[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Note taking application

[From: Timo Sirainen]

Now that I'm soon getting my 770, there's one piece of software I'd like
to have on it: A good note taking application which doesn't get in your
way while you're actually wanting to take the notes.

I may start writing it myself, but I'd first like to hear if anyone else
would be interested in doing it. I'm way too busy nowadays as it is and
I'd rather not want to waste my free time on yet another project if
there's just a way to get someone else to do it ;)

I haven't seen any of these kinds of programs before, but I'm sure there
already exists many similar ones. Improvement suggestions and other
comments would be welcome. Anyway, my plan is currently:

Step 1: Have a simple program that allows you to draw anything to the
screen. Clicking a button at the bottom of the screen would scroll half
a page down, getting you more empty space to draw on. There would be
scrollbars too of course. Possibly the scroll buttons could be in every
side of the screen so you could scroll to any direction.

Besides drawing lines, there would have to be support for erasing them
using a rubber tool. As extra functionality there could be colors,
different line thickness, and whatever other functionality exists in
simple painting applications.

The document could be then saved to a file as a list of vectors. It
could possibly try to compress them a bit so that a bit longer lines /
curves could be used instead of saving all pixels exactly at the
position they were drawn to.

Step 2: Feeding the strokes through handwriting recognition engine.
Whenever something is recognized, replace the strokes with the
recognized character using some specific font. If something didn't get
recognized, it's left there as-is. Recognition doesn't forget the
strokes however, so you still can go back to the stroke-mode where you
see everything exactly as you draw it.

In recognition mode you can then fix your strokes until HWR engine
finally has recognized everything correctly. This could work in somewhat
similar way to how HWR input method currently works in 770. Also this
same application could exist for PC, so you could use keyboard to fix
the text. Words could also be fixed/guessed semi-automatically using
dictionaries.

This editing mode could have all sorts of fancy features. In general the
editing mode should try to work similar to how word processors work. You
can insert, delete and modify text and the text after that gets moved
and wrapped to next lines as needed.

Pictures that appear to belong to text lines (eg. some math symbols)
would get moved the same way as other text. Pictures that don't appear
to belong to text lines (eg. some larger picture) would stay "sticky"
with the text flowing around the picture. You could then manually also
move these pictures around and change the stickyness if the picture
belongs to the text but is just a bit large.

It would be nice if the recognition could be done also in the PC
program, but I don't see the HWR library available in maemo.org, so
perhaps the initial recognition could be done in 770 and saved to the
document's file, which could then be fixed using PC. Or maybe some other
HWR library could be used?