Re: [Announce] PenPen Sketch Book - For quick note taking / painting
 

Thanks for your suggestion!

As far as I can remember , you are the second - third people to raise out the request. It is on my idea list.

But I want to clarify something:

1) Do you want the toolbar appear in fullscreen mode?

2) If I drop the left / right buttons in tool bar , and replace it by Full Screen mode button. Do you accept the change?

oh... ok , I will add a "Select" button to the right of color bar in next release.

ah yes , good observation! It is confusing. It will add hints of file type to user.

I am not quite understand the problem. Do you mind to talk more? Thx~

Re: [Announce] PenPen Sketch Book - For quick note taking / painting
 

I would leave the toolbar as it is... just add a full screen button to the right (it seems that you have room for it). Going crazy you could have a 3 stage "fullscreen" (normal, full screen with toolbar, full screen with just the image so you can show someone your master piece). I would also default to the "fullscreen with toolbar" (like the browser)

These are the steps:
1. create a new page
2. draw a big "1" on the screen
3. click the button to go to the right
4. draw a big "2" on the screen
(if you go back the thumbnail for this page will have a "1")
5. open the page again and delete the "1"
if you go back now the thumbnail is empty.

Because is so easy to keep going (what is great) the first "area" does not have any special meaning... I would suggest that you can update the thumbnail with whatever is last seen on the screen before the user click "back"... or just make sure to "move" automatically the drawing so you always have something on the "first area".

Re: [Announce] PenPen Sketch Book - For quick note taking / painting
 

haha , yes , it is crazy to have different fullscreen mode.

ok , It is on my pending feature list.

Thanks , I understand what you mean now.

Any more people think that it should take the last view section as thumbnail/snapshot? As it change the behaviour and affect the user experience. I would like to listen fore more opinion first.

Re: [Announce] PenPen Sketch Book - For quick note taking / painting
 

hey :)
looking very nice
theres a few usability things however
with a generic "undo" feature, 90% of needing to remove random strokes would be gone whilst making notes I often draw the wrong letter and just want to go back, for me currently this usecase is catered for with 1 button.

when you pan out and show the sketches on the group, you do not account for the drawn area, so its entirely possible to have a thumbnail which is blank on a sketch which is useful.

combined with the lack of undo if you wish to revert an image there is no way to do so, making destructive edits to the live sketch and having no way to back out of the screen without reverting is a little disconcerting (perhaps a "revert" menu item) - liqbase works by saving a new instance each time and never destroying an item.

there is a bug in your stroke erasure code
I managed to have a vertical stroke in the middle of a word which was not erasable (it was how I found out about the destructive closure/revert thing above)
it stayed there whilst the eraser managed to get everything else but I could not undo this - beware if small children play with your device..

overall :) nice sketching tool, best I have seen in a while and has echoes of some of the liqbase sketching.

Re: [Announce] PenPen Sketch Book - For quick note taking / painting
 

Thx!

Undo feature is already on my plan, but not available on next release. However, I may change the priority , I think you know about my plan on libpenpen as you are also on the competition thread.

I am going to release a library version of PenPen. In designing the library , classes for undo is also designed , they are not complex (Just the class naming is crazy). So I may implement it first. But due to the feature freeze , I will not make it during the voting period.

By the way , I want to ask everybody for their opinion on undo feature.

There should have a "Undo" button , but where should I place it?

1) On menu

2) On tool bar

(Only a single button space leave. It could be either of Full screen or undo)

haha , you found a bug. I know this since the first release. But seem no hurt (nobody complains it), I work on other stuff first. ok , I will try to fix it.

By the way , I find liqbase in discussion. It don't release to N900? Is the development freeze?

Re: [Announce] PenPen Sketch Book - For quick note taking / painting
 

By the way , beside talking about the feature of PenPen Sketchbook. I would like share about my thoughts on PenPen development. What it means to other developer , and what software that will be developed togather with PenPen.

Firstly, PenPen SketchBook is never the goal of what I want to develop for Maemo/Meego. My goal is a tool of task management(GTD) , brainstorming (mindmap) using handwritting. However, it is not able to archive in a short time. Then, I decided to first make a relatively simple software , PenPen SketchBook , it is used to test the response from user , and as a building block of my goal. So far the resulting is quite good :)

As it is an open source project , I don't mind to share the code to other project , even it is a commercial and closed source (They must obey the license). It is a waste if the developed module can not be used. For example , the color selection dialog. (The default Qt color selection dialog is buggy on Maemo)

Moreover, the core of PenPen , vector drawing and erasing engine , may benefit another software project. Therefore , I have started a sub-project called libpenpen , which allow other developer use PenPen's vector drawing engine to let user draw on their software. The code prototype is ready on source repository , but I have not tested seriously. (Will have another post on development talk)

The current license of PenPen is GPL v2 , so if you use libpenpen , you should open your source code. As I have already said , I don't mind other to use penpen as their closed source software. So I may change the license of library to LGPL or BSD once it is ready.

Beside the drawing engine , I am also developing a database object relational mapping (ORM) library for Sqlite/Qt. When I develop PenPen 0.1 , over 60% of time spent on the database model!! It is really out of my expectation. I am not demanding for performance , I just want to have a database model which can easy find and insert record. Qt / Sqlite is not the simple enough.

Android / iPhone /Maemo all has the same problem , missing an easy-to-use database ORM. Although Qt has a ORM mapper, QDjango , I think it could have a better solution. Then I spent few night time to study the problem. Finally , I have come out an idea on how to make a better ORM. The prototype code is in my PC. It looks okay at this moment. It could declare a database model easily.

Once it is ready , I will deprecate all the database code in PenPen and migrate to the new library. I believe this project can further reduce the development time for Maemo/Meego application. (So I will not touch the database code before the ORM is ready , the promised feature of "sorting" will be delayed... )

Re: [Announce] PenPen Sketch Book - For quick note taking / painting
 

Hi all,

The polling of first N900 coding competition will be finished soon. I would like to thanks for everybody who voted for PenPen.

And if you are not yet voted , please vote for PenPen. Your support is my greatest reward for developing open source software!

Re: [Announce] PenPen Sketch Book - For quick note taking / painting
 

The contest is over. I would like to thanks again for everyone support PenPen! Ofcoz , I will still keep the development of PenPen and libpenpen. :)

Re: [Announce] PenPen Sketch Book - For quick note taking / painting
 

Great app, looking forward to more updates in the future :)

Re: [Announce] PenPen Sketch Book - For quick note taking / painting
 

Yup, looking forward to fullscreen mode :D