the work down by 50%. I strongly hope Matrix will never shut down or get sold.

In any case, okay! Let there be the possibility to export data in a common format! (Preferably Markdown)

I feel all my data is siloed across several apps

Matrix supports a way to integrate with third-party data sources, but I haven’t read too much into it as it was not in my goals. Perhaps a Synapse (Matrix) plug-in might allow to integrate notes with third-party sources without having to make any changes to the client code. I might investigate this possibility in a later stage.

I didn’t know this term! I knew about DAGs which are probably a way to implement CRDTs. I just read the definition on Wikipedia, it says that “[CRDTs feature] an algorithm (itself part of the data type) automatically resolv[ing] any inconsistencies that might occur [in case of conflicts]”, that sounds interesting. I was thinking to try to resolve conflicts automatically whenever possible by adapting Git merge strategies, and when impossible: either just concatenate both versions and let the users fix it manually, or giving users the option to choose line-by-line which version they want.

With this keyword I might be able to find more literature on the topic. Thank you for suggesting it!

start by scouting around and see if you can adapt FOSS apps

I see lot of people are recommending me to contribute to existing projects instead of reinventing the wheel. I want this app to be as close as possible as I envision it, I couldn’t find something close enough to what I had in mind (in particular these three things do not seem to get along well: real-time collaboration, simplicity, reliability/stability). But I’ll be honest, I code for fun and I am lazy. Even if there was another project similar enough to this, I don’t think I would want to invest time to learn all the details and then more time to see if it can be adapted to my vision. Starting from scratch is easier, even though it might not be as beneficial to the FOSS community. Still, thank you for suggesting this, that sounds like it would be the smartest thing to do.

Also, I didn’t know about Murena, thanks for mentioning it!

Whoa, that’s a long list of ideas… let me see…

1. That’s the plan, excluding iOS as I do not have a Mac and thus I cannot develop for it
2. Certainly
3. Certainly!
4. That’s not part of the MVP (minimum viable product) I have in mind, but an export function must certainly be added later
5. Plug-ins are not part of my goal, but I will do my best to keep the source code modular enough to let people adapt it freely
6. We agree on that, global search is necessary, but I did not think about a “search inside a note” option. That seems to make sense, I’ll see what I can do
7. Tags are part of my idea, although not the MVP, but folders are not; I will see if I can also add folders without complicating code and UI too much, that doesn’t sound like a bad idea
8. Not part of my goal, but maybe in a future iteration
9. Yup, that’s what I had in mind too
10. As a developer I like Markdown, but it is not on my priority list… perhaps in a future iteration. I was thinking to (maybe) use Markdown behind the curtains, so it might not be too difficult to let users toggle the WYSIWYG
11. The first UI that I am planning to develop will be for the web browser, then a lazy-man Electron UI for the desktop as well as something for Android, I just wanted to do something simple. I don’t have the time and skills to do deep desktop integration, perhaps in the future, or maybe someone might contribute this feature if this project actually manages to become something interesting
12. That’s not part of the Simple Notes app I was thinking about, but that would make sense for Simple Calendar, perhaps in the future I might consider linking notes and reminders, but that’s not something I am thinking about yet
13. I did not think about that, that’s a good idea, I’ll see what I can do
14. The first version will not let you upload media, but images are planned. I did not think about sound/video/documents, but I guess why not?

I think notes collaboration might be a anti feature

That’s the main reason why I decided to build this suite of apps in the first place. I want to be able to work collaboratively on things with my girlfriend, and we must be able to do it in real-time. I realize that this will eat away a big chunk of the total time I will dedicate to this project, but it is also the main reason why I am not satisfied with the options currently available.

Oh, I like this a lot! I will consider adopting it if I will actually get this project started. Thanks!

Oh yeah, I used Joplin in the past. Although the goals are quite different from my idea. Joplin is a great recommendation as an alternative to Google Keep, but it’s not real-time collaborative (or federated, for what it matters).

create drawings

Ah, I don’t remember this option. Maybe it wasn’t available when I tried it last time a few years ago. I guess that means Joplin is still being actively developed.

I would also look into collaborating with the people […] Not sure if that will work, but it’s worth a shot if you’re interested

Oh! I just noticed that they have quite a few things besides Docs. I mean… I probably should. My goal is for something much smaller, I just want a replacement for Google Keep, and some day in the near future, SplitWise. Joplin sounds like a better candidate than Numerique.

Thanks for pushing to collaborate, I realize that would actually make more sense than starting a new project from scratch. Not without guilt, I have to admit that I code for fun, and I have more fun working on something that works exactly as I envision it rather than just joining another project. Someday I might learn how to make some real contributions to existing software, but I don’t think this idea of making a simple replacement for Google Keep will be my trampoline to working this way. Still, thank you for trying to push me to do it!

