Dan Bricklin takes on iPhone Note Taking

Dan Bricklin of VisiCalc fame is taking on the smartphone (and iPod Touch) market with his take on finger written note taking. The app is called–what else–but “Dan Bricklin’s Note Taker App.”

Dan has a write up here on the app on his blog. You can download the app from iTunes by searching for “Note Taker” or “Dan Bricklin.” Either will work. There’s a free and a $1.99 version. An Android version will be available later.

OK, so what does the app do? Finger writing, of course. Here’s the basic idea: Let’s say you want to quickly jot down a phone number or a map or shopping list or whatever. Using the built in note taking application from Apple is OK, but it’s very keyboard centric and requires a lot of attention. This app gets around all of that by focusing on finger writing.

The writing process is fairly straightforward. You write in big letters/etc on the screen and then in the background anything that you write appears. There are plenty of buttons to keep the writing process simple and keep your attention on what you’re writing rather than what mistakes you might be making.

My main issue with the current implementation is that it seems like it’s a bit difficult to randomly jump into a page and add something, but that just might be my current understanding of how it works. (I’ve only been using the app for a couple hours today.)

So what rating would I give Dan’s new app? My initial reaction: 4 1/2 out of 5 stars. You will need to walk through the built-in tutorial and there’s even a YouTube video that you can follow along with too. After a week or so of using the app I’ll rethink this score. I’m using the free version right now and am on the edge of actually purchasing the app.

So here are a couple of suggestions I have for Dan’s next version (in no particular order):

1. Inserting spaces would be nice. The detail area is fine, but it would be nice to be able to insert spaces around the fixed-sized box. Press and hold would be workable, but I imagine some other multi-touch gesture would work too.

2. While talking gestures, I imagine scratch out and the like would be reasonable additions to the application too.

3. Might zoom fit somewhere? I think it would/should.

4. What about writing on or annotating photos? It seems like you might be at a store or something and want to take a quick photo, annotate it, share it with someone, and so forth.

5. There’s no handwriting recognition, but then again who really needs it?

6. I seem to leave undo trails all over the place unless I really concentrate. Maybe there’s something that can be done to mitigate this.

7. Might Buzz Bruggeman from ActiveWords have something here that could be leveraged in terms of auto-inserting or converting text? Seems possible.

8. If you take lots of notes, one thing you’ll probably find is that there’s plenty of little stuff that you need for short periods of time. Some kind of page ordering algorithm/option that helps to keep the last accessed or last used item at the top of the pages might be useful here.

Finally, here is one tip I’ve picked up while using the program: Try writing large. Otherwise the text just gets too small in the “background.”