ThoughtCanvas

Inspiration

We had a ton of ideas for this hackathon as we began, and we quickly noticed that it was hard to organize our thoughts. We took a lot of inspiration from Obsidian's canvas feature and Notion's "generate AI summary" feature.

What it does

So far, in our application, users can create different notebooks. Within each notebook, users can create and position note cards that can combine to form effective mood boards.

How we built it

We used JS, HTML, and CSS for the backend and Vercel to host the website.

Challenges we ran into

A major feature of our initial idea was the use of AI to enhance the experience. However, the Gemini API was hard to integrate with JS webapps, and we weren't able to get it fully working. Also, Mongo DB was difficult to integrate with Vercel for storage. Both of these were major time drains. We had other issues with Vercel as wekk, such as only being allowed to deploy 100 times in 24 hours.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a solid UI and our notebook system was something we thought of on the fly.

What we learned

Three out of the four of us had never used JS before, so we all learned a lot as we went. We all especially learned a lot more about the technicalities of hosting and storing data that we had known beforehand.

What's next for ThoughtCanvas

Our initial aim for this project was to implement AI so that it could help create full text for the note cards with just a few entered words using context from all of the other existing cards. This would make it easier to capture all of your thoughts as they come into your head. We also wanted to be able to link notes together and create cool graph views like Obsidian allows you to do, but we didn't have enough time to implement this.