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Hey all,
I've been searching for techniques people use to make transparent controls. The problem with windows mobile is that windows always have the CLIPCHILDREN window style set. So you can't grab the contents of the parent window (in WM_ERASEBKGND for example) because it isn't there.
One technique would be to have the parent pass the handle of the background DC it uses to the child control but that involves having a memory DC around all the time. And if the child control is covering any sibling controls you'd be out of luck as well.
Another solution I've read about is to temporarily hide the child window so the parent window is forced to redraw the parts that would normally be obscured by the control. I personally do not like this approach. (the drawbacks are also discussed on some MS forum, i'm not allowed to post outside links yet, google for "Rounded Buttons : Does any one see any problems with this method" and you will find it)
So, there are ways to achieve what I'm looking for but they are far from optimal. Just wondering what everybody else is doing to achieve this.
The responses in that thread are pretty much spot on (funny to find I know over half the posters in that thread by reputation).
If you want to do this well, you really need to draw your own stuff, making a complete custom UI.
There is no proper way to do this in Windows Mobile (without runtime kernel patching, that is ).
Chainfire said:
The responses in that thread are pretty much spot on (funny to find I know over half the posters in that thread by reputation).
If you want to do this well, you really need to draw your own stuff, making a complete custom UI.
There is no proper way to do this in Windows Mobile (without runtime kernel patching, that is ).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What do you mean by "drawing your own stuff"? I am drawing everything myself now in all control i made using AlpheBlend() where needed. But that still doesn't resolve the background issue. Or are you referring to just drawing everything in a single WM_PAINT handler and only having one screen DC?
PegNosePete said:
What do you mean by "drawing your own stuff"? I am drawing everything myself now in all control i made using AlpheBlend() where needed. But that still doesn't resolve the background issue. Or are you referring to just drawing everything in a single WM_PAINT handler and only having one screen DC?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well the method I use in my own new UI's is indeed per form (excluding WinAPI controls like edit boxes and such) draw using only one DC.
The problem is that any 'windowed' control, the parent will not draw to the DC if a 'windowed' control overlaps. Due to CLIPCHILDREN all data drawn to that position is simply lost.
Now, handling WM_PAINT you can get the entire update region, which tells you which parts of your form have to be redrawn. You must use this information, because blitting the entire form is very slow!
In essence, to do this right you well end up faking most of the GDI system, including your own 'fake' child windows, invalidating and revalidating portions, calculating the intersections of your 'fake' invalidated regions of the screen with the update region you get in WM_PAINT and redrawing those parts.
There are several different strategies to go about this, one is to redraw on demand, another one is to use double buffering.
I personally mostly use the double buffering technique, as this easily provides every 'fake' control with a bitmap of it's own region. A child control can then alphablend using the parent's buffer as one of the alphablend sources.
You can of course combine this with keeping state information whether a child, grandchild, etc is using alpha / transparency and this with an algorithm deciding which control needs double buffering or can draw on-demand, which can give both speed and memory use advantages. In a lot of situations you can then suffice with only double buffering the 'top' component (form) and a select number of child components.
Of course two drawbacks of per-control double buffering are speed and memory use. You can eliminate the complete-form double buffer with some smart coding and calculating. This will give you a slight speed and memory advantage. Memory use is high because many of your controls will have a copy of their current state.
This can be as complicated, feature-filled, fast and efficient as you are willing to make it. The better you can design the code the better it will work, but it is not a trivial task. There are many ways to go at this, no one way is definitely better than the other ways. It depends on what your applications does with it's display, how simple you are drawing (are you making a simple white background, or a background based on images for example gradient?), which method is more efficient.
The other method is getting the update region and actually perform redrawing of those invalidated sections (instead of copying from buffer). I can tell you from experience that if you are using image backgrounds and alphablend calls, this will be _much_ slower than double buffering (if done right).
I know all of this probaby makes little sense, I'm not a hero with explaining things ... you really have to figure this out for yourself, I guess.
Other advantages of building your own UI system are that if you do it smartly and buffering, it is very easy to port to directdraw, and possibly even GL. But I must warn you, on far the most devices actually using directdraw for this stuff is not much faster, it is in fact hardly noticable. If you manage to make a GL port, that can especially on older HTC devices (pre-HD2) be much faster.
Hi all!
This is the PocketPC Version (Viewer) of PVD the very best program to organize your movies.
You can download the PC version from http://www.videodb.info/forum_en/.
My thoughts were: what is the best movie managing and cataloging software worth while in the movie store and searching for a title... or sitting in front of the TV and trying to remember what cool movie I could watch...
That, and enjoying to write software for my mobile phone, were the reasons for mobilePVD.
The software is published at PVD's home and at xda-developers place.
