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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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