Frogplate - WriteNow! 1.11 Review

Write Now! 1.11 is a shareware Palm application that makes it easy to quickly scribble information into the handheld and later transcribe it to text in the standard PIM applications.

One of the lifehacks that forms the basis of David Allen's "Getting Things Done" is the idea of a single in-tray through which all incoming data is collected. Ensuring all unprocessed ideas, requests, information etc. are put in an in-tray that is regularly cleared down is the way to keeping a handle on the demands and complexity of life.

I have three in-trays:

at work it's Outlook
at home its an A4, 9 litre, Really Useful Box
everywhere else it's the Palm's standard Note Pad application.

The only real problem with the keyboard-less Palms is the speed of entering text. An unavoidable compromise has to be made between size and the rate and ease of entering large quantities of text. Graffiti was a great improvement on earlier attempts, as anyone who has used the original Apple Newton will know. Remember the famous Doonesbury cartoon? (gocomics.com).

The problem is that Graffiti tends to be a little too slow for scribbling down an address during an encounter with an old friend, or an action or two when you are concentrating hard on getting your point over in a meeting.

With earlier Palms BugMe! was a great solution. It allowed you to scribble a freehand note and then transcribe it into a more suitable application later. You could flip backwards and forwards between the freehand drawing and a full page text note with one click and then paste the text out to another application. It was so successful that a rather cut-down version, Note Pad, appeared in the next iteration of the Palm operating system.

Note Pad is a very simple, focussed application that does its job very well. I love the simplicity of one click opening the application and starting a new note. Setting alarms by clicking in the top right-hand corner and the simple, clean design make it a joy to use. But unfortunately there is no way to enter more than a few characters of text without switching to another application. I constantly find myself copying addresses from Note Pad to paper and then back into Contacts.

Another solution is Handshigh's Slap but that relies on Graffiti input and I find the slow initial entry of the data isn't compensated for by the clever parsing of the data into the relevant fields of the PIM applications.

Write Now!, though it has a few minor flaws, is a good compromise between the speed of entry offered by Note Pad and the ability to write text to the built in PIM applications offered by Slap. Its unique selling point is that you can enter scribbled notes in freehand, but can then switch views so that your scribbles are displayed in the top half of the screen while the bottom half can be used for transcribing into text.

In Write Now!'s full screen drawing mode it has pretty much the same capabilities as Note Pad. There is a range of nine pens and seven pen colours, plus an eraser. Note Pad doesn't support using different coloured pens and has a smaller number of pen sizes, but when scribbling a quick note in a hurry these things do not matter.

Icons along the bottom of the screen allow the creation of a new sketch, the deletion of the current sketch and changing pen colour, size and mode. On a Tungsten E the performance was very snappy with the screen being updated fast enough to keep up with any speed of scribbling without lag.

There is a sketch selector at the top of the screen, with left and right arrows to move through your scribblings. Alternatively you can click on the number to drop-down a list of sketch numbers. Disappointingly there is a small but noticeable delay in moving from sketch to sketch. Left and right on the five-way navigator do nothing but the up, down and select can be used on the drop-down list - but only after it has been activated with the stylus. In comparison Note Pad is rather more responsive and page to page navigation is easy using the hardware keys. Write Now! doesn't allow the naming of sketches, but they are only intended to have a short life time, so this is not a major problem.

A utility intended for scribbling quick notes needs to be launched from one of the hardware keys and here Write Now! was a little disappointing. When you launch Note Pad from a hardware key it automatically opens a new note. This is one of those inspired little details that turns a rather simple application into a really convenient time saver. Alas Write Now! doesn't do the same, starting it from the Launcher or a hardware button delivers you back into the application where you last left it. So if you intend using it as a quick note taker you have to remember to switch into sketch mode and start a new sketch before exiting each time. A second press of the hardware button could have been used to create a new sketch, but no such luck.

The menus provide two more drawing related options. A sketch can be locked so that it can't be changed - displaying a small padlock icon at the bottom right, and a sketch can be cleared, without being deleted (saving one tap over deleting and recreating the sketch).

At the top right-hand corner of the screen are two mode icons. One switches to the sketch mode just described, the other switches to a text-entry mode. Clicking on the latter displays the current and next sketch in the top half of the display and a text entry area in the bottom half. If you were displaying the last sketch then the current and previous sketch is shown - it does not wrap around from your last drawing to first.

Two sketch selectors at the top of the screen allow you to navigate through the sketches, making it easy to select any combination for the top half of the display. Clicking on a sketch takes you back to the full screen representation of your drawing. Write Now! does some clever manipulation of the images to show them at a quarter size in the text entry mode. Even if the text was originally entered in the thinnest pen, only one pixel wide, it is still perfectly readable when shrunk to a quarter of the screen. In fact when shrinking the sketchs Write Now! increases the width of the two smallest pens to ensure they are visible. The results work very well.

The icons of the four built in PIM applications are shown down the right-hand side of the text area - Calendar, Contacts, Tasks and Memos. Clicking on one of the application icons changes the text area to display the main fields for that application. At the bottom of the screen two icons are displayed to copy the text to the selected application and to clear the entry.

Clicking on the Calendar icon displays a text field for the event name, time and date selectors, an alarm checkbox and an offset time selector for the alarm. Once the relevant details have been transcribed from the sketches above, clicking on the update icon at the bottom right sends the data to the calendar and then displays a "Goto Datebook?" dialogue. Clicking [Yes] drops you into the calendar at the new event to check for conflicts or to edit it further.

I found the flow of control across the bottom half of the Write Now! screen rather unintuitive. You have to select an application from the right-hand edge, enter the relevant text and then hit the 'update application' icon on the left of the screen. This right-to-left flow keeps catching me out and over and over again I found myself entering text in the field for the application that had last been updated and then trying to select the correct icon. This doesn't work, since Write Now! maintains separate text buffers for each target application. I'm not certain whether my difficulty with this was due to recently using Slap, which has the same layout, but you enter the text and then select an application, or that the general right-to-left flow is uncomfortable for users whose native language flows from left-to-right. Either way I found the usage a little awkward.

Selecting the Contacts icon changes the text area to a fairly comprehensive list of Contacts fields - only IM, Web site and birthday were noticeable by their absence. Here the five-way navigator can be used to scroll down through the fields, just as it can be used to scroll within text fields. This makes navigation of the long list of fields in the five line window much easier.

Selecting the Tasks icon allows you to enter task name, priority and due date. Like all the modes of the text entry form, it does not allow you to select Category - which would have been particular useful for task input. Instead it always defaults to Unfiled. However since it gives you the opportunity to go to the new item in the target application and edit it further, this is no great problem.

Finally the Memos icon allows you to enter text for a new Memo. Five lines are shown, but a scroll bar appears as you reach the end of the fifth line. The field is limited to 4 Kbytes of text, which is more than enough for Graffiti input! There is no support for configuring other applications to accept text, as Slap can. However it is easy enough to cut and paste from the text field to another application - especially if you have Paul Nevai's pToolSet installed.

Write Now! 1.11 is shareware, costing $19.95 to register. The demo version only allows three sketches at a time and is limited to creating ten new entries in each of the four target applications. The application has a few minor user interface flaws but these pale into insignificance against the ease with which it allows scribbled notes to be transcribed into entries in the Palm's main PIM applications.

Reviewed by Jonathan Littlewood, 06-Aug-2006.

Pros:

Efficient way to quickly scribble notes
Very convenient for transcribing into standard apps
Split screen with two sketches and text input area works well

Cons:

Creating a new sketch on startup would add to convenience
Right-to-left control flow feels unintuitive

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