How it works
First of all, you have to get PVD and enter your movies. After that, make a XML export. This writes a file containing the movie information and a directory containing the pictures. Take both and copy them onto your device. I recommend to copy them onto the SD card in a sub directory PVD.
Download mobilePVD and install it on your device. When starting, you will have to select the XML file by clicking Menu->Open DB. Your can select other languages and other skins (if someone makes them ).
When going to a sublist in mobilePVD (i.e. viewing the movie details or selecting directories) and you want to get back, just slide with your finger over the list from left to right...
How to translate
In the program directory on the device is a sub directory called "Languages". Within you find the language files. I deployed English and German so far. To make own translations just copy a file to your desktop, open it with any text editor and translate. Please publish your translation on either forum, so I can build the next version with more supported languages.
How to skin
also in the program directory you will find a sub directory "Skin" with all the images I use. The images in "Manila WVGA" are for a resolution of 800x480. If you like you can take those bitmaps and change them to fit other resolutions and other colors. Don't forget to adapt the settings in the skin.ini file.
And please share your work with us and publish your skins on either forum. I will put them in the download section.
Have fun!
Obelix
Changelog:
2.1 Filtering is back and actors are grouped by first letter.
2.0 uses virtual mode to load more movies before reaching end of memory
1.1 out of memory problem fixed
1.0 Initial release
If you like my work, you can buy me a glass of wine
Version 2.1 of mobilePVD
I was hoping this allows you to enter movie info directly on mobilePVD. A desktop entry method is rather inconvenient. Would that be possible?
Does this also mean I have to re-export everytime I add movies? I took a look at the desktop version and it is very good. I can see why it is more practical using the desktop for entry of movie info.
Obelix_A, I have exported some movies and I must say it looks really nice on my HD2 although it is still not very stable, sometime I get an error that quits the program. It's only 3 movies so I am wondering if it may sow down when I have much more (2,800 in my collection). I would love to have Ratings and duration. It is missing after export. Thanks, this is great for movie lovers just like IMDB Mobile. I am just surprised that there is not much feedback yet.
I like it to a while to sort all my movies and still didnt get all the pictures from IMDB, hey ho did it manually, i need to change the skins to VGA how do i go about that im a bit of a noobie when it comes to skins?
The Actor list is huge and is close to impossible to scroll all the way down to "T" etc. Can we have a sort of filter to search actor names? trev666, use IMP plugin for movie posters. It's excellent.
@Kensong cheers mate
it works well after i restarted my phone, without changing anything from wvga to vga so im happy, thanks man not looking forward to adding all my movies though lol
Ok so i now have a HD2.... works great
great app, thanks for sharing it
here we go with Version 2.0 of mobilePVD. It now uses a virtual mode of the SliderList, what means, that it can load more movies before running out of memory.
If it runs on your devices as stable as it does on mine, we can start adding new features...
Really nice work mate
Really nice work
If you don't mind, i have share it HERE.
Please feel free to drop me a comment if you have anything else to add or in case i have missed anything. Cheers~
just released version 2.1
Filtering is back now and actors are grouped by first letter
I have installed v2.1 right now.
If I click on one of the "-" e.g. "- Actors" I get an exception:
"RemoveItem in virtual mode not allowed"
I am very interested in the development of mobilePVD since I would love to have my movie list on my phone (TD2).
Is mobilePVD a "one man show" or are you planing to involve more developers?
I will check this and fix it...
Yes mPVD is a one-man-show. you can ask my friend amirdt (here on XDA) if he wants to join the project...
Actually I wanted to ask if I could help you with mPVD
what exactly do you want to add?
the only thing I could imagine right now, is another way to read the data.
play around with PVD and the exported data (XML) and how fast you can read it.
currently I am reading with XmlReader.Read and evaluate the nodes. If you can read faster, this would help. other proposals welcome
Here is just a spontaneous list:
- WM 6.5.5 Problem with menus. The black background (when menues are displayed) does not cover the whole screen. Above there is some space visible. This is because the top bar (where the clock is) is smaller and the windows task bar is bigger in WM 6.5.5 (Sorry, cant supply a picture now how it looks like)
- Filter Actors: Add a search field also
- Add a clear button to the search fields to clear the field easily
- Add (Readd?) a ">" to the Movie list to open the movie details (I think the ">" was already there in an earlier version.
- Maybe make the UI somehow less sensitive. At least on my device it moves very quickly. E.g. I cant open the details view without moving the movie list view up or down accidentally.
- Add "Reset all Filters" menu item to the Filter Menu.
- Remove the search field in the detailed movie view to get more space to view the details.
- Maybe make the "letter lines" (+A, +B, ..) in the actors view a little bit thicker so that it is easier to open/close them with a larger thumb
- Maybe add the "letter lines" (+A, +B, ..) to the movie list also. Dont know, how large collections will be handled right now.
