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.

Locayta Search Mobile for iOS beta5

At Locayta we recently released beta5 of the Locayta Search Mobile full text search library for iOS.  This may be the last beta as we prepare for the 1.0 release soon.


Beta5 included the usual bugfixes and improvements to memory usage.  It also included a new feature that assists with search results display. The feature allows you to fetch the character ranges of all terms in a text field that were matched by a search result.


This feature isn't as simple as it sounds, due to the search engine's ability to infer relevant document terms by spell correcting, stemming or synonym expansion of query terms.  This means that terms matched in a document aren't necessarily the same as those in a query. The new character range fetching exposes this information so you can clearly highlight the term "test" in a document that matched the search term "testing", for example.


Here are some more examples.  Assume a note contains the line of text:

These notes are just for testing.

Each of these search queries would match this note by the highlighted terms:

• "test note" : These notes are just for testing.
• "test notr" : These notes are just for testing.
• "I am not testing" : These notes are just for testing.

i.e. the same document terms were matched by each query, however in some cases stemming or spelling correction was required to get the match.

Another example: consider a note containing this line of text:

My Christmas list

With an explicit synonym defined to expand "xmas" as "christmas", a search for "xmas" would match the document on the term "christmas":

• "xmas" : My Christmas list

Using the character range fetching feature for matching search terms gives you the information needed to highlight or find search terms in your documents.  This is demonstrated in Locayta Notes 2.0 (free in the App Store).  The screenshots above are from Locayta Notes, demonstrating the examples.

Locayta Notes 2.0

Locayta Notes on iPad

One of my primary projects for Locayta has been the development of the Locayta Search Mobile full text search library for iOS.  As part of that work I built a note taking / text editing app for iPad/iPhone that helped us show off embedded full text search on mobile devices. Recently I got the chance to add some significant functional enhancements to this app, which has now been released: Locayta Notes 2.0.


The biggest feature in Locayta Notes 2.0 is integration with Dropbox which will automatically sync all your notes across all your iOS devices.  Notes will also be accessible as plain text files in Dropbox on your linked computers. This feature has been extremely handy for me personally, which made Locayta Notes become my primary note taking app on my iPad & iPhone.


But that's not all, here's the full list of features in Locayta Notes 2.0:


 • Instantly search the contents of all notes using Locayta's embedded full text search engine, Locayta Search Mobile. Includes smart search features such as automatic spell correction, synonyms, stemming and context snippets.


 • Dropbox syncing to automatically sync notes between all your iPads, iPhones and computers.

Locayta Notes on iPhone

 • Customise the text colour, size & font per note. Change the default text style.


 • Full support for printing notes with AirPrint (iOS 4.2+).


 • Full iOS 4.0 multitasking. Search index updates and Dropbox syncing tasks will complete in the background if the app is closed.


 • Share notes via email without leaving the app.


 • Universal app for both iPad and iPhone.


 • Free and ad-free!

The last "feature" is important. Locayta Notes is and will remain free, as it helps Locayta promote the Locayta Search Mobile full text search library on iOS devices.


Get Locayta Search Mobile here. It is free to download and develop with.


btw, Locayta Notes 1.0 was open sourced on github, as a resource for Locayta Search Mobile developers.

Locayta Notes shows off iOS full text search

Locayta Notes

This week at Locayta we released an iPad/iPhone (universal) app to demonstrate the Locayta Search Mobile full text search library for iOS. Locayta Notes is a free iPad/iPhone note taking app which obviously offers full text search of the contents of all notes. Search is updated in real time as notes are being written or modified. It includes all the fancy search features such as word stemming, automatic spell correction, user defined synonyms and various sorting options.

But that's not all! Locayta has also released the full source code for Locayta Notes under an open source license. The source code should be a very useful resource for Locayta Search Mobile developers. All that is needed to build the app is the Locayta Search Mobile SDK, a free download from Locayta (currently in beta).

Finally, I will be doing a talk and demo of Locayta Search Mobile at this month's Melbourne CocoaHeads meeting on Thursday. Hope to see you there if you can make it.

Looking for Beta testers for new iOS full text search engine library

At Locayta we have released a beta of our new full text search engine library for iPhone/iPad developers. I have been leading this project from the software engineering side and am looking for developers interested in beta testing this framework and offering some feedback.

To download the beta version, go to http://www.locayta.com/pages/new/ios-search-engine

Here is a quick blurb about the search engine library:

Locayta Seach for iOS is a port of Locayta's full text search engine library for the iOS platform.  The core library is pure C (with a bit of C++) and we have wrapped a higher level Objective-C API around it and produced a static library in a Framework bundle so that iPhone & iPad apps can provide fast local full text search.  The search engine provides "enterprise level" full text search using a probabilistic model of document terms, along with clever features to improve search success such as automatic spell correction (based on trigram analysis of terms) and word stemming.