This website is moving...

Wed, 9 May 2012 10:34:20 +0200

This is the last post on this website. If all goes well, our new site will be up and running within a few hours. The site’s address remains unchanged www.notebooksapp.com but we have restructured its contents. Some of your bookmarks may need to be updated.

The new link to the news section is www.notebooksapp.com/news/

Notebooks 5 released

Wed, 9 May 2012 10:25:38 +0200

Notebooks has just been approved by Apple and will be available for download within the next couple of hours. We kept you waiting longer than we anticipated, but when looking at the list below and when launching Notebooks 5 for the first time, we hope you understand that this is in fact a major update.

We gave Notebooks a more modern appearance and tried to make its usage more intuitive. So at first, things may look a little different, as certain buttons and functions have been rearranged, but on the whole, Notebooks should now be much easier and more fun to use.

The major topics are the new interface and support for formatted documents, but we also polished and improved the rest of Notebooks.
We added many smaller features requested by our users, but if you still don’t see your personal favorite implemented, please don’t worry, our list is still quite extensive.

By the way, Notebooks for iPhone and Notebooks for iPad are now both version 5.0!

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NEW INTERFACE
• More modern, more intuitive, less clutter; many things may look new, everything is still available, but in more obvious places
• “Light”, “dark” or “classic layout” options
• More logical grouping of actions for books and documents
• Process multiple items: delete, move, combine, compress… (iOS 5)

WYSIWYG EDITING AND FORMATTED DOCUMENTS (IOS 5)
• New type “Rich Text Document” (which is HTML)
• Select document styles, paragraph format, insert embedded images, lists etc.
• Apply text styles, font color or highlight phrases
• Convert Markdown documents to editable HTML
• Set default document type in settings (“Plain Text” or “Rich Text”)

WRITING
• Define your own set of Extra Keyboard Keys
• Much improved handling of large text documents (400.000 characters and more)
• Option to set word count, character count or nothing at all
• Option to hide note when changing book (iPad)
• Option not to display an info bar (by default, info shows for 2 seconds and hides automatically)

PDF CONVERSION
• Convert any document Notebooks can display
• Optionally protect generated PDF documents with a password

SKETCHES (IPAD ONLY)
• Portrait or landscape orientation (default is device’s orientation)
• Rotate sketches (and images)
• “Palm protection” ignores multiple touches
• Option to use current paper pattern as background

VOICE MEMOS
• Creates an audio file in current book and displays a record button in book’s toolbar; use that button to start/stop/pause (Tap to pause, tap&hold to stop or pause)
• Copy a voice memo’s link and paste it into a formatted document for an embedded voice note; this allows you to listen to the recording and write at the same time

TASKS
• Set default Inbox
• Extract tasks from a note at custom marker
• Option to hide “Done Tasks”

SEARCH
• Use multiple words or phrases to narrow the search results  (Notebooks looks for documents that contain ALL words and phrases)
• To search for a specific phrase, put it in quotes  (like “Notebooks for iPhone”)
• Cancel button stops search
• Search is diacritic insensitive (Ü=u, e=è etc.)
• Highlight search hits in Office, iWork and RTF documents, too

GESTURES
• Plain text: tap once to make text editable (no multiple taps anymore) Combined Markdown documents: tap once to switch to plain text view
• While editing, swipe left or right to hide keyboard
• Single tap with two fingers switches to fullscreen mode and back;  on the iPad, this gesture displays PDF documents in an advanced view with thumbnails
• Touch and hold a list entry to open its info window

DROPBOX
• Upload document immediately after editing (much faster than before and allows editing of other notes during sync)
• Sync starts max 3sec after operation and blocks operations less frequently
• New “move and delete” procedure during sync (takes a bit longer but is much more reliable)
• When book is empty on DB but not in NB, give user the option to upload or delete documents
• Let user solve most conflicts immediately (instead of sync report)
• Option to solve conflicts automatically
• Option to ignore “.dot” files
• Improved sync reports, which now generally appear at the top level
• No more “Cocoa Error 4” (we do hope so!)

