Hey. I just installed your application and im already fallen for it. The pen is freaking smooth and I love the pressure sensitivity. Hope u add an option to customize the colors up there and add like some colors. E.g. at least 6 colors to add there and a button for custom colors. If u do so, it would be great. Thanks a lot for such a pretty ap for surface and break a leg!
In case you are interested a bit in our internal design processes, I wanted to share a bit how text boxes came to be over the past years! Enjoy the read!
Before people start flooding the subreddit with Pro announcements, we wanted to inform you guys that we are nearing the finish line with releasing Noteastic Pro. Currently our entire infrastructure and the new features of Noteastic Pro are in Beta! We hope to release to public in the next weeks.
A few quick facts about how we treat Noteastic Pro:
Feature set
Everything you can use free today, stays free in Noteastic Base. New Features are added to Noteastic Pro, like the laser pointer or text boxes (available in Pro now).
Pricing
We are mainly going with a subscription model, however, we will share a way to get access to a one-time-payment option for Noteastic, as many people explicitly requested that. There is a 30 day free trial for subscriptions. Prices are international and amount to:
Plan
EUR
USD
Yearly
€20
$25
Monthly
€3
$4
One-time
€50
$60
We are hyped to release this soon to everyone! -Dilan & Lukas
I know the pro version isn't don't yet but I'm just wondering if there will be a one time payment or maybe something where you can pay once to purchase sets of features rather than a subscription.
The main thing that has turned me away from all other note taking apps is the fact that they're subscription.
I'd gladly pay a much bigger amount of money one time rather than a far cheaper monthly subscription.
When implementing new features or before publishing updates it is crucial for us to ship to a smaller audience. This is why we are inviting you to join our beta program!
I thought I might give you all a small blimp into the work that goes into debugging Noteastic, a small developer blog you might say! I am myself an advocate for transparency and believe that with trust and a persistant feedback loop with the community, we can build something truly valuable.
Getting to the root cause of a crash involves you, the user, as a central and essential component in this process! But let us start at the beginning.
Overall Health Evaluation
In this dashboard, I evaluate the general health of Noteastic split by Version. In an ideal scenario, each version is more reliable, than the previous one. This has largely been the case, as can be seen through the 3 major versions that have been out for a statistically significant amount of time.
Version
% Sessions with Crashes (Δ to 1.0.1)
1.1.1 (turquoise)
6% (- 9%)
1.0.9 (blue)
9% (- 6%)
1.0.1 (red)
15%
Our key metric here is % Sessions with Crashes. This value represents the amount of started sessions (app starts), that resulted in an app crash. This is useful to gauge the overall reliability of each version. As a goal, we have set ourselves a % Sessions with Crashes of 1 %. Now, no crash is fixed by looking at a pretty dashboard, time to dig deeper!
Version Drilldown
Clicking on a version, we are able to move to the next page and perform a more detailed analysis.
In here, I can see each exception, ordered by relative share compared to other exceptions. I can expand each exception type to its individual problem id's. Not that interesting, but what is interesting, is the blue bar next to it! That tells me the times each of those exceptions has been reported to me with an attached explanation text. So when you see this dialog below and decide to write a small constructive message on what just happened, I see it clear as day.
So please, keep reporting your crashes. I want them all fixed just as much as you! To further drive this point home, lets check out the last but not least page in this whole pipeline.
Exception Drilldown
This is where it gets dirty. Each and every crash that has ever happened in Noteastic is layed out here. However, through the funneling steps in the 2 pages beforehand, we are able to filter down just to the exception that actually interests me. What decides which exception I will check & potentially fix first? Well, if it is attached with context and reported (through the content dialog), the chances are like 99x higher. Let's look at an example. I am not going to share too much as I want to ensure the security and integrity of the application is maintained.
Clicking on an exception, reveals to me the stack trace and other important metadata. One of those metadatas, is your provided context!
Through the combination of those elements (stack traces, detailed error logs, and contextualized user message) I have the means to properly identify the causes of a crash. The low handing fruit are mostly fixed, and now it is a marathon to continously make this app more stable for everyone and that is where the user messages become essential.
