Hosted Notes: Like a Sticky Note in the Cloud

Managing all your account credentials can be a cumbersome task if done from memory, and potentially insecure if you use a traditional method like writing them down on paper. And that problem has spawned a niche in the market for a web app that can safely store your login credentials, whilst speeding up the whole login process. Luckily for us, there’s a ton of these apps available for us to choose from.

Hosted Notes is one of them. A lot of people, insecurely, write their login credentials down on paper, and Hosted Notes replicates this idea but in the cloud, but with a lot more security than standard paper notes. The service takes your login credentials and organises them into groups, for personal use throughout multiple types of website or for business use for multiple clients.

Setting the Scene

Let’s set the scene for when Hosted Notes becomes really useful. In one scenario, an individual can have so many accounts that, being the safe, different-password-for-different-sites kind of person, often forgets their credentials for different sites. They need a solution for safely storing all there login credentials to be accessed when needed.

Or, let’s look at a business that have multiple clients they are working for. Each one has their own set of credentials needed by the business that must be organised and assigned to different projects, as well as being shared with a variety of people on multiple machines. In both of these scenarios, Hosted Notes helps.

Design and Interface

Hosted Notes features a simple interface, focused on the table of credentials. The web app uses almost exclusively grey, black and yellow to symbolise the sticky note in the sky concept. Overall, everything is very simple to use and you won’t find it difficult to navigate your way through.

Getting Started

When you’ve signed up to Hosted Notes, you’re presented with a view not unlike the image above (sans the three folders I set up). Each entry must be categorised under a folder, and these are setup by clicking the “Create a New Group” link. This then leads you onto choosing a group name.

Once a group is created, you can then enter it and start creating entries. The entry creation form requires a little more time to be filled out, since each entry requires a name, the username and password of the corresponding site and the sign-in URL. Optionally, you can add notes to each entry if they are needed.

Re-accessing Login Credentials

Of course, Hosted Notes is designed for the time you need to re-access those login credentials you stored in their system. To do so, you simply launch the Hosted Notes website as normal, locate the desired site and then click on it. A stylishly-animated panel then drops down with your login credentials.

In it’s simplest form, Hosted Notes will just return your credentials to you; your username will be in plain text, while your password will be obfuscated unless you click the show button. However, Hosted Notes saves time even further by providing three helpful buttons to the left, each of which has been annotated with a coloured arrow.

• Red arrow – this button essentially launches the URL that you selected as the signup URL, allowing you to input your credentials.
• Blue arrow – this button copies your username to your clipboard.
• Green arrow – this button copies your password to your clipboard, unobfuscated.

Other than that, there’s little extra functionality which is exactly what we want. There’s no feature bloat here, which is exactly what we want in a simple utility like this.

Pricing and Availability

When reviewing Hosted Notes, I was using the free trial which is available for fourteen days, sans credit card. Should you want to use Hosted Notes outside of that window, you’ll need to shell out the minimal $4/month fee through PayPal. That is small, but similar utilities like LastPass Premium only cost $1/month with a non-time-limited free version available.

While the advantage of using a web app means you can access your credentials from anywhere, it does mean that you have to visit the Hosted Notes site to do so. Personally, I use LastPass because of the convenient browser extension that automatically retrieves login information without needing to visit a website. Hosted Notes does not have anything similar, so it’s more suited to the business user who doesn’t need to access these credentials on such a regular basis that it becomes an inconvenience to do it in this way.

Hosted Notes says it is releasing a mobile application in the future, too, although I seem to think that the March/April timeframe was meant to met in 2011, rather than 2012.

Final Thoughts

Hosted Notes is a pleasingly simple utility that works as you expect, even though it’s not entirely suited for personal, regular use. While it does what it says on the tin, I can’t help think that the free/$1 per month LastPass is more useful in most case. Hosted Notes lacks a browser extension, which is probably more useful to most than a smartphone app.

Nonetheless, I can’t fault Hosted Notes since it does nothing exceptionally wrong and is presented in a clean, simple interface that’s easy to use. And, if you’re managing group logins for shared team accounts, this might be a great solution.