liqbase - faster than paper
 

paper is slow.

when I am talking to my friends or sitting in a meeting at work, I like to have a pad and pen so I can doodle and take little notes or reminders for later. When I am going for dinner I write everyone's order. When I am on the phone to a customer I have to take notes.

These notes are not intrusive and we go through tonnes of paper with them every single year.

How long do we spend searching for that scrap you wrote your dinner order on? or the todo list from the last meeting? What did customerx say when you spoke to him?

how many napkin ideas have fallen into the wastebasket never to be seen again?

I want to keep them all and let you use them and expand upon them.

liqbase is faster than paper.


(posted here as well as on my slashdot blog, its a really clear description of how I see the sketching aspect)

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

if my handwriting didnt stink, take up way to much space, and my n800 didnt have a "slippery" screen i could maybe agree...

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

what do you do when you have to take notes and all you have are postits?
your handwriting is not really important, its whether you yourself can read it.

of course having a larger pad with the same input mechanism would be nice - the design should scale quite reasonably (would love to try one day soon).

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

and what if i say that the combo of screen and writing makes at best barely readable by myself?

as for only post-it's, so far its been the phone, either by its built in notes app or as a sms draft ;)

i dunno, i just kinda feel the straight handwriting wastes a lot of screen space. nice, natural input, but not much info density...

as in, i want to like it...

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

remember the density increases quickly on the graffiti wall.
You can read lots of information in one go after it has been input.
Its fully resizable and I am currently adding new view options to follow threads.

I am also beginning to organise my thoughts about an intuitive grouping and tagging interface.

I tried to use my phone the other day to take notes of washing machine prices - i got through about 2 before i gave up and ran back to the car for my nokia.

I wrote down a whole list and was able to inform the missus exactly what was wanted (made her happy :) )

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

paper needs no batteries tho. you can fold the paper and put it in the backpocket of your jeans. there're other uses of paper I can hardly imagine liqbase competing with. :)
so yeah, paper is slower, but it gets you further. :)

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

tried to do handwriting just now and found myself comparing it to rollerskating on a soap covered dance floor.

and the only way i find myself holding the tablet somewhat comfortable while writing is on end.

and that leaves painfully short space for any kind of lines.

all in all, love the idea of auto save, just cant get comfortable with the input.

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

I used to love something called Tornado Notes, later just Tornado. I edited academic journals, and each had a different bunch of style rules. They were impossible to keep straight -- except with Tornado. You had a whole bunch of individual notes, and it was dead easy and fast to search among all of them. I hope that Liqbase someday has as good a search function. When you add text to the notes, maybe a good search will also be added.

Tornado eventually adjusted itself to the Windows environment, and was improved so much by that, that it became clunky and graceless and slow and useless. I still wish for the original.

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

Know thy competition:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3032/...51b39a831b.jpg
Xournal test by dikiy / Alex N

You can annotate PDFs in Xournal, too :)

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

I like Xournal, but I don't really think it's Liqbase competition. Notecase is also fantastic, but for making a quick and dirty note or sketch, nothing beats Liqbase for speed and freedom. If I had to pick a slogan for it, maybe I'd pick something like "the ten-second solution", because when I need something really, really fast, like when I'm on the phone, Liqbase is there now, even if I didn't have it open to begin with.

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

Liqbase should open quickly on the notes scratching page. No stars, no splash screen, nothing.

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

Agree, faster = better. Liqbase is the fastest note taker, camera snapper app on the tablet, and it could be even faster!

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

Of course, that depends where you are starting from.

Theres so much more inside liqbase that I am using different features all the time, whether its the camera module or playing with the new stuff I keep testing or reviewing whats there.

the clock on the stars has also been tweaked to be big and useful - I'm normally on that screen when idle now (obviously a battery killer).

I have got the core elements for registering all the available modules and plan to allow full menu customization which will include configuring the module to run "on startup" (as well as screensaver)

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

I cant read either, as far as i can tell, the paper says something like

Bamagotal gene a ogrem
actayummom tona facemoopus
nyoctimyo jerry lewis tyre
gene cocrow ugyno ivy
uctomuua token a 70C
a mom never compromise brewerz

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

qole/overfloat
http://liqbase.net/liq.20081108_143938.gary.scr.png

I am trying to expand my utilization of my notes and recall is as important as storage.

I have a visual record thats easy to review and find what i need, this will be augmented shortly with full tagging and grouping and hopefully adaptive HWR to pinpoint anything you have stored.

The database required to contain and manage this is being worked on amongst other things :)

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

How good is Notecase?

I liked this feature very much about liqbase (I use it to make my grocery shopping list), but I also like the rasters on Xournal. It gives me a less messy feeling.

If you write something down it gives some kind of personal touch to it. You use your own handwriting, and this contains a lot (invisible) metadata. Although consciously you would not know this aids in the memory. For example, if you are hurried, you might write something down fast, and when you reread it this is part of the memory. In the case of a computer font this link is less likely made.

