The idea

Just like almost all of us, most my time through the day is spent online. Hopping between websites in search of inspirations, ideas, learning, API docs and what not. Even while working on my projects I am constantly connected to the internet. Mostly for seeking help on Stack Overflow and through API references if I ever get stuck (a lot).

I am a college student too. So, most of what I learn, for exams mostly is through youtube, wikipedia and other informative websites on the topic.

While concentrating on one of the above I tend to get kind of disconnected from the other. And since most of the time I am not doing the latter, except a day before the exams. It costs the grades. So, I thought to myself, if there could be a way to keep revising the important facts unobtrusively and effectively while I am online, then maybe my life would be a lot easier.

I began looking for existing solutions and discovered some, not many apps in the process. They didn’t quite work for me as I tested their unobtrusivity and effectiveness.

The only way left, was to scratch my own itch.

Exploring solutions

If it was to be something that lives in a browser, it had to be a chrome extension. A chrome new tab extension to be specific. A new tab always stands between your current page and the site you will visit next. And the job of throwing a fact at you to revise was to be done in that very brief moment. Sounds challenging? It actually was.

Starting out weird

I wanted not only to be able to add notes manually but to clip notes from websites too. That is to highlight some text that you find remembering worthy, right click and save. Chrome API makes this feature very easy to implement. I had it working in under 10 lines of code.

This was the time when Evernote rolled its new Web UI and I was kind of impressed by that. So I tried to follow the same design. Categorising notes into topics. Here are some screenshots of the mockups created with HTML, CSS and Sketch.