What's cooking
Thanks to the Justin Madigan, the new Notecase project team member, I got several quality bug reports. His detailed testing work was mostly the reason for the new improved version of the program.
Thanks also goes to Max from Russia, who sent me a report on the problems with "Find" feature when using Russian alphabet. With his help with testing, I've managed to fix this problem too.
Unrelated to bugs, I got a good idea from Daniel Hertrich, the long time collaborator on the project, to build the package for the eeePC. I've set up the build system using VMWare, so you can expect this platform as a target for future versions.
Daniel even contributed a Notecase .deb package built on eeePC. You can find it here.
I don't own a eeePC machine, so I am always interested on a feedback from the people who can try the program on the real hardware.
7 comments:
I don't use the default eeepc OS (I use arch), but I have been running notecase on an eee for a few weeks. So far I've been really impressed with it's form factor to the small screen and it's small resource overhead. The lack of dependencies makes it very nice on the little harddrive also :) -- I'd definitely recommend the app to users of the device, and might even suggest getting asus to throw it into the repos; note taking is a pretty key use of the eee after all right? seems silly to use the messy and under-featured knotes. Maybe you could get them to go pro even for a small licensing cost =D
I dont use eeepc's default OS (I use arch), but I have been using notecase on the eee for a few weeks. So far I've been rather impressed with it's use of the eee's tiny screen area and low resource use. The lack of dependencies is very nice also being that there's not much hard drive space to play with (the reason I searched out and found this rather than jumping on basket)
A suggestion to make this even more tailored to devices with small screens (and not take functionality out) would be to throw in a hotkey (defaulting to say... F9?) that would show and hide the tree sidebar. This way you could open the node you wanna work on and hide the tree until moving to the next node (which often enough wont even be in the same session)
This is definitely well fitted to the eee either way- I'd totally suggest offering releases to asus to throw into their repos, cuz compared to knotes... actually there's no comparison :) maybe you could even convince em to jump on a bulk pro =D
I dont use eeepc's default OS (I use arch), but I have been using notecase on the eee for a few weeks. So far I've been rather impressed with it's use of the eee's tiny screen area and low resource use. The lack of dependencies is very nice also being that there's not much hard drive space to play with (the reason I searched out and found this rather than jumping on basket)
A suggestion to make this even more tailored to devices with small screens (and not take functionality out) would be to throw in a hotkey (defaulting to say... F9?) that would show and hide the tree sidebar. This way you could open the node you wanna work on and hide the tree until moving to the next node (which often enough wont even be in the same session)
This is definitely well fitted to the eee either way- I'd totally suggest offering releases to asus to throw into their repos, cuz compared to knotes... actually there's no comparison :) maybe you could even convince em to jump on a bulk pro =D
Thank you for the suggestions.
You already can change the view mode (hide the tree view) by "View/Change View mode"
Additionally, you can change the default "Ctrl+T" shortcut in the Shortcut editor window.
The idea on collaborating with Asus is really great! The only possible problem I can see is that they probably need to see a lot of demand for my program from actual users before accepting my program in the repos.
ack, sorry about that-- I didn't realize it'd take like 10 for the comments to be added :\ feel free to delete some if you want :) -- I actually sent some of this off in an email too figuring it'd be the only way to let you see the mini review :) so... sorry about the massive spamming!
change view mode does work but on of the 'views' has only the tree dialog open, adding an extra cycle to every time you wanna go back to having the bar. It ends up feeling like you're using another feature to 'kind' of get what you need you know? tho I admit I can see a conflict thinking about it -- maybe adding a way to setup the layouts that are cycled in the options would be a better solution? (provided it's worthwhile compared to other development of course)
as for demand-- The only downside I can see notecase having in relation to the eee's (imaginary?) target market of children and old people is the lack of user-friendly language. I'd bet that if you replaced some of the terminology with some less data-structure sounding names like basket and onenote pulled off (should be simple in translations) you could push the idea on them pretty easily. knotes is the closest you get to note taking in the stock install which is pretty terrible considering how many people bought the thing for note taking; so proving theres demand should be simple-- proving yours is the best of the rest imo is easily done by showing how it's resource use and screen real estate are so much better than really your only real competitor, basket-- not to mention you're constantly supporting the application, especially on the professional level while basket is basically abandonware -- and to top it off, you have a windows version which they could include now that they're selling windowsxp versions of the eee- and in windows the only thing that blows notecase out of the water is onenote which is gonna cost a LOT more than your dealie :)
anyway, just some thoughts-- I wont repost this time! peace
Just a quick reply until more detailed one tomorrow:
The comments are moderated, so they are not visible until approved (no need to press "publish" multiple times :-).
The reason is simple, I started to get some spam comments with links to the trojans.
I agree that the View changing mode can be un-intuitive at first. Perhaps I could break this into two separate menu items (one for tree, one for text view visibility).
But in that case, what if the user selects both areas to be invisible ???
I agree on "user-friendly language" issue, but this is best solved through the concrete examples. Feel free to mail me directly your proposals for any string that you feel you might improve (the good way to start is to download "notecase.pot" file that contains all phrases used in the program).
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