list of feature requests

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list of feature requests

(38 posts) (16 voices)

Started 14 years ago by webnessa
Latest reply from afry

12 Next »

webnessa
Member

I've been collecting a wish list of features while trying out this software. Sorry to post this as a list, but I don't have time to put them in individually. Thanks for the great piece of software! I wish I had this years ago and will be buying very soon.

Auto-save at intervals set in preferences.
Set default font preferences (spacing, font size, font face, etc.).
Pages-like formatting toolbar.
Drag-and-drop editing.
Show total time in toolbar.
Show total slides in footer (before previous and next buttons).
Thumbnail view of slides (for easier navigation while recording).
Undo capability while recording slide progressions with audio (for those times when I or my instructor accidently hit the wrong previous/next button).
Active linking to slides, so that changes in original slides is reflected on the fly in Pear Note.
Pages-, OmniOutliner-like editing features (or become an add-on to Pages and Keynote), especially styles for lists, paragraphs and characters.
Annotations to slides (pie-in-the-sky).

Posted 14 years ago #
c-had
Developer

That's quite a list. I'll respond to each below:

Auto-save at intervals set in preferences:
Agreed that this should happen. It's on the roadmap.

Set default font preferences (spacing, font size, font face, etc.):
Agreed. This is on the roadmap.

Pages-like formatting toolbar:
This is not on the current roadmap, but I'll think about it.

Drag-and-drop editing:
Do you mean highlighting pieces of text and dragging them around? Or something else?

Show total time in toolbar:
I assume you mean in addition to the current time.

Show total slides in footer (before previous and next buttons):
Makes sense. I'll add it to the requests list.

Thumbnail view of slides (for easier navigation while recording):
I hadn't thought of that. I'll add it to the requests list.

Undo capability while recording slide progressions with audio (for those times when I or my instructor accidently hit the wrong previous/next button):
This looks like a bug in 1.1.3. It used to work. I'll fix it.

Active linking to slides, so that changes in original slides is reflected on the fly in Pear Note:
I'll think more on this. Active linking can be surprising to many users, who assume that the slides in their note are the ones they added, even if they change the original on disk.

Pages-, OmniOutliner-like editing features (or become an add-on to Pages and Keynote), especially styles for lists, paragraphs and characters:
I'm assuming you mean more than what you currently get in Pear Note under the Edit and Font menus (List, spacing, Font, Kern, Ligature, etc..). Do you have any specific things you'd like?

Annotations to slides (pie-in-the-sky):
Do you mean drawing/writing on the slides themselves? If so, that's likely not going to happen in the near future due to complexity.

Thanks very much for the feedback. It is very helpful.
Chad

Posted 14 years ago #
c-had
Developer

Just wanted to let you know that Pear Note 1.2 has been released which includes some of the things you asked for. In particular:

Auto-save: Pear Note now auto-saves every 15 minutes (unless you disable this in Preferences)
Drag-and-drop editing: should now be fixed
Show total time in toolbar: if you click and hold the time, it will show you the total time
Show total slides in footer: this is now shown

Thanks,
Chad

Posted 14 years ago #
cwera
Member

Ok - I love this product and use it for taking notes of lectures importing pdf or powerpoints - the one thing I really would like to see are drawing or highlighting tools for the document I'm working with. For example, if I'm in a lecture and taking notes, I'd like to highlight the powerpoint and bold, underline, draw a line to or from, etc on the slides. Now you can select the text in the slide and paste it into the note, but that is clunky.
The other feature that I think is needed is a more font formatting tools that can be added to toolbar. You have size and a color wheel, but size, a few default colors (a color palette), bullets would be great (almost like the default toolbar in word) - I would like something quick so make changes so key notes stand out.
This is a great product - thanks so much!!!

Posted 14 years ago #
c-had
Developer

cwera,

The slide markup idea is interesting. It's not in the immediate plans, but I'll definitely explore it for the future.

I'm planning to make formatting easier, particularly the most common formatting tools, in 1.3. I'm not sure what shape it will take yet, but I definitely understand the need.

Thanks for the suggestions (and the compliments),
Chad

Posted 14 years ago #
silverinkweaver
Member

I was wondering if it'd be possible eventually to just have a blank slide and draw directly on it? This would be great for times when my professors draw diagrams or formulas and I could just copy them down. Maybe the drawings could be time-lined like the text? Just an idea, trust me I know it'd probably be a ton of work so I don't expect to see it anytime soon.

