Hey! I've never really been a spreadsheet person, but I occasionally need something more than a standard calculator. I used to use Soulver for this purpose, but it lacks a good way to visualize data, and as a software engineer I find its informal syntax and lack of user-defined functions limiting.
So I built Inkblots, a "notebook calculator": a hybrid between a full-blown notebook interface like Jupyter and a notepad calculator like Soulver. It's built around a small language I've been working on called Blots, designed for exactly this kind of inline, expression-by-expression evaluation.
Inkblots lets you build interactive documents around blocks of code. You can feed inputs from forms to your code and display the output in charts and markdown blocks. I've used it for things like figuring out how much to budget for an apartment in SF, planning college savings, figuring out how high to put the nail when hanging pictures, and generally building little tools and visualizations that I'd otherwise have to reach for a spreadsheet for.
It's local-first and doesn't require an account. Your documents are stored locally, and you can make as many as you want. If you create an account, you can sync across devices and share documents with others.
There's also an (optional) AI agent that can search the web and build and edit documents with what it finds. The simple syntax and inline results make it easy to verify what the agent produces. No data gets sent to any LLM providers unless you send a message, and no data is used for training.
Please give it a try and let me know what you think!
0 comments
—
Show HN: Local-first computational notebook for everyday life · HackerTrans
So I built Inkblots, a "notebook calculator": a hybrid between a full-blown notebook interface like Jupyter and a notepad calculator like Soulver. It's built around a small language I've been working on called Blots, designed for exactly this kind of inline, expression-by-expression evaluation.
Inkblots lets you build interactive documents around blocks of code. You can feed inputs from forms to your code and display the output in charts and markdown blocks. I've used it for things like figuring out how much to budget for an apartment in SF, planning college savings, figuring out how high to put the nail when hanging pictures, and generally building little tools and visualizations that I'd otherwise have to reach for a spreadsheet for.
It's local-first and doesn't require an account. Your documents are stored locally, and you can make as many as you want. If you create an account, you can sync across devices and share documents with others.
There's also an (optional) AI agent that can search the web and build and edit documents with what it finds. The simple syntax and inline results make it easy to verify what the agent produces. No data gets sent to any LLM providers unless you send a message, and no data is used for training.
Please give it a try and let me know what you think!