I own fourteen stylus-based notetaking apps for the iPad. (Yes, I’m obsessive. Trying to recreate my long-lost Newton experience.)

I love Noteshelf for the iPad, but there are some parts of the user experience that could use some work.

This post is aimed at Fluidtouch tech support. Fingers crossed!

System Preferences

You have page and notebook preferences, but I want to have system-wide preferences as well. Specifically, when opening a new document, I want to be able to have my default:

• zoom on/off (for me, always ON)
• magnification level
• left-right zoom split
• pen size/color

Personally, I never plan to write in the top half of the screen, so I dislike setting all this up every time I create a new notebook.

Managing Notebooks

When creating a new notebook, I always want to give it a name. The cursor should be pre-selected into the “Title” field with the keyboard ready to type.

I’d like a way to quickly switch back and forth between multiple notebooks.

I’d like a way to easily and intuitively move pages back and forth between multiple notebooks. Think split-screen Norton Commander.

Pen settings should be saved with notebooks.

Zoom Editor Changes

In the zoom editor, there should be a button to jump the editing rectangle to the top left corner of the page (see mockup below).

The zoom rectangle should snap to zoomed lines on stationery. In other words, if the rules are 36 points apart, the zoom rectangle should only move vertically in 36-point jumps. And there should be a button to jump up one line (see mockup below). Think “Snap to Grid” in a drawing program.

Finally, the “New Line” button in the zoom editor is by far the most common target in that vertical row of buttons. According to Fitt’s Law, it should be bigger (see mockup below).

The zoom level should be a slider, or at least have more granularity… I think 2.75x would be perfect.

The page-forward/page-back arrows in the split bar are too small.

Pen Behavior

I want to be able to set pen sizes independently for the three colored pens (in my case, 1-point black, 2-point blue, and 5-point red would be perfect).

There should be a way to use the eraser for one motion, then have the pen instantly snap back to whatever I was using before. (Example: writing in blue ink, select the eraser to clean up a glitch, then I’m writing in blue ink again).

Infinite-Length Pages

Why should an infinitely-expandable notebook be limited to A4-sized paper? False skeumorphism (I love that word!). I would like a page to scroll as long as I want, only switching pages when I manually create a new page. Basically, when I’m writing, I want to *keep* writing, and not be nagged with the irritating little minutiae of creating a new page, getting the zoom box in the right place, and regaining my stream of thought. I want to be able to keep writing!

Handwriting Recognition

Exporting to Evernote doesn’t cut it, and I’m worried about confidentiality anyway. Until Apple enables Inkwell for iOS… license Phatware!

Cutting and Pasting

Need to have a non-rectangular selection option for cut/paste.

I always seem to miss the last step in committing a “paste”… rethink?

Icons

I find the collection of icon stamps completely useless. First, because it doesn’t work in zoomed mode, so it might as well not exist.

Second, if I’m willing to drop out of zoom mode (and I’m not), I don’t want to scroll through five pages looking for one that I want. I want the initial two-row drop-down to be a “favorites” tray where I can place the two dozen icons that I want to use 99% of the time, and have those instantly accessible when I hit the smiley-face. If I want something else, 1% of the time I’ll hunt around in the “More” pages.

Paper Templates

There should be an editor for new paper templates… either built into the app, or downloadable on the iPad. I’d even pay another buck or two for it.

I want to edit the right-hand margin of a template… in other words, how close do I have to get to the right-hand edge of the screen before I automatically get moved to the next line? The existing red-dotted-line is way too close to the edge; I want to move it out a quarter of an inch.

Bugs

Sometimes when navigating around, the zoom rectangle in the top half of the page gets completely obscured. That should be impossible.

Future

I bought an iPen from Kickstarter… haven’t received it yet, but I hope it meets expectations. If so, I really hope you support the API! I’d hate to have to switch to another notetaking app.

I hope this list is useful… obviously, I use the app a lot, or I wouldn’t spend this long making suggestions to improve it!

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Car and Driver is the latest enthusiast rag to hop onto the hydrogen bandwagon with their article “What the H?” in this month’s issue. I wrote this letter to the editor but, since I doubt it will be printed, I’m reproducing it here.

Editors,

I’m sorry to see that you’ve bought into the hydrogen hype (“What the H”, Jan 2012). Hydrogen fuel cells make for nice demonstration projects, but will never be a meaningful part of the national transportation infrastructure.