However on the Internet I can go to a grocery store website, select my shop list, print it out, and pick it up. This is also user-friendly.

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

allnames,
i think notecase is something different

http://notecase.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html

http://notecase.sourceforge.net/thm_...se_zaurus1.png

its mind mapping and recursive tree based entry.
I've written many of these kinds of things in the past and organising data is of great importance to me.

http://liqbase.net/macrosimple.png
(incase its not clear, this is one of the variants I wrote and used a couple of years ago to do similar job as notecase)

Once you have the data in it should be simple to place where required.
This mapping and relating sketches and threads and blocks is where development is heading now.
(obviously not with a crappy interface)

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

ok, i played around a bit with xornal and found that the lined background helps my writing.

so maybe if one had something similar for liqbase, i would find more use in it ;)

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

I prefer xournal for 2 things: The lines, and the white paper. If I could choose white background, i would use it more, i think. Its a personal preference.

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

fair enough on both points :)

If been asked before and I have no problem with that.
I'll try and make sure its configurable in the next released version.

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

eliagp,
one thing, how big should the lines be?
is your writing size the same as mine?
what about resolution variance?

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

^^ awesome prospectives! :)

Notecase is more memory mapping, but tree-based is IMO not UI-friendly on the tablet. So I won't touch Notecase. Thanks.

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

That's completely offtopic, but it actually looks like some electrical engineering lecture notes in Russian :)

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

Yeah, the guy (Dik), is the admin of the Russian internet tablet forums :)

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

I can see myself using it when several screenfulls can be grouped together logically as one note session, and tagged for retrieval, as discussed before. I guess all of that is in the works...

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

Luck - thanks for considering the white background option - that is something I have wished since the first time I used liqbase.
For the lines - maybe same as Xournal is fine with me - but again maybe a toggle botton to turn the lines on or toggle it off would be great - since often time someone may wish to used a lined background (for clean writing), and some may not to fit in more writing in one screenful.

Also your consideration of a configuarable startup modules is very welcome. That would make liqbase more useful (considering its fast startup).

One input from me - I know liqbase has great potential as a tool, but I would also like to see the icons and buttons and fonts designed a bit more professional and well designed to give a overall look of a great application. I understand you might be concentrating on the actual implemetation part of the app and its features - but maybe someone could chip in with the graphics design part of it - just a suggestion.

But as a note taking app, even I like liqbase best as a efficient tool (though I like Xournal as a better looking tool).

(I know I am rustling up a hornet's nest here with the design and looks vs functionality debate again). :eek:

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

I agree that Liqbase is indeed faster than paper.

But better than Newton, it (sadly) ain't.

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

karel,

send me a newton and I'll see if I can extract some of the magic sauce from it :)

I hear great things about that device and would love to get my hands on one. From my reading it was way ahead of its time and everything has been second rate since.

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

My main "problem" with liqbase is the small drawing canvas. With paper, I can use the huge 8 by 11 inch surface on both sides, but with liqbase I can't. It would be a lot better if the size of each sketch would dynamically change to become bigger or smaller, like a never ending canvas. And like vi or something, pressing a button would change it from draw to scroll mode. That would make it faster than paper.

Also, the fact that the "edit" and "view" screens are separate makes it slower. On paper, is basically WYSIWYG in a sense, but liqbase not so much.

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

nilchak,

regarding the interface elements.
Every UI element in the system is now configurable, and as you can see from this screenshot:

http://liqbase.net/liq.20081031_033416.gary.scr.png
(the icons on the right, the tagging stuff I'm actually using the editor for is not important yet ;) )

It is cleaner and doesn't just have words anymore.

You can adjust these by highlighting any sketch in the graffiti wall and clicking the UI button.
If you specify a UI title the same as the button it should automagically replace the text.

I'm pondering a lot of things for this and hate the unintuitiveness of the interface to changing.

For me personally the interface has to be intuitive enough to work without polish and design.

If I was doing this as a dayjob I am sure my perspectives will change, but such things don't personally concern me.

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

thesandlord,
its entirely feasible to pan and zoom i have pondered this a lot.
when i move the sketches into a database I will be storing them at ridiculous DPI settings.
But thats much later for now, i have other things to consider.

when the new version is released it will automatically be able to stitch together threads of sketches made a few minutes apart and allow them to be viewed in that manner, but theres a whole lot of other code i aim to get in place before i can replace the graffiti view.

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

I'm not going to send you one of my Newtons! I have only two left!!;)

Newtons have two huge assets: The awesome handwriting recognition (really, it's almost beyond belief; don't base your opinion on that Doonesbury ****'s cartoons) and an operating system that was designed to be operated by stylus -- and by "designed" I mean that the people who worked on it really thought about how a person was going to apply a stylus on the screen and get things done. It's the little things that tell you someone actually thought about it: Newtons have no drop-down menus, but pop-up buttons on the bottom of the screen, so your hand won't block the screen's view; copy-paste is done by tap-selecting text or other objects (you tap, wait for the funny sound and then draw around the stuff you want selected) and then dragging them to the margin of the screen, where the selection waits for it to be dragged into the page again, a metaphor so simple and natural you don't even have to get used to it.

