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What do you think about "startup notes"?

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What do you think about "startup notes"?

For those who don't know, Luminotes has the concept of "startup notes", which are notes that show up when you load or switch to a particular notebook. You can flag a note as a startup note via the options tab. Those notes that you don't flag as startup notes are completely hidden when you load a notebook, and the only way to bring them up is by following a link or performing a search.

This distinction between startup and non-startup notes has, I think, proved to be an unnecessary source of confusion for new Luminotes users. Even people who have used Luminotes for a while have expressed an interest in seeing all of their notes at once and not just the notes they've flagged to show on startup.

So this brings me to a big potential change. How would you, as a Luminotes user, feel if I completely got rid of the concept of startup notes? In its place, I would essentially make all notes show up when you load your notebook. In other words, all notes would always be startup notes. There would be no way to hide a note as there is now.

This proposed change might be most controversial for people with huge notebooks containing many hundreds of notes. Do you really want to see all of your notes at once? Would you care if you did? Would it seal the deal if I threw in the ability to reorder your notes? Would it make more sense if I added the ability to separate your notes into sections or add tags/labels?

Anyway, what do you think?

Dan


Personally, I don't think it's necessary to get rid of the concept entirely, as - like you say - it might be useful when a notebook becomes large.

However, I'd prefer startup notes to go completely, rather than the current situation to remain, as I I like to see all the text in my - relatively small - notebooks without having to remember to select a checkbox.

Scott

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I'm one of the people who was initially confused by this! Personally I'd be quite happy if it was taken out and instead all notes were displayed on startup - although I'd prefer it if they were 'minimised' initially like Google Notebook does, with a '+' next to the title to expand to the full note, otherwise there's potentially a lot of scrolling necessary to find the note you're after.

If it is useful for some people, maybe the startup notes functionality could be enabled/disabled on a per-user basis via an option somewhere (with the default being that it's disabled)?

Matt
I like startup notes; but maybe the concept can be hidden by default for users.  In other words, make the default for notes to appear at startup; then people can hide them when they want to. That way, people who aren't aware of startup notes don't automatically have to use them, but they're useful once people are ready to start trying them out.

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I too like the startup notes. Makes it simple to highlight the important stuff for folks. Please don't kill the feature; do as aquafire says (if anything).

Also, you could make a config option, but that doesn't help online users.

I do think the small icon for expanding the tree on the right could be more attention getting though. Larger icon/ diff colour, or preceded by some text, whatever.

Still loving it though!

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Don't kill the start-up notes-- I just figured out how to use them!  I use the offline version and when I created a new notebook, start-up notes were off by default.  I had to purposely select the options tab to set a start-up note.

I guess I don't understand why other users are having difficulty viewing all their notes.  For me, the start-up note function adds a really useful level of hierarchy and organization to my notebooks.  I would miss it if the function were removed.

​Startup notes

Well, this is exactly why I posted this question here instead of just killing the startup notes feature without public discussion first. :) I had a feeling that some people would be relying on it.

To review, when you flag a note as a "startup note", that does two things. First, it makes the note itself show up on startup. Second, it makes a link to the note show up in the note tree on the right side of the page.

So of those of you who like the startup notes (aquafire, gemlog, puritangurl), let me ask you this: Which of these two aspects of the feature is it that you really like for startup notes? Is it the showing the note on startup? Or is it the hierarchical link in the note tree in the right? Or do you really rely on both?

I ask because it would be possible to, for instance, maintain the hierarchical note tree as it is now while still making all notes display in the center of the page when you first load your notebook. The benefit to this is that you could re-order your notes as you like, and that order would "stick" the next time you load your notebook.

As things stand now, I can definitely add a note reordering feature. But if you reorder your non-startup notes, then the next time you load your notebook, those notes won't be displayed at all. And then when you do load them (by clicking links, etc), they will be displayed in the order you load them rather than any previous ordering you set up.

gemlog, I agree that the little triangle arrows need to be bigger and/or easier to click.

Dan

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I like both the features you ask about, because I tend to make a TOC (which makes sense to have open on init) and because you'd have a really junky TOC, if you included every little note; the hierarchy on the right allows one to browse all notes.

Reordering is a non-issue for me. I think it's easy enough to force ordering with a TOC or by naming convention (e.g. 01 Note I want first, 02 A note I want second...).

Certainly, I wouldn't want a zillion notes opened up by default -- even minimized. Postgresql can hold a lot of records! :-) Seriously though, one could implement Matt's desire with a 'show all notes' icon/link on the right, if it was that popular a request.

Besides, the 'options' drop-down is also a good location to place later candy like styling options etc. via css e.g. diff bg or icon or...

I think luminotes is very well thought out. My users don't like to have many options -- that's why I chose it in the end. I've installed a lot of wikis over the years.

The only thing to deal with that I can see is orphaned notes. It's too easy for a user to create an orphaned note. I'm guessing that's what led you (Matt) to make your post.

I'd be fine with getting rid of the 'click in the blank area and start typing' feature. I may be alone in that, but it would cure most orphans. Another idea (that would possibly cure Matt's discomfort and keep the feature) would be to *automatically* make such orphaned notes as show on start-up. Best of both worlds.

The other fix would be to track refs to notes and warn of deleting the note (or promoting it to always show) if that last ref is deleted.

The first fix is a one-liner (ish) either way. The second is prolly some work, because I don't think I saw such tracking when I browsed the table the other day. I could easily be wrong though.

Early days still, all good discussion anyhow :-)

​Startup notes

gemlog: First of all, thanks for your detailed feedback. :)

In the interests of seeing what it would be like, I hacked a development version of Luminotes on my own machine to make all notes into startup notes, and then opened my largest notebook. It took quite a white to load, and did seem like it would be difficult to navigate even though I could just click on links to automatically scroll to the various notes. So perhaps my initial plan of just making all notes act like startup notes is a bit much.

I would like to add a way to display / search for orphaned notes. I've seen that feature in a few other wikis and generally liked it. Although perhaps it's even better to discourage the creation of orphaned notes to begin with, as you suggest.

I think that making newly created orphaned notes show on startup could be a good solution, but it might confuse users even more. I can see a new Luminotes user being somewhat perplexed when only half the notes they created show up the next time they load their notebook, simply because half were created as orphans and the other half via links.

Anyway, I think what this discussion has proven if nothing else is that this is a complex issue that will require a very well thought out solution. :)

Dan

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I honestly hadn't thought about that objection. Good catch.

OK, I have seen other cases where, even though you are minimizing the impact of confusion to fewer users, hey! there are still *some* users who will be confused, because they don't understand what is going on.

The way to get to those users who may become confused is to distinguish the note somehow when it's promoted automatically. Because it *is* different, it should be shown to be different; you could make it an 'Orange Alert' as you do when reverting to a former version and make it stand out that way. Or just a large, coloured link to the right of the title, like "Why is this note showing automatically?"

In either case (or some other, better idea), the link would lead to information *educating* those users as to just what is going on and explaining orphaned links and why they are Evil :-)

Google apps does this for some things, so it's not an idea original to me. I just think it's a good solution here.

Thanks for taking the time to do the quick hack and test the performance of 'open all'. I was quite curious about that.

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