Why? First, there are no hydrogen wells. You have to create it, whether from water electrolysis, biomass gasification, or natural gas reformation. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that’s always going to take significantly more energy than you get out of burning it in a fuel cell. In this sense, hydrogen is just a bulky, expensive, and occasionally-dangerous battery.

Second, hydrogen is incredibly hard to work with. It can’t be transported or stored easily. Standard tools, fittings, tanks, and materials become brittle or leaky. Yes, aerospace companies have solved these problems for rocket engines, but not with parts you can buy at Pep Boys.

Finally, hydrogen is the opposite of dense. Whether as a liquid or a pressurized gas, a hydrogen tank contains only a fraction of the potential energy represented by an equal-size tank filled with liquid hydrocarbons. That’s a fundamental physical limit, and can’t be improved by smart engineering.

If you want to burn hydrogen in your car, the best way is to attach your hydrogen atoms to carbon atoms… and make gasoline.

Thanks for the otherwise-great issue!

Stephen

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Today, I was fortunate enough to enjoy lunch with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, his wife, and their son. (Yes, this is the author of “The Black Swan” among many other accomplishments.) It was an utterly indescribable experience. The best I can do is:

Conversing with Nassim is like conversing with a swarm of butterflies. A swarm of glittering, hyper-intelligent cyborg butterflies. Who aren’t quite sure whether to take over the Earth or migrate to another star system.

In a ninety minute lunch, here is a (possibly incomplete) alphabetical list of the topics we discussed:

• Aerobic exercise
• Angel investing
• Apple laptop design
• Aramaic mistranslations in the Bible
• Asian Silk Road
• Asset allocation
• Battery chemistry
• Best airlines to Abu Dhabi
• Carbohydrate consumption
• Early (1st-6th century) Christianity
• Electric cars
• Elon Musk and SpaceX
• Groupon IPO
• History of jet engines
• Islamic fundamentalism and Lebanese society
• Islamic tolerance/intolerance of alcohol
• Litigation and litigators
• Lost Legion of Rome
• Misunderstood links between science and technology
• NASA politics
• Neurological damage and recovery
• Option pricing
• Poetry of Omar Khayyam
• Risk clipping
• Rocket design
• Teaching birds how to fly
• Undersea treasure hunting
• Wernher von Braun

Taleb has an amazing habit of saying a sentence or two that should rightfully be the subject of an entire conversation (or university lecture)… then, before the surrounding humans have absorbed that thought, leaping to a completely different topic and doing it again. And again.

I like to characterize myself as “a mile wide and an inch deep”… I know a little bit about a lot of different things. This is a man who is a mile wide and a mile deep. I’m going to go re-read his books. Slowly.

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Once again, I’m honored to have been asked to speak in the Space and Science tracks at Dragon*Con.

Dragon takes over downtown Atlanta during Labor Day weekend. It’s enormous. All the public reports of attendance are wrong… they admit to “40,000+” but that’s low-balled to avoid fire code problems.

But for those of you who don’t know, there is a wing of the Hilton reserved for the few hundred attendees who are too geeky for DragonCon… and that’s where the Space and Science tracks are. (Plus a couple of others, like Skeptics, EFF, and Podcasting.) Yes, when most normal humans would be going in search of Princess Leia bikini models, we’re learning about astrophysics and nuclear power plants…

Anyhow, I’m on three times this year:

What’s in the Labs at Georgia Tech?
Friday, 2:30 pm, Science track

Enter the Commercial Space Age
Sunday, 7:00 pm, Space track
with Michael Mealling

NASA Goes Commercial
Monday, 11:30 am, Space track
with Michael Mealling, John Bradford, A.C. Charania

I hope those of you attending can drag yourself away from the (admittedly incredible) entertainment programming and cross the pedestrian bridge from the Marriott to join us in the Hilton. My sessions are during family-friendly hours (i.e., not Saturday night), so bring your kids. Have a great con!

PS, for those who asked: My incredibly popular and thought-provoking talk on alternative energy (“Hydrogen Cars, Ethanol, Wind Farms, and other Silly Ideas“) was apparently vetoed by Science track management this year as being insufficiently respectful to prevailing opinions, even though I filled the room last year, and there are empty slots on the schedule. C’est la guerre.

