Review by vertigo
Rated 3 out of 5
by vertigo, 7 years agoPromising add-on that does mostly work, and I love the annotations aspect, but it needs several things:
- When installing, there's no context menu option until you go into the settings and save them, even if you don't change anything. This shouldn't be necessary and will probably lead people to think it's not working (in fact I'd bet it's the reason for the two low ratings complaining about not having an entry in the right-click menu). This happens both on Waterfox 56.1.0 x64 and Firefox 59.0.2 x64.
- It needs a toolbar icon/button as well as the ability to set shortcuts to make adding notes and annotations quicker (using the context menu is less than idea for something like this). This would also require a setting to tell it where to place new notes by default.
- When a note or annotation is created in a location that causes it to not be visible (i.e., to be off-screen) when a page loads, there should be a notification that there's a note on the page that requires scrolling to see it (see Internote as an example of this).
- There needs to be an optional warning when deleting a note.
- It needs the ability to export/import the settings.
- It sometimes takes two tries to get it to create a note or annotation.
- Moving the notes was a bit counter-intuitive. I expected to click and drag on the hamburger menu to do so, but you have to drag the note itself. And then the hamburger menu stays in place while you move the note around, jumping back next to it once you drop it in its new position.
- Needs an interface to view/edit/delete all notes and annotations from all sites in one place (again, see Internote as an example).
- Needs the ability to backup/restore all notes and annotations and to set the directory where the files that contain their information are kept, so they can be kept on a separate drive or partition as well as be sync'd between computers. Speaking of sync'ing, it would be great if they would be sync'd by Firefox sync (maybe they are), but that might be asking a bit much. Also, if they aren't already, the files that contain the information should be human-readable.
- Finally, while not necessary for it to be a great and functional add-on, I'm looking at this as a possible replacement for Internote, which appears to be abandoned and isn't e10s compatible, and the ability to import all my notes from that add-on into this one would be HUGELY helpful, since I have a LOT of notes in it. With this and the above changes, this would not only replace that add-on, but be a massive improvement over it. I hope development continues on it and it becomes a suitable replacement.
One final note: the support site is github, but I don't see the code posted there. I thought the point of github was to host source code for open software, though maybe I'm wrong. It would be nice if this was open-source, just for the sake of helping to assure that permissions aren't being abused. I'd like to think we can trust that they're not but, unfortunately, we can't and shouldn't. I'm not saying I won't use it if the code isn't public, but I would feel much better about it if it were.
Edit: Thanks! I saw that, but didn't realize that was the actual code for it. As for the other issue, I'm 99% sure I didn't restart Waterfox, and that it started working after I saved the configuration. I'm less sure about whether or not I reloaded the page in between. I'm guessing I probably did, as I just tested it by uninstalling and reinstalling the addon, and saving the configuration did nothing but refreshing the page did, so it seems you're right there. In any case, the fact that refreshing the page(s) or restarting the browser is necessary isn't an issue; the problem is that it's not clear that it is, which seems to be causing a fair amount of confusion. I'd recommending putting it in bold letters, in its own "paragraph" so it doesn't just get skimmed over or skipped entirely. Or perhaps have it open a page upon installation that warns users of this "issue."
I look forward to further improvements. This appears to be the most promising notes addon, and I really hope you can make the above changes to make it a suitable replacement for Internotes et al. Let me know if I can be of any help with testing or in any other way.
- When installing, there's no context menu option until you go into the settings and save them, even if you don't change anything. This shouldn't be necessary and will probably lead people to think it's not working (in fact I'd bet it's the reason for the two low ratings complaining about not having an entry in the right-click menu). This happens both on Waterfox 56.1.0 x64 and Firefox 59.0.2 x64.
- It needs a toolbar icon/button as well as the ability to set shortcuts to make adding notes and annotations quicker (using the context menu is less than idea for something like this). This would also require a setting to tell it where to place new notes by default.
- When a note or annotation is created in a location that causes it to not be visible (i.e., to be off-screen) when a page loads, there should be a notification that there's a note on the page that requires scrolling to see it (see Internote as an example of this).
- There needs to be an optional warning when deleting a note.
- It needs the ability to export/import the settings.
- It sometimes takes two tries to get it to create a note or annotation.
- Moving the notes was a bit counter-intuitive. I expected to click and drag on the hamburger menu to do so, but you have to drag the note itself. And then the hamburger menu stays in place while you move the note around, jumping back next to it once you drop it in its new position.
- Needs an interface to view/edit/delete all notes and annotations from all sites in one place (again, see Internote as an example).
- Needs the ability to backup/restore all notes and annotations and to set the directory where the files that contain their information are kept, so they can be kept on a separate drive or partition as well as be sync'd between computers. Speaking of sync'ing, it would be great if they would be sync'd by Firefox sync (maybe they are), but that might be asking a bit much. Also, if they aren't already, the files that contain the information should be human-readable.
- Finally, while not necessary for it to be a great and functional add-on, I'm looking at this as a possible replacement for Internote, which appears to be abandoned and isn't e10s compatible, and the ability to import all my notes from that add-on into this one would be HUGELY helpful, since I have a LOT of notes in it. With this and the above changes, this would not only replace that add-on, but be a massive improvement over it. I hope development continues on it and it becomes a suitable replacement.
One final note: the support site is github, but I don't see the code posted there. I thought the point of github was to host source code for open software, though maybe I'm wrong. It would be nice if this was open-source, just for the sake of helping to assure that permissions aren't being abused. I'd like to think we can trust that they're not but, unfortunately, we can't and shouldn't. I'm not saying I won't use it if the code isn't public, but I would feel much better about it if it were.
Edit: Thanks! I saw that, but didn't realize that was the actual code for it. As for the other issue, I'm 99% sure I didn't restart Waterfox, and that it started working after I saved the configuration. I'm less sure about whether or not I reloaded the page in between. I'm guessing I probably did, as I just tested it by uninstalling and reinstalling the addon, and saving the configuration did nothing but refreshing the page did, so it seems you're right there. In any case, the fact that refreshing the page(s) or restarting the browser is necessary isn't an issue; the problem is that it's not clear that it is, which seems to be causing a fair amount of confusion. I'd recommending putting it in bold letters, in its own "paragraph" so it doesn't just get skimmed over or skipped entirely. Or perhaps have it open a page upon installation that warns users of this "issue."
I look forward to further improvements. This appears to be the most promising notes addon, and I really hope you can make the above changes to make it a suitable replacement for Internotes et al. Let me know if I can be of any help with testing or in any other way.
Developer response
posted 7 years agoThank you for your comment, I'll annotate all your suggestion and try to fix the issues if possible.
About the issue when installing the addon, it requires all the opened pages to be reloaded after installing the plugin (it is necessary because it has to inject the code that creates the annotations). Maybe you reloaded (or rebooted) Firefox after saving the configuration (it would be great if you could confirm this, as I can´t reproduce the issue in my navigator).
About the source code, it is posted in github (https://github.com/carriH/My-Notes). Please, let me know if you still can´t access to it. Thanks.
About the issue when installing the addon, it requires all the opened pages to be reloaded after installing the plugin (it is necessary because it has to inject the code that creates the annotations). Maybe you reloaded (or rebooted) Firefox after saving the configuration (it would be great if you could confirm this, as I can´t reproduce the issue in my navigator).
About the source code, it is posted in github (https://github.com/carriH/My-Notes). Please, let me know if you still can´t access to it. Thanks.