- Add more filters like rating (stars...)
- Add movie trailer support (e.g. prepare trailers on PC (conversion etc.) and copy them to device. Link from within mPVD to start media player on device)
- ...
So where can I get the source code to get started with it?
Regards
Al
ok, ok
I will prepare the sources and make it available for you via SVN, so we can handle developing both.
By now, the list won't move when clicking. I changed that... (but all other things from your list can/need to be done)
so, drop me a PM with your wished user name and password for SVN and give me little time to prepare...
alfish2000 now officially joined the development of mobilePVD. So let's welcome him
thanks for your support!
http://www.videodb.info/forum_en/index.php?topic=1755.40
Dear developers,
As we develop more and more apps, and as the Windows Phone marketplace hit 10,000 apps, I noticed an increasingly annoying trend: Abuse of panoramic hubs.
Yes, I understand that our latest greatest app may be our first important app, but as a user, the app is only one of my many tools in my toolbox, not the center of the universe.
And I understand that a lot of us want our app to be the hub above all other apps, however, let's face it - it's unlikely any third party hubs will be as important as Microsoft's hubs.
While the 6 major hubs in Windows Phone 7 presents some sort of extensibility, a lot of 3rd party hubs don't really do much except the function it is confined to.
A panoramic hub lets developers put different types of list controls in the same page, often for the purpose of showcasing the many depths of the app. However, some apps don't really have much depth, and the usage of panorama in this case feels like 40 pages for table of contents for a 20 page book.
If the app only displays one type of data, a pivot suits a lot better.
And panorama views usually come with a gigantic title, which takes up lots of precious screen space.
Sometimes I noticed that some developers will try to use a background in an app. However, if the app does not have a strong reason to have a background, e.g. dynamic content, I think it's a lot better to let users decide their background colors in their own theme settings. This can save us a lot of Photoshop time, and save users from a lot of text legibility problems.
Just something I'd like to share as both an app developer/designer and a user. Thanks for reading. Peace.
I agree with the fact that the panorama is overused where the pivot is in 99% of cases more appropriate.
I definitely don't agree with the background image thing. Two simple points: Brand Image and Individuality. From a developer standpoint you need something that sticks in users' brains - nothing does so more than product branding. And images are an integral part of that. Since a mobile device doesn't have room for giant logos, the best thing to do is move it to the background and let the text sit on top of it.
I agree that the developer should always offer a choice of background and ensure the text is fully legible in all - but Marketplace rules forbid text not to be legible anyway.
Second, for every application in the Marketplace there are 10 more identical in functionality. So why get the user to use your app over the other 10? Make it look better. And you can't make it look better when it's using the same colour scheme and layout.
pakkei said:
And panorama views usually come with a gigantic title, which takes up lots of precious screen space.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Modifying panorama's header template u can do whatever you want with the title (even delete!). Also, most important feature of panorama control is a nice looking slightly scrolling background image (that, I believe so, MS borrowed from Android's home screen).
Panorama != Hub
There is currently no way for a third-party developer to create a hub. Just because an app has a panorama view does not make it a hub.
I do agree though, the panorama view is overused.
I'd be interested if you could give an example of an app over using it as I really enjoy it when used well.
Purely from a developers perspective, I'm slightly worried that I may fall in the category of overuse.
emigrating said:
I do agree though, the panorama view is overused.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I disagree.
I think panorama apps are great. Instead of clicking and then having to go back you just swipe.
Best example for me was 1800pocketpc app which was a panorama/hub.
And then apps like facebook that are purely panorama are much easier to navigate cause you never need to reach for the back key
I love the panorama apps i have , its unique to our phones and what makes it great!
evolutionqy7 said:
I disagree.
I think panorama apps are great. Instead of clicking and then having to go back you just swipe.
Best example for me was 1800pocketpc app which was a panorama/hub.
And then apps like facebook that are purely panorama are much easier to navigate cause you never need to reach for the back key
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I mean that the Panorama is overused because the Pivot is a much neater way of displaying data imo. I think it separates it out nicely.(Pivot being the Outlook-style swiping to sections)
However, some apps do the panorama justice. Faebook, IMDb, etc. However 3rd party developers rarely use it right.
Sent from my OMNIA7 using Board Express
Don't get me wrong - I love the Panorama view, but some [a lot] apps do misuse it.
I have seen plenty of apps which rather than having a "settings" button to open a new view will create their settings page (and about page) as part of the panorama. That is, IMO, not how you should utilize Panorama.
The same goes for apps where you may search for something to add to your "library", placing the search page on your panorama is wrong. It doesn't belong there.
A panorama should, again IMO, be used to display information that belongs together.
