Feedback wanted: Notetaking application concept
 

I've come up with a new idea for a tablet-friendly note-taking application that zooms in to notes you are writing but allows you to "drag away" notes that you are not using at the moment for later use.

A video of the quick prototype I wrote to explain the concept can be found here, please have a look and give some feedback:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...78714653&hl=en


Do you think this could be some useful application on the NITs? Do you have suggestions how to improve that concept even more?

Re: Feedback wanted: Notetaking application concept
 

Looks pretty awesome :)

A couple of suggestions :)

1) Maybe provide a way to resize the note manually? Rather than have the sizes correspond completely to its position on the screen? (Maybe a draggable lower-right corner?)

2) Custom note colors/pen colors?

Could your please provide a binary? I'd love to try this out :)

Re: Feedback wanted: Notetaking application concept
 

Looks cool. I assume you plan to scale down the drawings so you can see the zoomed out notes (or maybe I just didn't see it doing that in the video)?

My only suggestion would be that you try to keep the code modular. By itself, I don't really need a note taking app, but I can see it being handy if it's easy to integrate either with the app or with other apps. Unfortunately, I don't really have any practical examples because all of the apps seem to be their own little world at the moment :)

Re: Feedback wanted: Notetaking application concept
 

How about using it as a light-table style app for photos?

where your photos are stored in a side bar and you can drag them out and expand them and move them around (similar to the microsoft surface demo a while back?)

Re: Feedback wanted: Notetaking application concept
 

Personally, I've no desire for a notetaking app where I write on the screen: the size of the screen is physically too small and the accuracy of the stylus means it's not specific enough.

My ideal usecase for a note app is neatly encapsulated in Psion's old EPOC Jotter.

http://www.ericlindsay.com/epoc/bjot5.htm
http://home.online.no/~gmorgan/gadge...een_jotter.gif

The key features are:

• Reopens with last-opened database automatically p[em
• Rich-text editing
• Always in "edit" mode

Nothing quite like it on Maemo, AFAIK :-(

Re: Feedback wanted: Notetaking application concept
 

I generally like your idea

Suggestion:
- It is good that you can drag your notes around but to
minimize screen scratches, stylys wear and processor load ( ;)) and
to make your note handling faster perhaps
there should be a shortcut to automatically order/move your notes
as icons with preview to the left side "grid". Perhaps by double
tapping the green top left triangle program should move the note
to the next empty slot to the left side grid (and when there
are many notes program automatically decrease icon size/resize grid).
And similarly when you double tap the left side note icon
you instantly move the note to the topmost position to the right.
And hopefully program automatically saves the notes / loads
latest note set.

Re: Feedback wanted: Notetaking application concept
 

Jaffa, I am surprised by what you have said.
That actually looks like my ideal editor too.
Whilst I have been using liqbase for notes I have been considering the interface a lot.
The graffiti wall proves a concept, though after extensive use I am aiming towards continuous infinite paper where its not a separate step.

I write on my screen every single day, small hand written notes which are actually plenty, all I require for the continuous is a button at the bottom to say "move up now, im done with this".

Actual hardware keyboard support has been considered as well - the hardware keyboard on the 810 currently defines a single line to associate a sketch, but the long term aim is to simply allow hand written notes to be mixed up with keyed entry and code blocks or images etc.

I have found that the cradle I have made for my 810 ( http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/7...crateinkx8.jpg ) supports my wrist at the same height as the screen and so is more akin to writing on actual paper.

The effect is outstanding and I often catch myself sitting and doodling and writing little post it notes.

I hope to soon bring them all together as groups and tag similar threads to allow all those little notes to be useful and not lost.

Anyway, I'll stop talking for now - I hope I finish it all in time.

Re: Feedback wanted: Notetaking application concept
 

thp,
im awfully sorry for that splurg i read the comments and said what I thought before your video had loaded.

I agree with ism that scaling as it stands is too fiddly and not preconfigured, maybe when you create a new item you fill the free space available?

Are you redrawing the sketch each time you adjust, or are you scaling a bitmap?

