Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Locayta Notes 2.1

Locayta Notes on iPhone
One of my projects for Locayta Limited has been the development of Locayta Notes for iPhone & iPad. We just launched another big update to the free notes app that already includes full text search and Dropbox syncing. The new update, version 2.1, adds many enhancements across the board, including improvements to how notes are synced to Dropbox:
  • Better default note filenames ("Note 2011-06-21.txt");
  • Note filename renaming;
  • The Dropbox folder to sync notes with can be selected and changed at any time;
These enhancements help improve Locayta Notes as a general text editor for files within Dropbox. Notes are synced to Dropbox as plain text files, meaning they can be easily viewed and edited on a desktop computer or other device. Plain text files added to the Dropbox folder from any device will automatically show up in Locayta Notes as an editable note.


We also added:

  • Notes can be sorted by date, title or filename;
  • Background colour can be customised per note;
  • Matched search terms quick jump in iPhone UI (was already in iPad);
  • Improvements to syncing logic and non UTF-8 character set handling.

Locayta Notes started out as a simple showcase app for Locayta Search Mobile, a port of Locayta's full text search library to the iOS platform (and one of my other projects). Since then it has grown to become a fully featured productivity app in its own right.


Locayta Notes on iPad


Locayta Notes is free in the App Store as a universal app for iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch.



11 comments:

  1. Could you add Password protection to the app?
    Thanks!

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  2. It is on the roadmap, I'd like that feature too.

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  3. Hi,

    I've been trying to use my iPad as a business diary, day planner and task manager to replace my old paper day planner and have bought a number of apps but they are not giving me the tools I need - for instance I have now got a few months worth of random notes from meetings, phone conversations etc in SmartPad and when I try to search for something they only take me to the page so if there were a lot of notes for that day I have to read thru the notes to find what I'm looking for - bit annoying when I'm on the phone or in a meeting trying to quickly locate a piece of information. No note searches that I could find allowed me to jump to the exact location until I found Locayta. Looks very good but I have a couple of questions that I would be very grateful if you could answer as I donlt want to get a few months down the tarck and hit a wall. I would want to use Locayta as a daily business diary ie one entry per day so default date would work great. Or am I better to make multiple new entries each day? Will the database slow to a crawl when I have several years worth of notes? Until I got an Ipad I would regularly hunt back through my day planner to look up meeting details etc and even go back through previous years planners at times. I had developed a system of highlighting stuff that I knew I would likely want to check up on later.
    Perhaps you need to sell your software to SmartPad or PocketInformant. Sure would be nice to swipe back and forwards between notes as I find that I am most often flipping back a day or two in my day planner. Would also be nice to be able to list entries with most recent at top not the bottom as the last entries are the most often referred to - perhaps you could add a feature so if I click on the date button a second time it would reverse the sort order. I realise that this product is to demonstrate your database rather than try to be a full featured app so "no" is a perfectly acceptable answer.

    Thank you - Peter Munn

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  4. I've been testing further and find that I misunderstood the sorting. I can now see that the date sort has the newest MODIFIED file at the top. That's a bit strange. If I change a single letter in an old note it becomes the newest when sorting by date. Wouldn't that be better to sort by creation date? - or a config option? I can see that the title sort sorts by the first word of the note. Filename sorts by the filename but not in a very useful fashion. I thought I might be able to use that to sort by date as I am using the default auto filenames. But that doesn't work because of the way you sort so I have Note 2011-12-11 at the top then Note 2011-12-12, 2011-12-13 ... 2011-12-22 but then under that is 2011-12-6, 2011-12-7 etc Any changes, enhancements coming?

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  5. Hi Peter Munn,

    The app has been slowly turning into a full featured product, and will continue to be supported as such, so your feedback is appreciated.

    In terms of search performance, I don't think you will find a problem. We have tested search over a couple of GB worth of text on iPhones and iPads and results are always returned in less than a second, even on the older devices.

    The default sorting is by last modified date, which we found was the most common use case. We don't offer sorting by creation date yet (nobody had asked for it).

    Updates and improvements should continue to be rolled out during 2012 (we have an update coming soon, and other features are being actively developed). Can I suggest, if you would like features added or changed, you fill out the technical support form http://www.locayta.com/iOS-search-engine/locayta-search-mobile/techcontact which will help ensure your requests are prioritised.

    If you don't get appropriate or timely feedback from the official channels, feel free to contact me directly and I'll see what I can do.

    Cheers,
    Chris

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  6. Hi Chris

    Thanks for that. It's still the only app I have found that highlights words in a large document. Do you know of any ios apps that use your engine that I could take a look at?

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  7. There are some apps we are aware of that should be launching soon. There will be some announcements when they do.

    Cheers
    Chris

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  8. Hi all...

    I'm new to Locayta and so far it's great.
    I just have a small problem : I copied a note from Notes over to Locayta Notes and 'opened' the keyboard for character entry. The keyboard seem to 'hide' the lower half of the page and the only way I could see what I had typed was to 'close' the keyboard.

    My phone OS is 4.2.1, does this affect Locayta?

    Andrew.

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  9. Hi Andrew, there was a keyboard related issue in Locayta Notes 2.1 that was fixed in 2.2. Have you upgraded to 2.2 yet?

    Cheers,
    Chris

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  10. Chris,
    Is there any chance you will updating the source on github to match the currently released version? The code on github is missing all the cool newly added feature....

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  11. There have been no plans to release Locayta Notes source since the 1.0 release.

    If you are looking for code specifically for implementing Locayta Search Mobile functionality, you can contact the technical team here http://www.locayta.com/iOS-search-engine/locayta-search-mobile/techcontact

    Cheers,
    Chris

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