LectureNotes app

[pgibby081965]

Text box colours

Hi, just a small point:

I open up a new text box, type some text in and then select it all to amend it in some way. My problem is, the little icon "A" the the bottom left of the text box is the same colour as the highlighted text (blue) and therefore impossible to see. I often accidentally tap on it whilst amending the selected text so I was wondering if the icon could be placed outside the box or given a different colour or even if the four icons in the corner of the text box could be added to a bar at top/bottom or side of the text box? User selects Text box menu bar placement? Hope this makes sense?

Phil

 

[acadoid]

@pgibby081965: Clicking on the icon just brings up a popup menu, so that erroneously clicking does not cause much harm, does it?

To place the icons outside the box causes problems when you wish to place the box at the boundary; to place the icons in the action bar could be an option.

You could disable `use translucent icons´ in the app's handling menu, this should increase visibility.

 

[Wingator]

Editing length of audio file

@snir2: You can set LectureNotes' app directory to the external SD card (but there are some things to keep in mind if your device runs Android 4.4 (KITKAT)).

If you cannot stay with `normal´ recording quality, you could record in `high quality´ (which will yield a larger file) and afterwards reencode the result using an audio processing tool (which will yield a smaller file). This would allow to freely adjust audio quality and hence file size.

Thanks for a great app which I now use on a daily basis.

Inadvertantly left the recording running after my meeting (in high quality mode). Is it possible to cut the audio after a period of time or can you recommend a 3gp editor?

 

[Klagundi]

I have a couple of suggestions regarding the PDF annotation feature.

Importing a PDF as a series of pictures seems a horribly space-inefficient
solution. In my opinion PDFs should not imported but the internal
format should be PDF. The idea is to use the un-altered text layer
(space-efficient because text is stored as text and rendering in
vector graphics SVG is preserved) and then in addition store the annotations
in an image layer in the same PDF file. This would also solve the problem
that the annotations are sprinkled around the system in several meta-data
but are not there where they belong -> in the annotated PDF file.

If this was implemented as suggested your app would approach perfection.
Thanks for all your effort thus far!

PS: Sorry, I am a long-running UNIX user and I think the suggested would
be the cleanest design. Please tell me if it's impossible because of the PDF
file format specification. I don't know exactly if several layers of different
content could be embedded in a PDF file.

 

[acadoid]

@Wingator: LectureRecordings does not provide audio editing, but there are numerous tools available, search for instance for `audio editor´ in your favorite app store.
@Klagundi: LectureNotes is a handwriting app which, among many other features, also allows to import PDF files. The PDF import is intended to import, for instance, a drawing available as PDF file into a LectureNotes' notebook. The PDF import also allows to import a multi-page PDF file and annotate it, but this is not what LectureNotes is meant for.

In any case: Why not just handle PDF files directly? That is certainly a fair question to ask.

PDF is a very complicated format, the reference manual is a book of almost 750 pages (see http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html at the bottom in case you wish to have a look). A PDF handling library is not something that one can code on a rainy afternoon, it takes several person-years (if not several person-decades) to create a PDF handling library.

In case you wish to annotate PDF keeping the PDF file intact, you need to use a PDF viewer app.

 

[Klagundi]

Thanks, I understand the difficulty of creating a PDF handling library.

Incidentally then, I wish to use LectureNotes in tandem with a PDF annotation application.
Could you (or the community) suggest the best such app? My criteria are

a) Free-hand annotation possible on the PDF
b) Annotation stored in separate layer (allowing to erase just the
annotation not the text)
c) Annotation embedded in the PDF itself, allowing for an easy
backup workflow.
d) Original PDF is not touched at all, remains searchable, stored as
text and vector graphics format.
e) Efficient dealing with large textbooks (>= 1000 pages)

Is there such an app? Thanks for your help.

 

[starbuckk]

Thanks, I understand the difficulty of creating a PDF handling library.

Incidentally then, I wish to use LectureNotes in tandem with a PDF annotation application.
Could you (or the community) suggest the best such app? My criteria are

a) Free-hand annotation possible on the PDF
b) Annotation stored in separate layer (allowing to erase just the
annotation not the text)
c) Annotation embedded in the PDF itself, allowing for an easy
backup workflow.
d) Original PDF is not touched at all, remains searchable, stored as
text and vector graphics format.
e) Efficient dealing with large textbooks (>= 1000 pages)

Is there such an app? Thanks for your help.