I hope its a sketch because you can get tremendous performance boost by filtering the points and removing duplicates or straight runs.
You gain an additional performance boost when shrinking them by only drawing some points (instead of every 1, draw every 2 or 3 or 4 and so on).

For obvious reasons I do enjoy sketching programs. :)

Re: Feedback wanted: Notetaking application concept
 

The one problem I've had with other "infinite paper" approaches to note taking is I like having them segregated. For instance, when I last used my Psion I had separate notes for:

• patents I was working on
• Todo list for the day
• Shopping list for the weekend
• Phone number for a plumber
• ...

The big problem with infinite paper is navigating between these and ensuring I've got the space to add to the earlier ones without colliding with another existing note.

Solve these problems and I may be convinced :-)

Sounds good: I still haven't got round to giving liqbase a try - and will endeavour to do so ASAP.

As I said above, though, my biggest problem with other similar solutions (e.g. Horizon) was navigating back to individual specific notes for either review or modification at a later date.

Sounds interesting.

Re: Feedback wanted: Notetaking application concept
 

I don't know that infinite paper means you can only have one note. If it does, I'm against it! It just means that you can make a note as long as you like without turning pages. You can start another note, I think!

Do take a look at the liqbase utube video.

Re: Feedback wanted: Notetaking application concept
 

This looks like a nice start. Some comments:

• Have the shrunken notes have a representation of the note within somehow.
• Have some kind of auto-organization to the shrunken notes. Even with infinite paper, you're going to have separate notes for separate things (I'm not going to combine my grocery list with my notes from my meeting with the college president).

I use GoBinder on my Tablet PC. That SW uses a hierarchical organization with the note in handwriting. Pretty nice and easy to use. Visually appealing, too.

• Smooth out the handwriting. One thing I have noticed about taking notes on the N8*0 models is that handwriting sampling is slow enough so my handwriting always looks blocky. Perhaps you can smooth out the screen writing.
• Autoscroll the "paper" in the note. Like EverNote/One Note/GoBinder, each note should be able to have lots of "paper" in the note itself, while it's representation on the screen is smaller.

Thanks for considering this app and my comments. This could be quite awesome: kind of a Xournal/MaemoPad+ with organization.

Re: Feedback wanted: Notetaking application concept
 

Is there any source for liqbase? Couldn't find it on its website. Only a playtest binary.

Re: Feedback wanted: Notetaking application concept
 

The source is in garage.

https://garage.maemo.org/plugins/scm.../?root=liqbase

Re: Feedback wanted: Notetaking application concept
 

frethop,

a lot of applications suffer on maemo because of the screen refresh speed.
I've found a number of ways round this (which even the video doesn't do justice since I was running in powersave mode when i was drawing)

I write clear legible notes every day and drawing quick circles come out as circles.
It helps that I've got the refresh rate upto expected levels :)

Currently it views the notes on the graffiti wall at half resolution, so for every page you write you can view and read 4 pages of text.


thp, the source is parked in garage.
I might be able to do some things nicely, but fail at packaging - its not ready for end user consumption yet.

Re: Feedback wanted: Notetaking application concept
 

If you want to test it, make sure you have python2.5 and pygtk installed and download it from:

http://thpinfo.com/2008/maemo/dragnotes.py

Re: Feedback wanted: Notetaking application concept
 

The problem then is how do you move down to write more text? When you type on a keyboard, there's a focus and the text area can scroll as you go. With a paper-like UI you have to have some form of indicator to the system to scroll in some direction and give you some more room. And, no matter how well that's implemented, it's going to interrupt your flow.

I've seen it, and now played with lcuk's playtest. It's technically impressive and I hope the library gets used in some whizzy new apps. It's not yet done anything to change my mind of drawing tools for notes: it can't magically make the stylus as accurate as a pen, or the N810's screen as big physically as an A5 notepad.

Another thing (and Karel could pop up here), is that cursive sketching can't help with searching through 100 or so notes for the one you want.

Re: Feedback wanted: Notetaking application concept
 

OK, but there's not much that will help with searching; unless you propose LaTeX instead of hand-drawn equations. (Different notes for different folks, of course... ;))

Don't get me wrong, typed/recognized text is important, but drawing is much quicker for me to do substantial portions of my notes than typing.