Oh yeah, both Joplin and NextCloud are great. I tried them both in the past. NextCloud is a bit bloated in my opinion though, I was hoping to go for something simpler both to install and to use.

Most of us here on the Lemmy Selfhosted community are skilled enough to keep a computer running somewhere, expose it securely on the internet (or just LAN, if that’s good enough), and install their own services such as Joplin and NextCloud, but my goal would be to make something that you don’t need to self-host. If you can trust any server, you don’t need to host your own. I like the idea of building a network comprised of both self-hosting users, and “normal” users, like here on Lemmy.

The federation may leave you wanting more and the collaboration might not be “real time” enough for you either, though. If you can build something better by all means go for it.

I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Do you mean writing a protocol that supports federation is a very difficult thing to do? Actually my first draft didn’t include federation as that’s just too much for my skills. But I am considering adopting Matrix, and Matrix includes federation, so why not? They built real-time messaging with Matrix, so I would assume that should be real-time enough for document editing.

As far as I know, Joplin is not really real-time collaborative, nor federated. I was using it a few years ago and I like it, that would be a great suggestion for people not interested in those two things.

why you wouldn’t hop on projects already out there

Ah… that’s… yeah, that would probably make a lot of sense. I think that to us developers it’s much easier to come up with our own ideas than to hop onto other projects unless they align very well with our vision. It’s quite unusual to find other people with our very same goals. I’ll be honest, I code for fun. I would like to build this tool because want it more than because I need it, as there already are both Google Keep and Joplin after all. If there was an alternative out there with most of the feature features I need, in a programming language and framework that I am familiar with, I would probably have joined or forked it. But no, unfortunately that’s not the case. My goal is not to just find/build a replacement for Google Keep, my goal is to find/build a framework that can be used to build more collaborative apps in the future. A replacement for SplitWise is my next goal immediately after Google Keep, and I assume (hopefully not too naïvely) that once I will have a starting point, making more similar apps will be virtually free in terms of time required.

Actually, I was just so incredibly lucky that the Matrix protocol seems to overlap almost exactly with all the things I had in mind. I had included a few more features in my draft for a custom protocol, but honestly adopting something already made would save many tens of hours of work, so joining something already existing sounds like a good idea. I don’t think I will be able to contribute code to it though, as it’s developed in a language I am not familiar with (yet), so if I decided to go for Matrix after all, I will just be joining as a consumer.

LibreOffice also has Async collab […] might also benefit from another person putting their time towards it

Oh, that’s actually good to know, thanks! Personally, at the moment I use Google Docs when I need to work in real-time on a document with someone else. In my opinion it’s just too convenient to just be able to share a link which can be opened with a web browser from any device and operating system. There are some good self-hostable web options for documents imho though, which are probably less resource-demanding than LibreOffice.

Unfortunately I am not interesting in contributing to LibreOffice. I have installed it on all of my devices, but I almost never use it.

Whatever you choose to do, I’ll be super interested to see the results.

I’ll take that as an encouragement! Thanks!

Ah, that’s why the UI looked familiar! I have some of their apps on my Android :P

Joplin is not really real-time collaborative, nor federated. Or rather, it wasn’t last time I used it a few years ago, unless things have changed now. As a developer, I like Joplin though, that would be a great suggestion.

Oh yeah, I looked into and tried some of the European collaborative docs softwares, in particular I like this Numerique’s clean Material UI interface and I’m definitely going to take inspiration from it (although I haven’t installed and tried it, I just checked screenshots). Although, if you are recommending it as an alternative to my idea, Numerique doesn’t seem to be federated, nor to be privacy-centric (well… it is if you self-host, but my idea is to let people collaborate through different servers, like Lemmy, I don’t want users to need to trust the owner of the servers they join). And I really need an alternative to Google Keep more than Google Docs. I’ll be honest, Google Keep is really well made in my opinion, I would say we don’t yet have a good self-hostable alternative.

did I mix google keep and docs

Yeah, Google Keep is more like for text snippets, links, checklists, scribbles, and images. Google Docs is a full-fledged RTF editor. I was planning to implement the two things separately. I considered implementing Markdown in the Google Keep replacement, but I am still undecided whether it might count as feature-bloat.

vjournals

Oooh, that’s nice. I know about VCard and VCal, but I didn’t know about VJournal. Thanks for the hint, this might be very useful!

Ah, that’s a shame, I quite liked the idea of using the “Simple” prefix. Well, naming software is hard! I’ll just keep it as a temporary name for now. Thanks!

As a personal anecdote, recently I installed a co-op videogame on my Linux Steam machine and I couldn’t get past the main menu, I wasted quite a bit of my own and my friend’s time before realizing it was a bug in the Linux build. After reinstalling the Windows version through Proton everything worked flawlessly.

Please don’t publish a Linux build unless you plan to test and maintain it.