Posted 14 years ago #
c-had
Developer

Hi silverinkweaver,

Drawing support in some form has been requested a few times, and it's a feature I definitely want to add eventually. I'm focusing on making the current feature-set a little more solid right now, but hopefully it won't be too long before I look at ways to add even more information to a Pear Note.

You're idea is very cool. Most people have requested being able to draw on the text section, but creating blank slides for drawing is a very interesting different way to look at providing drawing support.

Thanks for the idea,
Chad

Posted 14 years ago #
blueshoes
Member

I have just discovered Pear Note. What a wonderful app! Thank you!!!

Have been looking for years for a solution like this. Some months ago I found Transcriva which was quite good, but Pear Note has almost all I was looking for.

I would like to second the request for more font formatting tools. In Textedit I used to highlight text with different background colors by applying favorite styles through Quickeys macro's. Now I haven'f found a way to make a Quickeys macro to do that in Pear Note. It would be great if one could choose styles from the menu (not only from the context menu) or from the toolbar. Maybe you could include an option for background colour in the color palette.

Thank's

Posted 14 years ago #
RobLewis
Member

Feature request:
Be able to right-click on an audio or video file, and have Pear Note be one of the available choices for the "Open with..." dialog.

Maybe other supported file types too. Does dragging a media file and dropping it on the Pear Note app icon already work?

The media would be automatically imported into a new Pear Note document with the same name as the media file.

Posted 14 years ago #
c-had
Developer

blueshoes:

Thanks for the suggestion. I have to say I feel a little dumb right now, as I can't figure out how to set a background color for a selection in TextEdit. I can set the entire document's background color, but not a particular selection.

I can certainly provide a feature like this in Pear Note, but I'd like to at least get a look at the user interface TextEdit provides before doing so and I can't seem to find it.

Thanks,
Chad

Posted 14 years ago #
c-had
Developer

RobLewis:

Pear Note does not do this today. If you want to import audio/video into a new document, you must create a document and then import it (via the menu item). Auto-importing when dragging to the icon and allowing users to "Open with..." are great ideas and I'll add them to the todo list.

Thanks,
Chad

Posted 14 years ago #
blueshoes
Member

Chad,

Oh, yes, you are right. Textedit cannot do that. I had forgotten that I hadn't created those favorite styles with Textedit alone. I pasted a piece of text with background color from another application (DEVONThink; works with Abiword also) into Textedit and saved it as a favorite style.
What would really help me would be if you could provide a menu access to the styles dialogue, or to the favorite styles. I can use Quickeys to do the rest.
The bad thing with using styles to highlight text is that when you apply a different style to a text selection, not only the background color changes but all other text formatting also.
DEVONThink has a chekbox in the color palette for background color. Using that only changes the background color.

Posted 14 years ago #
c-had
Developer

blueshoes:

Thanks for the explanation. That makes sense now.

Posted 13 years ago #
c-had
Developer

RobLewis:

Just wanted to let you know that you can now "Open With..." audio and video files to auto-import into a new Pear Note document, as well as drag/drop onto the Pear Note icon. Just make sure you have at least version 1.2.2.

Posted 13 years ago #
bjkitchin
Member

Just downloaded the 30 day trial and want to first say its clearly a winner! Ill be purchasing the software and recommending it throughout my network of students and colleagues... just sent a link actually. :)

With regard to the requests for annotated slides (writing on slides). Indeed this would in my view perfect the software for my uses however I can only imagine the difficulty with this.

Thinking creatively now, what if you could write in the text area rather then on the slide itself? For example, I take notes using my wacom pen tablet. I do this because its often a lot faster to hand write something. The writing action is a mouse click so I would imagine it can be time stamped. As a second best option to writing on the slide: if I could write in the text area or on a panel designed for hand writing like post-its notes that would be great. I often need to note symbols, like math formulas.

Just a thought... have no idea how complex that is to pull off. Love the app now!!!

Currently I keep Acrobate Pro open and write directly on my slides then advance the pdf in the slide panel to time stamp the audio lecture or meeting notes I am recording. As you can imagine the window jumping isnt fun.

Best
BJ

Posted 13 years ago #
c-had
Developer

Thanks very much for the input and ideas.

Posted 13 years ago #
joules
Member

its a very interesting app and it has great features that i have not seen in other software yet
so Feature request:
I know it has been mentioned before but being able to annotate on PDFs would be ideal. look at preview's annotations.
i currently use it as my method of taking notes however i have to open other programs if i want to record the lecture and it wont necessarily tie in like pearl note does.
maybe you could use preview within pearl note? now i am talking crazy

Posted 13 years ago #
c-had
Developer

Hi jca488

Thanks for the feedback. Unfortunately, I can't actually stick Preview inside of Pear Note, but I'll look at what I can do to satisfy this need.