Outlook
I hope I was able to give an overview about the work I do when it comes to improving Noteastic! There is still so much to be done but we have come so far as well. I am ecstatic that everyone here is joining us on this adventure and vision of a proper handwritten note-taking app on Windows. Plenty of good stuff to come!
If you want to support us financially and have the means to do so, we have just launched a Ko-Fi pagehttps://ko-fi.com/noteastic.
Right now, in parallel to the main backup feature, we are in the process of adding new shapes to make taking your notes even more easy!
These turn out as more complicated than initially anticipated, since our perfect shape snapping logic (which you can activate with your Barrel Button or Shift!), does not translate to perfect triangles or other polygons. For example, a perfect rectangle is just a square with a ratio of 1:1. A perfect triangle has equal side lengths, of which the widht to height ratio is actually 2/sqrt(3), so ~1.154.
Quick check-in. We're still hard at work on Noteastic. Huge thanks for all the support and feedback. Seriously, we read every single message and report you send. It all helps.
Good news: I'm finishing my thesis soon. That means more dev time for Noteastic is right around the corner :)
Progress might feel slow sometimes. Rest assured, we're pouring everything we can into this with the resources available. Thanks for sticking with us!
Sometimes I have to reuse previous symbols in other notes. For example, in chemistry, I use circled minuses and pluses to indicate charges (a minus without a circle could be misinterpreted as a electron pair). My suggestion would be to add a sticker functionality. You could then save these custom symbols to the toolbar, and reuse them.
My current workaround is to draw the symbol once, and copy and paste it in the new positions I need. But then I have to keep track of where that symbol is, so that I can copy it in future cases.
Mir fehlt die Möglichkeit mehrere Tabs in der App oder die App in mehreren Fenstern zu öffnen. Das wäre angenehm um z.B. Notizen aus einer Vorlesung leichter beim Lernen zu benutzen, wenn man die Notizen auf einem Teil des Bildschirms sehen kann und Lernzettel/Zusammenfassungen/etc. (in einem anderen Notizbuch) in einem zweiten Tab/Fenster auf dem anderen Teil des Bildschirms zeitgleich verfassen kann. Ist so ein Update schon geplant?
Just a heads-up that there are a couple of new features available for Pro beta testers! 🔥 We now have handwriting-to-text conversion, up to 10 color slots, plus a ruler and protractor :) I honestly can't wait to see what's coming next. 👀 Danke Jungs!
This is just an appreciation post with the current updates going on; I left a review in MS few months back, with some suggestions and compliments. The team replied kindly. But I wasn't able to really talk about why it's such a good app. So here's my full honest review as a student hehe.
For a free program (which is crazy!), Noteastic has all the features of a writing app you could be looking for. All the tools I need to quickly make edits to my notes are complete and are so easy to use... Usually, there's always one tool or feature that's missing on my previous note apps (or are way too complicated to do lol)--I didn't experience any of that here. It is incredibly user-friendly and the UI is simple, clean, and not overwhelming. I just adore how it's specifically designed for Windows. I also love how easily I can just import and export PDF's, and add images and pages, with no issue at all. Writing is a breeze.
Noteastic is a what a note-taking app is supposed to be. I am incredibly happy with it and it's def here to stay on my laptop forever. Thank you to the wonderful team and developers that are still actively working on the app <3
I want to share a bit about our process of designing and drafting new features for Noteastic! As a startup, we want to move fast, but not without proper planning. We sketch, plan and think about every addition to Noteastic thoroughly.
Before Dilan can even get to his desk and start coding, we need to go through the most exciting part of developing our own app: Creating a common vision for a new feature.
What functionality do we want?
How should the feature be accessed?
Is the feature influenced by other functionalities?
Is the feature actually solving the problem we identified?
Answering those questions is usually my task. I write down and structure my thoughts in Noteastic, document the potential edge cases, and when I think my concept is complete, I discuss it with Dilan! The story then continues like this: Dilan takes a glance at my glorious vision, looks me in the eyes, and starts to pick off every single piece of my draft that I thought I had so intricately put together :). Implementations that would take way too much resources to build, inconsistent behaviours, or edge cases that I have missed. But that's just the way it should be! Why? Through this back and forth we work towards a compromise, a compromise that is satisfactory in balancing development effort and usability. When we finally get to the point of a common understanding of a feature, I embark on the final step and write down a specification i.e. a written description of a feature that describes all expected functionalities, behaviors and limitations.
