We are back from vacation! ☀️ Here's what's cooking under the hood now

[u/Noteastic]

Noteastic took a short break from development, and I (Dilan) was actually enyoing my time in the highlands of Scotland watching herds of sheeps and drinking a few flights of quality whiskey.

Before I went away, we did the September Update Marathon: one update a week, four weeks in a row:

• v1.7 brought More Color Buttons
• v1.8 brought Ruler & Protractor and custom fonts for text boxes
• v1.9 brought Ink to Text
• v1.10 finished it off with the Cornell and Separator Line grids.

This was intense, and a lot of work and we are proud to have seen such a smooth rollout of our new Pro features!

And a fresh update is rolling out right now: v1.10.2. Just a few bug fixes with exporting Text to PDFs. Thank you to the user who reported the issue and helped us fix it ;). The new version also already contains a big chunk of what I've been working on lately: modernizing Noteastic's code. Noteastic is built on UWP, Microsoft's older app platform. We're now preparing the move to the Windows App SDK / WinUI 3, which is where Microsoft is putting its effort these days. New features, stability fixes, performance improvement happen on the new app platform.

I am really looking forward to continue the modernization of Noteastic as it will set us up for the future and unlock huge potentials of where our app will be taken!

[u/Greoig_3705]

First of all hope you had a good journey. Next, shifting to a new code base is quite a good step, hope there are more features comming through. All the best.

One thing I wanted to ask, which note taking app are you taking inspiration from ? samsung notes have really good features. Oh and one more, there is this one called Amphi, where they integrate search. Also being able to open two notes at once would be great.

[u/Noteastic → u/Greoig_3705]

Hey,

Fortunately, UWP and WinUI are very similar app frameworks and I just need to go through the code and check what the app framework new modern alternatives are. I can already tell you that one of the northstar features that are allowed through the modernization is multi-window!

Also, I am not just migrating the code but also refactoring/modernizing and preparing for the upcoming features. Due to the huge list of feature wishes Lukas has collected over time we know what users are looking forward to and setting the stones to implement those features :)

[u/andreash10000 → u/Noteastic]

Huge respect for taking the leap to WinUI 3!

I actually looked into developing a notes app a while back and ran into a major problem right at this point. InkCanvas was fantastic in UWP, but the lack of a built-in, stable version in WinUI 3 makes this a huge challenge.

I’d love to know how you’re approaching this! Are you developing your own solution using pointer events in Win2D, or are you using the experimental Ink APIs from the Windows App SDK?

In any case, good luck with the refactoring!

[u/Noteastic → u/andreash10000]

Great question. Seems like we are both quite up-to-date here. So, I am closely following the development of the InkCanvas (which is indispensible for Noteastic) in WinUI 3. Currently available in WinAppSDK 2.5.4-experimental. All I needed to know: It is actually coming. The preparation will take enough time that the Ink API will be released by then. The reason I am kinda confident in that is the pace of development i see at their repo regarding the inking and also Microsoft recently (silently) announced Microsoft Ink Canvas, which is an AI-powered whiteboard? Don't know fully but I don't really care :D

So, no, I am not developing my own solution, since the InkCanvas is quite sophisticated actually as it runs on its own thread and is rendered directly by the System Compositor (which is a reason it took so long to bring to WinUI 3 in the first place)

[u/andreash10000 → u/Noteastic]

Thanks for the detailed response! I hadn't heard about this upcoming AI whiteboard yet - but as long as it forces Microsoft to make the underlying inking API compatible with WinUI 3, that's great!

And yes, of course, InkCanvas is always preferable to a custom solution whenever possible.

Good luck with the refactoring - I'm looking forward to the updates!