Amnis

A thought organizer for the 21st century. Freely commit your train of thoughts to a digital form, and then organise in time.

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Inspiration

Our idea came from a need to help organise long, sometimes lucid trains of thought about any topic. When I am actively engaged in a subject, it is often a major hassle to organise and commit my thoughts to some kind of permanent media while I am partaking in this subject, and, afterwards, remembering what ideas I had about this subject can be difficult and unreliable.

Essentially, we wanted a tool to easily commit our thoughts to a permanent medium, for organising and reviewing later.

We got the name, Amnis, from the Latin word for stream, the core idea of our site - organising streams of thought.

The logo makes use of negative space to represent a Σ (sigma) symbol, representing the addition, or culmination, of all of your thoughts on Amnis.

Logo explanation

What it does

  • When you visit the site, you are greeted with a minimal login screen. We used Netlify's authentication system, something we hadn't used too much before, but it ended up being a very pleasant library to use.
  • Once logged in, you are taken to the Thought Space. Here, you can create new streams of thought for the various topics you are engaged in.
  • Once you have chosen a stream, you can simply start typing, committing each thought to the stream as it comes.
  • Finally, after you have finished engaging with a topic and you have the time, you can organise your thoughts, deleting excess thoughts and rearranging as you see fit.
  • You now have a permanent record of your thoughts/ideas on Amnis!

How we built it

  • We used ReactJS implemented in TypeScript for the frontend, and NodeJS with the Express framework for the backend, also written in TypeScript.
  • We used tsParticles, a TypeScript implementation of ParticlesJS, for the background particles. My first time using this, and caused a lot of headache.
  • Redux was implemented a bit, we didn't really have much experience with this either.
  • We tried react-draggable

Challenges we ran into

  • tsParticles/ParticlesJS being an incredible pain to work with
  • We tried making the Thought Cards draggable into different streams, but we didn't have the time nor experience to implement this
  • Many other things

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Getting tsParticles/ParticlesJS to work
  • Getting our MVP
  • Getting thought organisation working; the logic for this was actually somewhat difficult to figure out
  • Authentication was nice to have

What we learned

  • tsParticles is a finicky library, but I am at least familiar with it now
  • Draggable components are also finicky, but I have also learnt how to use them

What's next for Amnis

  • We wanted to implement a more complete thought taking process, involving more easily dismissing the latest thoughts.
  • We wanted to implement Twilio to allow users to SMS message their thoughts into Amnis, this will likely be implemented.

Thank you for looking at Amnis :))

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