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Some of you are too young to remember the Model 100. I travelled with one of these bulletproof boxes for years, starting in 1984. It ran forever on AA batteries. It had a full-size keyboard for touch-typing. The acoustic couplers would connect you to CompuServe or your corporate mainframe at 300 bps over anything… hotel phone, pay phone (remember those?), and probably a barbed-wire fence. I loved it. So did a lot of people; Radio Shack sold 6 million of them.  It became standard issue for foreign correspondents and other road warriors.

One drawback was the display: big, clearly legible LCD dot-matrix, but limited to 8 rows of 40 columns. That was a bit cramped, but I wrote multiple-page memos on the thing. I even claimed that it helped me focus.   

Today, I spend most of my time on the road using my iPad. Computationally, it’s not even in the same universe as the Model 100. But, if I need to type more than half a page or so (this blog post, for example), I’m likely to rotate my iPad sideways and fire up the superb iA Writer.

One of the features of iA Writer is an optional “focus mode” that removes all framing and dims everything but the last few lines. I feel like I’m using my Model 100 again.

iA Writer is five bucks on the iTunes App Store. Whether you use the focus mode or not, its a great tool for banging out text. And, like everything else in the iOS universe, it syncs with Dropbox. Go buy it. (If you’re one of those people who complains about $4.99 productivity apps being “overpriced,” then we can’t be friends any more.)

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Anyhow, I’ve gotten some decently high scores this week and decided to see if anyone else reading this has gotten anything similar. It’s also a test—since I’m intentionally not linking this to a tweeted category—to see if anyone other than me ever finds this page without Twitter.

So, here are my high scores on selected levels of Angry Birds Seasons, “Summer Pignic” (2011):

(Can you tell that the black bird is my favorite? I guess I just like blowing stuff up…)

Can anyone match those?

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How? I’d gone to the trouble of setting up a custom lock screen for my iPhone (and my iPad; see below).

A stranger picking up your iPhone and pressing the Home button sees the standard “swipe to unlock” screen.  If you use passcode protection (and you should), they’re then confronted with “Enter Passcode.” Unless you’ve picked “1234″ as your passcode, your iPhone is now a brick to them. But… there is a spot on the screen 100 pixels tall where you can put ownership information that will be visible to anyone looking at either screen, whether you’re using a passcode or not.

Here’s the layout:

Anything in that green bar is visible. You can use whatever pixel editor you like (I like Acorn) to put your name, email address, a friend’s phone number, a promised reward, etc. (Don’t enter your cellphone number… the hypothetical good Samaritan already has your cellphone!) The area isn’t that big, but I used Trebuchet as my font and had room for two full lines of text in 28-point type (which, on the Retina display, is smaller than it looks).

Once you’ve edited the image, save as a JPG or PNG, and transfer it to your iPhone. It’s probably simplest just to mail it to yourself. Save it to the Camera Roll. Then:

• Find your new image in the Photos app.
• Press on the “Action” button in the lower left corner.
• Choose “Set as Wallpaper.”
• Ignore the “Move and Scale” and just press “Set.”
• Select “Lock Screen.”

You’re done. It takes longer to read the instructions than to do it!  Here’s how it looks on my iPhone, using a photograph I took of Cissa on top of Table Mountain in Cape Town:

Simple and effective. (Obviously, you can replace the green bar with whatever color you like.)

iPad Lockscreen

iPads are a little tougher because the lockscreen needs to be able to rotate. But a little experimentation shows that there’s an area 768 pixels wide and about 75 pixels tall that is always visible, for both the “swipe to unlock” screen and the passcode page. So you create a 1024×1024 image, then customize just that portion with your message. The rest is whatever artwork you like.

Edit as above, and follow the same steps to install the customized lockscreen on your iPad. Here are some samples of how it looks on mine, with the same photograph:

I’ve created simple JPG templates for both the iPhone and the iPad, here and here. Feel free to download them and do whatever you like with them. For an iPhone 3G or 3GS, reduce the template to 320×480 pixels.

If a thief gets your device, this isn’t going to help; log into me.com and wipe it remotely. But most people are honest. I hope this helps an errant iOS device get reunited with its owner someday!

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(This is Gov. Perdue of North Carolina speaking at the Southern Growth Policy Board; confusing, because we had our own Gov. Perdue in Georgia until six months ago!)
 

Standard iPhone 4 photo

With PhotoJojo lens installed
 

See the full gallery on Posterous

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More levels, please.

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(Click to embiggen. ~2000 pixels square.)

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