Mind you, Newtons were by no means perfect: The screen is rather hard to read; the OS setup (as a giant database rather than a file system) means that connectivity is spartan at best -- and non-existent whenever you want to export anything a bit complicated; Internet was a glint in the distant future for Newtons and still is (a really bad TCP/IP stack is mainly fault to that). And there's a few more things.

But in all, NewtonOS is by far the best tablet OS ever made, mainly because it was actually made for a tablet.

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

about Xournal and Liqbase comparision.
I don't think it's comparable.
I can't imagine doing notes on lectures with Liqbase since I often have to scroll A4 sized page once for higher overall resolution of my writing (I use zoomed page) and I have to scroll doing some drawings - annotating them etc.
800x480 page is not sufficient for this - because of that Maemopad+ turned to be a failure on this field in my opinion.

Liqbase - smart and fast but with MUCH smaller capabilities.
PDF annotation, pdf export, selectable paper sizes, great highlighter feature, eraser and text input - to sum up Xournal is simply "big app".

As I said earlier (and got a kind of answer from Lcuk) - if liqbase is to be notetaking app - a great number of comments is worth considering.
Let's face it - we are "simple users of simple app" - for Lcuk it's techno playground - for us notetaking app + camera option (which is rather a toy with VGA camera).
I've never been in Berlin and I know I won't use this map :)
Maemo page is not so interesting to read and scroll again and again ;)
Ok - TXT reader but without other encoding is not usable comparing to FBreader.

As a good note taking app it needs a lot of mentioned polish, as techno-playground is good as it is - for ordinary user.

For short lists like grocery shop list - it's way better than Xournal but this one is a heavy caliber tool which replaces paper in ways that liqbase is not capable of.

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

I would love to be able to automagically upload my liqbase notes to evernote, which uses handwriting recognition to make notes searchable.

Thanks for liqbase!

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

xtc,
i agree they aren't comparable, i never aimed to replicate the terrific features of xournal or even maemopad.

for myself, notetaking is exactly that, whilst I am taking notes I haven't got time to review and mess around - its the GTD principle, I want to get the notes in and listen to whats being said instead of fannying around.

The work I have put into liqbase has mainly been to show that this device *can* do them and if people want to get onboard and expand on the things I've started with their apps it would be amazing.

I spent a long time getting the display to operate smoothly and have a lot of personal usage for it, but its going to take me individually a long time to get feature complete apps up and running.

the comparisons between liqbase and xournal are similar to comparisons between notepad and microsoft word.

Both are useful.


additionally, the sketches drawn in liqbase are a mere fraction of what I aim to achieve.
They are merely the ingredients to be used later as the interfaces emerge.

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

lm2,
i have done testing of automatic uploading and transfer to a webservice and conversion to svg.
( http://liqbase.net/liqriver.php )

I am actively seeking a way to develop a "big daddy" version of liqbase for a larger touch based desktop to manage and sort out what I record on the device, however I am a very "hands on" type of developer and need to see and feel the hardware to do this.

If you send me some information on the formats evernote can accept if theres anything compatible I'll try to accommodate in future.

you are welcome :)

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

lm2,
also liqbase includes a low level rudimentary HWR algo which I really hope to work on soon.
I purposefully kept the sketches as raw vectors for this reason and keep poking at the code to see what I can do.

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

I've used both xournal and liqbase for note-taking (graduate-level engineering course), but at present I almost exclusively use xournal.

Why? Mainly, portrait mode. As one or two other posters noted, scrawling text tidily onto the screen is much easier in portrait mode, and liqbase doesn't support that at present. I'm not sure of the technical details, but I had thought that XV breaks in portrait mode; I recently discovered that the internet call app handles it just fine, though, so it may be possible...

That's perhaps the biggest improvement I could see for the way I use it; I'm considering writing a liqbase-xournal file converter, but I don't think that's a big deal either way. A practical lock-in (no conversion tools) is no big deal, as long as I know I can overcome it if/when I need to.

And searching the graffiti wall is much easier than opening 5 different sets of notes when I need an equation; liqbase definitely wins there!

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

Benson,
its hand written notes, of course they support rotation, just hold your tablet the other way round ;)
Its a matter of will for me to support unrotation of sketches later.

Of course, that doesn't deal with the rest of the ui, but if I manage to get what I've been trying to write all afternoon in place even that won't be an issue.

if this is requested I'll add it, but no1 has really pushed it so far ;)

Thats very interesting you noting the the internet calling app handles rotation - are you sure its using the XV overlay and not just native x11 (or gdk pixbuf)?
I can't test anymore because I'm back on a stock kernel.

I could not get liqbase or mplayer to stretch across the full display, it always crashed when attempting to update over 480*480.
http://liqbase.net/liqbase_rotate_480x480.jpg

Re: liqbase - faster than paper
 

I'mernot able to install liqbase on the n800 under chinook,
It says itt cannnot be downloadded and instal