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)

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

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).

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...

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 )

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.

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.

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.

Know thy competition:


Xournal test by dikiy / Alex N

You can annotate PDFs in Xournal, too

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.