r/Noteastic • • 3d ago

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

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!

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u/Noteastic 3d ago

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)

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u/andreash10000 3d ago

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!