The whole point behind a note taking app is of course to take down ideas. Apple took this to heart with notes to allow drawing anywhere on the page. Sometimes when writing ideas it’s easier to draw a few lines for something, think of all the ways white boards are used. The problem is of course output. Once you touch that drawing pen you have to output jpgs, etc. This is also true of another program I used and loved for years, Notability. The problem was separating scribbles from text.
My IDEAL would be to be writing away (this will of course be even better on the ipad) and click one of 3 little boxes which would place a small, medium or large drawing area inline just under my typing. I do what I do with my scribbles, then continue typing. 3 sizes because I may not have much to scribble and I just don’t want a huge drawing if I don’t need it, both in real estate and Kb (variable border size at creation time would perhaps be even better).
I think these should then become inline attachments. The other part that goes with this is to be able to view all inline attachments as normal size or THUMBNAILS. This would be so great. One of the things I hate about most writing apps is I have to either have huge images (that I intend to eventuallly print out in a document) or none at all. But it should be a choice and upon output can be again decided. The beauty of thumbnails is to see all your images inline so you can remember what the hell they are. I have so many writing apps and none of them do this.
Please give this some thought. It would be yet another thing to set your app apart.
Sounds good! Yeah I’m just surprised nobody has addressed this in writing apps. My last short love affair was with AI Writer. I liked the fact that I could import images and then reference them rather than having potentially multiple copies. The problem was that with Markdown there’s only the link and no visual cue. I just want a freaking thumbnail. I had a document with about 30 images in it and it was a nightmare. Many times captured images (for example) don’t have the best names and there’s not really a good reason to change them, but then who knows what they are. Ok, enough said. thanks for your response!
Hi Roland. Aside from this topic, how did I miss that Nebo app!? I used Notability for years until I found how difficult it was to export or integrate with something like Devonthink where I organize all my files (and more and more, my notes). These days I try to simply do as much as I can in specific writing apps or take notes right inside Devonthink.
Anyway, my request here isn’t to include a whole note app, I do like the direction Agenda is going or I wouldn’t waste time here. My point is just that note taking for managers, prose writers, many programmers or bloggers, etc, is text and they are happy. And for a lot of things I just type in markdown and voila. But there’s a huge percentage of us who often want to insert images into our Agenda notes. Images are so valuable, yet take up a lot of the visual field. Maybe it’s a reference inserted later, maybe it’s a photo of the whiteboard, a sketch from the notes app, whatever. But I don’t want this huge image filling the screen full width in Agenda, nor do I want a img_83848283.jpg link that I have to visit just to remember what it was. I just want…
It’s just an layout and efficiency thing for me and I would think it super easy to implement thumbnails. Scrolling through agenda items you would see the text and image thumbnails, click to expand. I would set a default thumbnail size (120 here) in preferences. Seems a self evident point to me that this would be a plus for this kind of app.
As I wrote before, part b to this would be to easily scribble an inline doodle (which then becomes a thumbnail), but maybe this is too difficult.
The following image is too big and you can imagine 10 in one agenda note would defeat easy scanning of agenda items… I think what we need are thumbnail placeholders.