WEBDAV SYNC
• Detect empty folder on server and give user the option to upload all documents from NB
• Option to ignore “.dot” files
• Correctly report user agent

WIFI SHARING
• Set custom port number (default 8080)
• Correctly report creation date to the WebDAV client

MISC
• Optimized layout of imported HTMLs and web archives for improved readability
• Option to create an editable HTML copy from webarchive
• Change file extension of documents (in Info)
• Improved print quality
• Many new options in “Setting”

Notebooks 5 rejected, waiting for review again.

Tue, 1 May 2012 17:19:53 +0200

We expected Notebooks 5 to be released today, but in fact it was rejected by Apple due to a minor inconsistency. The issue is fixed and now Notebooks 5 is waiting for review again. Depending on the size of the queue it may take up to a whole week until we get the feedback from Apple again.

We will keep you updated on the progress...

A Real Life Example: Notebooks in video post production

Mon, 5 Mar 2012 10:52:58 +0100

Robert Salsbury just posted a nice article about Notebooks in his video post production workflow. It is great to read and shows how Notebooks can help cope with lots of documents, sheets, notes, binders etc.

The article is available at Robert’s blog.

http://blog.robertsalsbury.com/?p=149

Your opinion on International Languages

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:43:36 +0100

This one is specifically meant for our Spanish and Italian speaking readers: we have been receiving feedback regarding the quality of the Spanish and Italian localizations of Notebooks, which obviously are not up to the overall quality of the app. We see that we need to react, and there are two directions we could take:

a) bring the translation to a professional level
b) remove the language from Notebooks

Removing the languages would be a simple solution for us, but maybe a drama for you, bringing the translation to a professional level (and keeping it there) can be quite an effort and challenge for us and might impact our release dates.

As we do not know how many of you actually rely on these translations and how many just don’t care because they use their iPhones and iPads with “English” as default language anyway, we would be very interested to know what you think and which option you would vote for.

Thanks a lot!
Alfons

Update on NB5 and NB/Mac&PC

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:37:52 +0100

Many of you are checking this site regularly for news on our ongoing development, but the past weeks have been very quiet again. Regular readers know that this means we are busy, but other readers may think we don’t care about you (which is NOT the case at all!)

We want to improve our communication and are working on a new version of this website with the goal to make it more modern, easier to read and much more interactive. This should allow us to update you with notes or tips more quickly, and it should give you better options for commenting and discussing the content. This might make the site kind of a shared Notebooks knowledge pool, and we will see how that works out :-)

A few words about Notebooks 5

As usual, things take longer than planned, but with this major release we don't really want to make compromises. So we are addressing and changing areas that have begged for improvement for a long time, and there is hardly anything we left untouched. Looking at our task list I have the feeling that we have finished most of our big topics and now need to go into refinement and testing.

To answer a few questions:

- iCloud will not be part of Notebooks 5.0, we save that for 5.1 (it is far more complex to add iCloud support to an existing app, and we did not want to compromise the rest of our development for that; so it will be an extra step)
- Markdown will still be supported in NB 5, we did not see any reason to remove that ;-) (We have even added a dedicated “Markdown” set to the extra keyboard keys, which will be fully customizable in NB 5)
- The formatted documents will not be RTF (it is still “impossible” to handle that on iOS), but HTML. Regarding flexibility and portability, HTML wins over RTF anyway.

Notebooks 5 - almost final, with optional extra keys

A few details about Notebooks/Mac&PC

The first weeks of beta testing showed us that we are on the right track, but the current set of functionality probably is not enough for an initial big launch. Knowing that many of you are desperately waiting for the desktop version we decided to start a so called “public beta” in a few weeks. This shall give all of you the opportunity to work with Notebooks while giving us time to finalize the initial version.

Notebooks/Mac - Beta 2

Those of you who would like to start working with Notebooks on their Mac right away, drop us a line and we add you to the current “private” beta ;-)
(If you read the last sentence carefully you probably realized that I just mentioned Macs; the beta for PCs has not yet started...)

Thank you for your patience!
Alfons