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alex_portabella | 5 years ago | on: Show HN: PrivaNote – offline first, end-to-end encrypted notes

Hey HN! Happy to be here for another launch.

This time I'm showing off PrivaNote, my attempt at a modern day note taking application. A few highlights:

- offline first

- end-to-end encrypted sync

- installable as a browser extension (Chrome and FireFox) that overrides your new tab page.

Personally I'm always in the browser and always having random thoughts I want to capture, so this tool is perfect for jotting down notes and sorting them out later. I hope you find it as useful as I do!

PS, today I've also launched it on ProductHunt so if you find it interesting, consider giving an upvote there https://www.producthunt.com/posts/privanote

alex_portabella | 5 years ago | on: Show HN: Block Hooks, blockchain event subscriptions

Hey HN, for my last side project of the year I decided to build a much needed piece of infrastructure for the Celo (https://celo.org) blockchain ecosystem, an event subscription service.

You can configure it to listen for events on certain contracts (some basic filtering functionality is provided so you don't spam yourself) and receive a webhook when your conditions are met.

It has an HTTP API so you can easily register events from your system and supports custom ABI parsing so you can receive decoded events.

This kind of system is crucial for running any service on top of a blockchain, some quick use cases that spring to mind are:

- building a Stripe like service on the blockchain and watching for transfers

- monitoring sign ups for an email welcome.

Looking forward to any feedback!

alex_portabella | 5 years ago | on: Show HN: Offline-First Personal Kanban

IMO RxDB isn't a competitor here, we're talking about end-to-end encrypted solutions, RxDB is just a way of syncing JSON documents.

In that sense Firebase, Parse, deepstream.io all handle that problem as well.

What you want though is to operate without seeing your customers data, much more ethical in that you'll never be tempted to sell your users data

alex_portabella | 5 years ago | on: Show HN: Offline-First Personal Kanban

Nice! This is actually exactly what Portabella (https://portabella.io) started out as around 7 months ago.

I found that LocalStorage isn't reliable enough to keep all your important stuff, so my thought was to encrypt everything client side and store in LocalStorage + a database. On session startup you just check the lastEdited date of the LocalStorage version vs. the database version and take the data with the latest.

That way it's still offline first but you can also access your data on different machines.

Not trying to plug Portabella too much but I followed this logic and thought, how can I now allow people to share data? What if I give them different views? How about notifications? Pretty quickly I had fleshed out a full product.

alex_portabella | 5 years ago | on: Notion Timeline View

Well the primary benefit of Portabella is end-to-end encryption.

The reason for e2ee is so you don't have to trust the provider. If you're hosting stuff yourself why wouldn't you trust your own infra? As long as you've got a TLS connection to and from your servers + encryption at rest, client side encryption gives no particular benefits.

alex_portabella | 5 years ago | on: Notion Timeline View

Makes sense!

We've just launched our Documents feature, aiming to be a G Docs/Confluence alternative. Still early days though!

alex_portabella | 5 years ago | on: Show HN: Portabella – privacy friendly project management

Thank you thank you! Similar thought process.

I _do_ think that enterprise isn't our target market. Any large enough entity should probably self host their stuff, in that case e2ee isn't as appealing, assuming you trust your own company.

In my perfect world all tools would e2ee where possible, however it's a lot of work and until lately I'd argue consumers don't care. Hoping to be part of the change

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