Take a look at Kno. This application is primarily designed for college students and commercial dial textbook providers. But it also imports PDF for note taking. It leaves the original file alone so you can even take notes on protected PDF files.

 

[Tamasaka]

LecturePresentations does not work on Lollipop 5.1

After I updated the OS of NVIDIA Shield Tablet from Lollipop 5.0 to 5.1, LecturePresentations does not work.
It displays presentation duration, and the notification area says "secondary display detected". But it shows action bar on the secondary display.

 

[acadoid]

@Tamasaka: I can reproduce the problem, many thanks for pointing it out to me.

I am not exactly sure what is going on. I tried numerous other apps that can access secondary displays and they all fail to acquire a secondary display under Android 5.1. The problem has also been posted in developer forums (see, for instance, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29512102/windowmanager-android-5-1), so far without a solution. Since LecturePresentations follows the Android documentation (as probably the other apps that I tested do as well), it might even be that the problem is caused by a bug introduced in Android 5.1.

EDIT: I found a solution (the reason for the problem is an incompatible change in Android 5.1), I will provide an updated version of LecturePresentation very soon.

 

[acadoid]

@Tamasaka: I uploaded an update v1.0.4 of LecturePresentations into the app stores which should solve the problem. I will appreciate to receive your feedback.

 

[Tamasaka]

@Tamasaka: I uploaded an update v1.0.4 of LecturePresentations into the app stores which should solve the problem. I will appreciate to receive your feedback.

Thank you for the new version 1.0.4 of LecturePresentations which works perfectly on Lollipop 5.1. Thank you again for your quick support.

 

[pgibby081965]

Export Icon

Hi. Quite often I tend to export a note rather than share - any possibility of having an export icon added to the menu?

Thanks!

Phil

 

[acadoid]

@pgibby081965: I am not sure whether I understand what you wish to achieve. Export in what format?

Android's `share´ functionality is an `export´ functionality, just with the convenience of presenting a collection of apps that can handle the exported material.

 

[pgibby081965]

Quick note shortcut

Hi. I'm looking for guidance on how to set the defaults for a quick note shortcut on my homescreen.

How do I set the default folder it goes to?
How do I set the page size, colour etc?

I'm not on about a shortcut to add a page to an existing notebook - this is for a brand new notebook.

Thanks

(Sorry if this is similar to a message I may have just posted but my computer crashed as I was writing my earlier question and I'm not sure if it was posted or not! )

 

[acadoid]

@pgibby081965: The parameters of quick notebooks are selected in the quick notebook settings; the folder is selected in this dialog via the button aside of `path´.

 

[pgibby081965]

Thanks for the response - sorry if I'm missing something but my question is - where are the quick notebook settings? I can't find them!

 

[acadoid]

@pgibby081965: It is the last item in the `+´ menu on the notebooks board.

 

[wingsandfloats]

Bookmarks

@acadoid: Is there any capability to bookmark pages within LectureNotes notebooks? Some of my notebooks are hundreds of pages long and it'd be really useful to be able to define and quickly navigate to pages that I've identified as the most important. Thanks as always for your fantastic application and for being such a responsive developer!

BTW, I noticed one of your reviewers on Google Play mention that device rooting is required to cloud synch LectureNotes notebooks via a 3rd party app. Thats not true. I use an application called FolderSync on my unrooted Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 to do a nightly incremental cloud backup of my notebook files (~30gb at this point) and it works great. Just thought I'd mention that here in case anyone else had the same misconception.

 

[acadoid]

@wingsandfloats: There are no bookmarks in the strict sense (I have that on my to-do-list), but you can attach keywords to notebook pages, LectureNotes creates an index and a table of contents from that.

 

[wingsandfloats]

@acadoid I've been using LectureNotes for over 2 years and never knew this index functionality existed. This is exactly what I was looking for, thank you! Just a suggestion, I think the average end-user may not be familiar with what a buried menu item labeled "Index Page" is supposed to do and may gloss it over the way I did. I should of known better since I was a software engineer in a previous life (in medical school now), but it didn't click for me until you just described it. I think this is a very powerful function and would probably see more use if the Index Page action were available via the action menu icon bar and if there were a short description on the keyword population page similar to "These keywords are used to populate the notebook's table of contents accessible from the Notebook Index main menu item". Or maybe I'm just not giving end-users enough credit and its generally more intuitive to them than it was to me, so feel free to take my suggestion with a grain of salt if you disagree... Thanks again for pointing out this feature to me, it'll be very useful for me moving forward!