If you ever buy an N800 I'm sure this will be useful information.

lol. I guess I got a bit carried away there.

This post comes at an opportune time. I want to share a little story and lesson with you. I was note taking in class last night using maemopad (not maemopad+) in conjunction with a Stowaway Ultraslim BT keyboard. I happened to have three browser windows open (with at least one AJAX app). I had about 2 hours worth of notes when all of a sudden my N800 froze. I thought maybe the BT keyboard had run out of batteries all of a sudden, but then I saw what might be described as the N800 version of the dreaded Blue Screen of Death: the huge blue on white NOKIA logo.

I ended up having to retype all those notes from memory after I realized that although I was pressing CTRL+S (hotkey for saving) frequently, I hadn't actually done an initial save and provided a filename, so it wasn't saving after all. )-: It's not obvious if you glance at maemopad if you have a saved file or not, and that bit me in the ***.

So lessons learned: When you start note taking, do an initial save. OR ... find an editor that autosaves. Anybody know of one? Or at least know of an editor that makes it obvious that you have an unsaved file?

Thanks again everyone for the info and help. I do have another completely different question, but will post as a new topic. Thanks again.

Autosaving: Emacs. Or XEmacs. They're huge though.. don't know if anyone tried building one of them for the tablet. I think I saw one emacs reference that may have been an emacs-compatible thing, but I'm not certain.

EMACS used to be spelled out as 'Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping', but that was back when Emacs was small and computers even smaller.. it's certainly larger now! Maybe 'Eighty' would fit. Nice editor though, if you like it. And it's almost impossible to lose any text.

Since the post about Notecase, I have been really impressed (thanks for the post btw). Notecase does a lot that Maemopad+ does not do and it does autosaves.

I was just taking notes in meetings during the last week (3 of them), and here's what I found lacking:


A) Notes can't do sketches

B) Sketch can't do plain text (it can do drawn text, but not typed text)

C) The only conventient "bullet", for Notes, on the on screen keyboard is an = ... which just doesn't look right to me. If Maemopad and + can do actual outlines, that'd be nice, though.


It looks like maemopad and maemopad plus are like Notes in this regard, and a brief look at the Xjournal page looks like it is more like Sketch in this regard.

I want me text to be _text_, and I want to add drawings as they're needed.

Also, I noticed that Notes didn't save in plain text format even though I said to only use plain text. So, here's what I want, two applications:

1) A plain-text editor at the graphical level (sure, I can open an xterm and do vi, but I'd rather not). Should be able to generate plain NVT ascii text files that any 40 year old unix sysadmin would be proud to work with (cuz, that's what I am .... well, 39), but at the same time, to stylus based highlighting, cut and paste (heck, in this day and age, highlight and drag would be nice). Options for column wrapping (soft during editing, option in preferences for it to be saved as a hard or soft colum wrap), and setting the text width for that.

1.5) small bonus points for automatically supporting different styles of code indention (Pascal, C/Perl, and Python), and having the choice to have tabs generate spaces or control-i (so you can use the tab button to do code indention at 3 or 4 spaces, so you don't have that awful style of mixed space and tab indentions that turns up in some C code).


2) A note taking application that can do bullet/number/alpha lists, or free paragraphs .... AND drawings. Could be separate tool bars (one for lists, one for paragraphs, and one for drawings) to keep the tool bar from getting too complex; you just switch modes as you move from making a text notation to a drawing, etc.

2.5) Bonus points: it doesn't have to record and save sound, but it should be able to run comfortably alongside another application that will just record whatever is on the mic while I'm taking notes in the note taking app.

I'd like to try notecase, but you experienced people are a little cryptic for me. If I understand correctly:
First, I have to install GTK+ 2.0 on my n800. Where do I find that? And, does it have its own prerequisites?
Second, I think I go to sourceforge and install the standard notecase for linux? Is that right, it will download and install just like an app I get from maemo?

Thanks in advance for your advice.
- tobyr21

You don't understand correctly.

You don't install gtk whatever. At the Soundforge site there is a version of Notecase expressly for the n800. You doubleclick on the install program and live happily ever after.

The .deb you want is towards the bottom of the download page. You need the one that refers to the OS you are using / device. ie OS2008 N800/N810. 2nd or 3rd from the bottom

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

Notecase has replaced my collection of palm memos/outlook notes. It took some time with cut&paste in the win version, but well worth it. Also gave me a reason to purge old memos
I don't remember GTK being a problem during installation, but ymmv.