azeirah/brainstorm

Project-brainstorm is a multi-purpose note-taking application which excells at free writing, prototyping, task lists and cheat sheets

Brainstorm

Brainstorm is a note-taking application made with love and my childhood dreams.

Demo

Features

• Note taking
  • Live preview of what you're writing
  • Supports Github Flavored markdown
  • Syntax highlighting for all languages highlight.js supports (see support here)
• Viewing all notes with the same tag by clicking on a tag name
• Sharing a single note by clicking on the title of a note
• You can create your own boards to organize your notes with, I've got notes, school, JavaScript, rambling, Brainstorm, C, links and Good Stuff.

Need help setting it up?

I see it in your eyes, you tried it, and instantly, you fell in love. I hear you wondering, how do I host my own?

At the moment, it takes a little time to set it up. You can choose to run it locally, or you can choose to run it on a server.

Local Brainstorm

Brainstorm only runs on Linux and Apple OSX, it's possible to set it up on Windows, but honestly, I have no idea how ;(

First, you need to install meteor, run curl https://install.meteor.com/ | sh in your favorite terminal. Then, you'll need to download Brainstorm (check out the releases, or clone Brainstorm with git) To run Brainstorm, run meteor inside the brainstorm folder, and a local server will start @ home sweet home.

Alternatively, you can host your very own Brainstorm server using mup.

The easiest way to host a Brainstorm server by far is by running meteor deploy {{yourUrl}}.meteor.com inside the Brainstorm directory. Replace {{yourUrl}} with anything you want, the demo version of Brainstorm, brainstorm-notes.meteor.com is hosted this way.

I'm sorry that it's so inconvenient to host Brainstorm at this time, I'll make this easier in the future, I promise!

Laura, I need to know what you're currently working on!

I'm currently working on improving boards, I do this for you as much as I do this for me

Cool project, how can I contribute?

All feedback is welcome. Anyone can contribute to Brainstorm. If you enjoyed the demo or are already hosting your own brainstorm server, any kind of feedback you may have is very welcome. I love emails, so feel free to send me an email @ [email protected]

If you find any bugs, please contact me or open up an issue.

Todo features

1. Widgets
2. Accounts
3. Privacy, so that nobody can remove or edit your notes without your permission, which is totally not happening all the time at the demo

Goal

Building a solid note-taking application which can be used for several different tasks:

1. Note taking
2. Planning
3. Cheat sheets
4. Free-writing

Honestly, I use this to dump my thoughts, write little notes about what happened today, sketch out how I'm going to tackle my next little project, collect quotes, save snippets of code, write down homework exercises and scribble down notes during class, share links with friends as well as let friends share links with me, write meaningless little stories, and type to the rhythm of my favorite songs.

Contact

I don't get many emails, but I do love email, so please send me any email @ [email protected]

-- Brainstorm was written and developed by Laura Brekelmans

Contributors

• Thanks to @neynah for the icons.
• Thanks to @paulproteus for helping with the sandstorm.io integration

brainstorm's Issues

Update note button doesn't dissappear after updating a note

This is a critical bug.

After pressing the edit button on a note, and then pressing the update note button on the editor, the editor will remain in note-updating mode, you cannot insert a new note until you refresh the page.

Gif of the issue

Future Sandstorm platform change will impact Brainstorm

I am filing issues to notify of future breaking changes. Specifically, client-side loading of external scripts is blocked in the following PR: sandstorm-io/sandstorm#3409

In testing, Brainstorm appears to try to load stylesheets from CDNs, which won't work after this change. The app is still reported to be functionally usable, but it doesn't look right on a server running this security change. (Also, #19 is similarly related here.)

(sandstorm package): Use more informative action title

Steps reproduce:

• Click on Brainstorm in the left navigation bar in Sandstorm
• Consider making a new Brainstorm instance

Expected behavior:

• Button says New Brainstorm (or something else informative)

Actual behavior:

• Button says New Instance

Screenshot:

New Brainstorm Graphics for Sandstorm Package

@Azeirah

I'm Nena Nguyen, designer at Sandstorm. I'm reaching out to you about Brainstorm graphics because we're currently developing an app market and working on UI improvements to the existing Sandstorm shell design. See: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sandstorm-dev/VRkPqX61cRs/Ts37SbqqKAAJ

As a part of this redesign, existing and new apps will need to submit 3 graphics (as a part of their SPK) for aesthetic and functional purposes.

I wasn't able to find any branding/logo assets for Brainstorm so I went ahead and designed you some graphics (inspired by your app's grid layout and a little green underscore highlight I saw).

