SWYoon Labs

Most advice about studying English while reading assumes you will stop and write things down. In practice you do not, and the reason is not laziness. Stopping costs more than the note is worth in that moment. You are three paragraphs into an article. You hit a phrase you half-know. To capture it you have to leave the page, find wherever your notes live, wait for it to load, type the phrase, remember the sentence it came from, type that too, then find your way back and rebuild the thread you dropped. That is thirty to sixty seconds and a broken train of thought for one phrase. Do it five times in an article and you have stopped reading and started doing data entry. So you skip it. And a week later you meet the same phrase again and have the same faint feeling of recognition, which is exactly where you were before. This post is about a workflow that removes the cost of capturing instead of trying to make you more disciplined about paying it. The rule that makes it work Capture mus...

There is a lot of writing about building software with AI, and almost all of it stops at the demo. Someone prompts a model, a working prototype appears, the screenshot goes up, and that is the end of the story. I wanted to write the other part. I built a Chrome extension called Simple Side Note with AI assistance, published it to the Chrome Web Store, and kept shipping updates to it for seven weeks. This post is the actual record of that: what the commit history really looks like, where the AI was genuinely fast, and — the part I find more interesting — the specific decisions it never made for me. If you are wondering whether AI can take you past the prototype and into something people install, this is one honest data point. What got built Simple Side Note is a notepad that lives in the Chrome side panel. You open it next to whatever you are reading, write, and it stays there as you move between tabs. It saves memos locally, lets you pin the ones you want to keep, and exports to ...

Fully revised · July 2026. This post replaces the original five-part "dev diary" teaser with a single, complete guide: why I built Side Panel Clock, how to install and use it, how the code works, and how to put it to work in your own day. I spend most of my working day inside the browser, and all day long I kept doing the same tiny things: glancing at the clock, working out what time it was for a teammate three time zones away, and starting a quick timer so a task wouldn't quietly eat an hour. None of these are hard. The problem is that each one pulled me away from what I was doing. The OS clock meant looking off-screen. A world-clock site meant a new tab. A timer meant yet another tab or a phone app I'd forget to check. Individually trivial; together, a steady drip of small interruptions. So I built Side Panel Clock — a small Chrome extension that puts a clock, a world clock, a timer, and a Pomodoro into the browser sidebar, one glance away with zero context...

UPDATE · v1.3.0 Just keep jotting — it tidies itself up Simple Side Note — the lightweight notepad that lives in your browser sidebar — is out in 1.3.0 . In one line: "Less cleanup by hand, and every delete is undoable." 📝 At a glance 🧹 Auto-clean old memos — unpinned memos clear themselves after a chosen age (7 / 30 / 90 days) 🗑️ Trash — deleted memos are kept for 30 days and can be restored anytime 📌 Pin = "keep this" — pinned memos are never auto-cleaned 🛡️ Off by default — nothing is removed until you opt in 🧹 Auto-clean old memos — the headline feature Every lightweight notepad has the same dilemma. It's great for jotting things down the moment they pop up , but over time most of those turn into throwaway notes you no longer need — and deleting them one by one is quietly annoying . So 1.3.0 adds ⚙️ Settings → Saved...

UPDATE · v1.2.0 Never lose a note again Simple Side Note — the lightweight notepad that lives right in your browser sidebar — is now on v1.2.0 . In one line, this release is all about "keep your data safe, and keep your hands on the keyboard." 📝 At a glance 💾 Backup & Restore — export all your notes to a single file and import them back anytime ⌨️ Keyboard shortcuts — ⌘/Ctrl+S to save, ⌘/Ctrl+F to search (toggle in Settings) 🖥️ OS system fonts — San Francisco on Mac, Segoe UI on Windows, applied automatically 🐛 Small fixes — unified color-button tooltip language, and more 💾 Backup & Restore — the star of this release As your notes pile up, one worry grows with them: "What if I lose all of this?" Until now you could export notes one at a time as HTML or Markdown, but there was no way to back up everything at once. Delete the ex...

📅 Published June 2026  ·  ⏱ 5 min read  ·  ✍️ SWYoon Labs By the end of this post, you will have five searchable grammar memos living in your Chrome sidebar — organized by topic, ready in one click, and fast enough to check mid-sentence while you are writing an email or a message. The tool is Simple Side Note , a free Chrome extension. The setup takes under ten minutes. After that, adding a new grammar rule takes about thirty seconds — right-click, type two lines, save. What You Will Have When You Are Done Five memos in your sidebar, each named after a grammar topic you actually struggle with. Every entry inside them follows the same three-line format — rule, example, your confusion. And a search bar at the top that finds any entry in under ten seconds by keyword. The next time you wonder whether to write "I have been waiting" or "I was waiting" — instead of opening a new tab and re-searching, you type "p...

📅 Published June 2026  ·  ⏱ 5 min read  ·  ✍️ SWYoon Labs You learn a great phrase. You feel proud. Three days later, you cannot remember it, where you saw it, or what it meant. This happens to almost every English learner because most "study" is really just passive exposure — reading something interesting once and trusting your memory to hold onto it. It will not. Memory needs a system, not good intentions. Below is a 5-minute daily routine that solves this, using Simple Side Note , a free Chrome sidebar notepad, together with Google AI Mode. No new app to learn. No subscription. Just five concrete clicks, every day. What You'll Need Simple Side Note installed in Chrome (free, no account required) Access to Google AI Mode (google.com → "AI Mode" tab) 5 minutes, once a day The Routine, Click by Click 1 Minute 1 — Open one memo, name it "Daily Phrases...

📅 Published June 2026  ·  ⏱ 6 min read  ·  ✍️ SWYoon Labs There is a particular kind of frustration that only language learners know. You are in the middle of a Google AI Mode session. The AI just gave you the perfect explanation of a phrase you have been hearing everywhere — natural, contextual, exactly what you needed. You think, "I have to save this." So you open a new tab. You navigate to your notes app. By the time you get back to the AI response, the moment is gone. Your focus has scattered. The sentence that felt so clear a moment ago now feels like something you half-remember from a dream. This is the tab-switching problem — and it is quietly one of the biggest obstacles in modern language learning. In this post, I will show you a simple workflow that eliminates the problem entirely, using a free Chrome extension called Simple Side Note . Why Tab-Switching Kills Your Study Flow Focus is ...