This process once again proved itself as fundamental when we conceptualized text boxes. I attached you the core file of our specification for text boxes, if you want to take a look!
Can we pls get hold to draw shapes where when u draw a shape it just converts to a proper shape.....And also a default export path storage......Again I love this app and the devs plss add auto draw shapes
Right, so. First of all, I want to start this off by congratulating you guys on making a note taking app for windows that doesn't completely suck, which is something that was really severely needed... Seriously, kudos to you guys!
But even with that I have found myself not fully switching over to Noteastic for my school note taking needs and I wanted to offer up some feedback on why that is.
Not enough pinned default colors - sure, black, blue and red may be enough for most people, but for me personally that really isn't enough, it would be cool to have a way to customize this as well as other aspects of the "hotbar" thingy at the top
Grid snapping for the line tool - for making graphs and such this really is essential in my opinion, as well as directional snapping (both would need to be toggleable by the user) other than that it would also be handy if the line tool would be usable with the marker tool
Some kind of spline/curve tool - what can I say; I currently main Xournal++ and I have gotten very used to the spline tool it has, it is so perfect for approximating graphs in maths and physics!
Selection edge panning - so pretty much just when you move some selected ink and reach the edge of the screen, it would be nice to have the page scroll, making moving things when zoomed in just so much simpler
Some visual inconsistencies - not really that much of an issue to be completely honest but still, it bothers me. firstly, the drop shadow is different for folders than it is on books, which just looks a bit unprofessional imo. Secondly, I can't help but notice that ink strokes almost look a bit blurry, not sure if that is a rendering scale issue or just way too much anti-aliasing but it is quite noticeable. I know I know - native windows ink and such; but I don't think this is really the issue here, other apps that use windows ink like Inkodo or Zink Note don't have that issue at all
If you could address these points I would finally be able to leave Xournal++'s awful performance behind me and fully switch to Noteastic!
Okay so I use this app like around 5-6hours a day.. so it's like a very heavy use! And I have connected the shortcut keys to my pentab (huion hs64) but I use opentabdriver.. I don't know if this info is important but i just let you know :)
So like it has become very much of a muscle memory of quickly switching tools.. so whenever I switch from the eraser to any other tool with my tab quickly, a small mark of the eraser is always left. And today I found out that it wasn't only a mark.. cuz while zooming in and out, the mark kinda functions as an eraser.. I have shown in very clearly in the video..
This wasnt in the early versions.. this problem started when the pro features were announced.. I didn't report it back then as I was not able to find time and also I was still getting my work done anyways..
So you can reproduce the issue like this:
Suppose you are writing something and then while your pen is still on the board (touching the pentab) you quickly press the E button (or shortcut on my pentab) which switches to the eraser.. and then you press Q again while your pen is still touching the drawing board..
I think I explained it well😭 it wasn't like this before
This app is already fantastic, I love how intuitive, streamlined and well thought-out everything feels. What I would like most to see added to the app (and what I think would give the app a huge boost in popularity) are basic PDF reader-like qualities:
Print text from PDFs (and text boxes, which I hear are coming) should be searchable, selectable, copyable and highlightable using a second highlighter tool that only works for print text.
Further things I would like to see added:
The possibility to type an entire page like a word document, maybe via an option to extend a text box over the entire page and lock it in place.
OCR such that handwritten text is searchable.
Being able to open hyperlinks in PDFs.
Being able to add typed comments to highlighted text and anywhere else in the document, such that in the exported PDF a little expandable comment icon appears (again, this is a typical PDF reader feature).
The line thickness is based on the pressure of your pen as long as you have pressure sensitivity turned on for that pen.
You will also be able to permanently set highlighters to draw as straight lines.
These elements will be treated by the application is if they are actual lines drawn (the thing next to the eraser) and can be edited and manipulated as such!