If you think these are suitable, I can send you the files for when we need apps to update their SPKs(soonish). If not, I'll happily send over the illustrator/svg files or you can choose to come up with your own set.

Thanks!

:)

Characters getting removed and cursor jumping around while using the note editor

While typing in the editor, in either the tag fields, name field or content field, characters may sometimes be skipped. This happens far too often, and results in an annoying experience.

This is all because the editor's title, tag and content fields are reactive variables. When they change, for example when you're writing something, reactivity might lag behind a little, and return to a state before you wrote a character.

Using these reactive session variables in the editor also creates a plethora of other problems, no spaces in tags, cursor sometimes jumps around, typing feels more sluggish. Not good 😦

Renaming a board "Home" deletes it

that's about it... I have 2 "homes" now, it deleted the old board and I can't remove the 2nd "home" anymore.

The editor note needs styling

The editor note is unaligned, the submit button is small, fonts are a little messy and all input fields should be a bit bigger.

My css is not very good, it would be nice if someone could help with this one.

Bring font-awesome.css in-package

Privacy Badger detects one outside call in your app to netdna.bootstrapcdn.com, which seems to be for font-awesome.css, which really should be inside the app package and not brought in from an outside source. Note that while this works right now, eventually client-side sandboxing in Sandstorm will break this existing setup.

Embedded Youtube videos aren't scaled accordingly

Just needs a single line of css added

(Sandstorm Package) In firefox page keeps reloading

I keep seeing xhr and xhr_send requests. My Sandstorm instance lives behind an nginx reverse proxy (I don't know if that matters?) I'm able to briefly select a text field, which then refreshes the page. Clicking on "New Note :)" highlights the text areas red, and then refreshes the page again.

Tags cannot contain spaces

Tags cannot contain spaces, because they are inside a session variable. The session variable doesn't support serializing arrays, instead, they get converted to strings.

An easy fix would be to simply convert from and to json. Tag arrays will never get really large, so I don't think there's any reason to be concerned about performance.

Markdown quotes are unstyled

Using the markdown quote syntax

> A quote

Results only in an indented and unstyled paragraph. It should have a little bit of styling to show that it's a quote.

Brainstorm has no favicon!

!

Notes in last column have no edges in Chrome

A note in progress can be deleted if you accidentally click on a link *within* brainstorm

When you're writing a note, it's possible to delete the current draft of the note by leaving the page. Leaving to an external page, or closing the browser, will warn the user that she's leaving the page.

This functionality however, breaks when you click a link within brainstorm itself. Since the browser doesn't realize you're not actually leaving the page. So the warning won't appear, and the draft will instantly dissappear.

(sandstorm package): Synchronize URL to Sandstorm address bar

Steps to reproduce:

• Be inside a Brainstorm in Sandstorm
• Create a new Brainstorm
• Create a new Brainstorm card, for example

• Note that the app iframe has moved to a URL like /note/...
• Reload the page (because why not)

Expected behavior:

• See the same thing as you saw before the reload.

Actual behavior:

• Find yourself wondering where your card went. Screenshot:

Fix:

Add something like this to the HEAD element, to synchronize the app's current URL with Sandstorm:

https://gist.github.com/paulproteus/99373ffce3c277bf6ec2

Also note - in the future, I hope Sandstorm can make this issue go away by e.g. automatically running JS like this to synchronize the location. But since it's needed right now, I thought I should alert you to it.

(sandstorm package) use <base target="_blank"> so Markdown links open successfully, in a new tab

Steps to reproduce:

• Create a new brainstorm on e.g. oasis.sandstorm.io
• Create a card with a link in it, in Markdown format
• Click the link

Expected behavior:

• The link opens in a new tab, since Sandstorm doesn't allow the grain iframe to navigate to other base URLs than the grain's base URL

Actual behavior:

• Clicking seems to do nothing
• It logs a message to the JS console saying:

Refused to frame 'https://cthuugle.com/' because it violates the following Content Security Policy directive: "frame-src 'self' https://*.oasis.sandstorm.io".

Relevant info:

• audreyt/ethercalc#240 is a similar bug in EtherCalc
• The following HTML in the <HEAD> should make the problem go away:

<base target="_blank" />

No warning messages appear when a note gets rejected

When trying to submit a note with for example, too many tags (>40), or too many characters (>10000), the note will dissappear, but no message will appear.

The note shouldn't dissappear, and the user should be notified of the problem.

Demo is not working

The link; https://github.com/Azeirah/brainstorm#demo in readme file is not working. Can you fix it?