Posted 13 years ago #
bspec
Member

Just registered at the forums because I have a request for a certain feature. I have several Pear Note files from one class. There's a different PowerPoint for each topic, so I can't really combine them all into one.

What I'd like to see is the ability to use tabs to organize all the files into one convenient window. Then you could switch easily from one Pear Note file to the next without cluttering your whole screen. While this might not be useful for taking notes, it would be handy when referring to several notes at the same time.

Thanks and keep up the great work.

Posted 13 years ago #
c-had
Developer

Hi bpspec,

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm going to be spending some time trying to re-imagine the user interface over the next few months. Your feedback is valuable input into the process.

Posted 13 years ago #
messonic
Member

Regarding the Pages-like formatting bar, there are shortcuts for bold, italics, align left/right/center, etc. They are system-wide shortcuts that are quite consist, so I personally don't have as great of a need for that.

Could there be an option to show a ruler? I hate dealing with margins, but when I paste in content and forget to "match style", it leads to having lines getting cut off and there being no way I've determined to adjust the margins without "cutting" back to a good Right Margin point and pasting to match style.

I hope the ruler would be an easier item to add that would add functionality that isn't found with shortcuts common to the operating system.

thanks for the awesome software. cheers!

Posted 13 years ago #
c-had
Developer

messonic -

I'm not sure I understand the problem you're talking about. You're saying you paste text into Pear Note and it cuts off some of the text because of formatting? Do you have an example of this that would be easy to point me to?

As far as the ruler goes, I can certainly look into making it available.

Thanks,
Chad

Posted 13 years ago #
messonic
Member

I wasn't very clear. I'll paste text in from lecture notes, and the text will come with narrow margins, whereas previously I was typing to the edge of the pear note window, the lecture notes will bring over a "right edge" or right margin. In a situation with a ruler, I could adjust the right margin but without the ruler, it's not easily available. I can possibly do a screen grab or screen capture if needed. I'm probably not using the right terms.

Posted 13 years ago #
c-had
Developer

I think a screen grab or capture would be helpful. Or even better, you could point me to a document that I can copy/paste from to make this happen. I've tried all I can to reproduce this, but I can't seem to make anything happen that looks like what you're describing.

Thanks,
Chad

Posted 13 years ago #
uimikew
Member

Hello Chad,

Your program has been very helpful to me. One feature that would help my team tremendously would be the option to export the notes to text with a column containing the time stamp information. Is that feasible or already possible?

Thank you for your help.

-Mike

Posted 12 years ago #
c-had
Developer

Sorry, but there's currently no way to export a timestamp column from Pear Note.

Posted 12 years ago #
crimsonite2099
Member

Hello Chad,

I really like the Jump back feature in pearnote 1 because it was adjustable (I usually kept it at around 10 seconds). Now I find that each time I use the Jump feature, it goes back too far and I'm stuck wasting valuable time listening to an extra 20 seconds of stuff I already know (it really adds up). Will you be making the Jump feature adjustable again?

Posted 12 years ago #
c-had
Developer

crimsonite2099:

Enough people seem to want this back that I made it happen. I just released a beta that has this feature (2.0.5b4), and it should be in 2.0.5 when it becomes official. If you're not already a beta tester, please consider checking this one out to make sure it does what you're looking for.

To enable the feature (once you have the new version installed), just go to the Playback preferences and change how many seconds you'd like it to jump back. The button should change to one that does not have 30 in it when you do so.

Thanks,
Chad

Posted 12 years ago #
caffeineoverload
Member

I have been using Pear Note exclusively for in-class notes this semester. It has been a lifesaver.

The only thing I wish would be improved is the outlining capabilities. I wish there was a way to define a deeper outline than just a header and 2 levels. Something like a Harvard option would be perfect.

Posted 12 years ago #
c-had
Developer

caffeineoverload:

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Pear Note does not limit how many levels a list/outline can have currently.

As to supporting the Harvard/Cornell note-taking methods, I do not believe Pear Note will ever have such a feature. I've looked into it in the past. To support those methods properly, I believe you really need an app that's built around those methods from the start. Pear Note is purposefully designed to have unstructured text input, and I don't believe retrofitting a structured approach in would result in an intuitive or elegant product.

Thanks very much for the input.

Posted 12 years ago #

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