Example. You have a DVD collection app; The app is more than welcome to use a panorama as the main page, perhaps it can display "all", "new" and "favorites" on different pages of the panorama. That's all fine. However, adding more pages to display settings, about, search, changelogs etc just gives an awful UX. Add settings/about/changelog as a pivot on it's own page, accessible by a settings button. Add search as a button, either opening a completely new page or an popping up an overlay on the panorama.
Interesting point, and am inclined to agree Panarama views shouldn't be padded with search and settings screens. After all, doesn't the phone sport a physical search button that would be more consistent and allow you to combine your app settings within the phones' main settings for added convenience?
Sent from my HD7 T9292 using XDA Windows Phone 7 App
emigrating said:
A panorama should, again IMO, be used to display information that belongs together.
Example. You have a DVD collection app; The app is more than welcome to use a panorama as the main page, perhaps it can display "all", "new" and "favorites" on different pages of the panorama. That's all fine. However, adding more pages to display settings, about, search, changelogs etc just gives an awful UX. Add settings/about/changelog as a pivot on it's own page, accessible by a settings button. Add search as a button, either opening a completely new page or an popping up an overlay on the panorama.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The above is actually incorrect. A pivot should be used when the data of all screens are based on the same underlying data source. Outlook is the perfecet example, as you have all, new, unread which is just filters or views based on the same source: your inbox. The above where you have DVDs should be a pivot as well, since all, new and favorite are based on the single source of your DVD collection.
This is actually where people are making common mistakes with the use of a Panorama control, when it should really be a pivot control. Most users really won't know the difference between the two controls, but developers should to keep the user experience consistent across applications.
The use of a Panorama for a main screen to offer different sections of you applications is a good idea. Be careful to not have too many though. Once you have more than 4-5 sections in a Panorama, the user has the ability to get lost. And remember unlike pivots, the header of each Panorama is seperate from the others (a pivot combines them giving a better hint of the other pages).
Some things to ponder would be in a multi-page settings setup should you use a pivot or a panorama? Since its really not based on data, it should be a Panorama, but a pivot might give a better user experience.
spokanedj said:
The above is actually incorrect. A pivot should be used when the data of all screens are based on the same underlying data source. Outlook is the perfecet example, as you have all, new, unread which is just filters or views based on the same source: your inbox. The above where you have DVDs should be a pivot as well, since all, new and favorite are based on the single source of your DVD collection.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I wouldn't say it's incorrect. A pivot may have been a better choice, but it was based on an existing app I have installed where the panorama view isn't completely wrong.
I also believe your argument falls when we step into movie details - this should clearly be displayed as a panorama even though it's based on the same data.
spokanedj said:
Some things to ponder would be in a multi-page settings setup should you use a pivot or a panorama? Since its really not based on data, it should be a Panorama, but a pivot might give a better user experience.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
A settings page should, IMO, always be a pivot (if more than one screen is really necessary - often it is better to have a scrollable listview instead). That said, if you manage to keep your settings on a single page, using a panorama view would still work to display the about/support/etc screens.
emigrating said:
I wouldn't say it's incorrect. A pivot may have been a better choice, but it was based on an existing app I have installed where the panorama view isn't completely wrong.
I also believe your argument falls when we step into movie details - this should clearly be displayed as a panorama even though it's based on the same data.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Here is a video from MS that clarifies this. Pivots should be used when displaying different views or filters or data. For the Movie details if you look at the "bad pano" example, around 11:00 it explains why you woulnd't want to do that. Just because another app is using it, doesn't mean you should.
http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/jaime+rodriguez/windows-phone-design-days-pivot-and-pano
spokanedj said:
Here is a video from MS that clarifies this. Pivots should be used when displaying different views or filters or data. For the Movie details if you look at the "bad pano" example, around 11:00 it explains why you woulnd't want to do that. Just because another app is using it, doesn't mean you should.
http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/jaime+rodriguez/windows-phone-design-days-pivot-and-pano
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
?
I pretty much agreed with you that it I presented a bad example. That said, it still works and was nowhere near as bad as many of the apps in the marketplace today.
As for movie details, let's just agree to disagree. Displaying movie details (as opposed to movie listings as discussed above) in a pivot is somewhat counter intuitive and gives a far worse UX than a panorama - I know, I've tried (and had it useability tested by the actual target audience).
Hi,
I physically own some technical books, mostly on engineering. Usually, I scan some chapters and sometimes I digitize them into PDF for simplistic reasons: To avoid carrying them. Later, I can skim through them on my old good Nexus 4 with ebookdroid using auto crop. However, screen size is not enough to be able to view a complete page, which is usually needed when there are many equations referenced from page top to bottom.
The scanned technical textbooks are hard to be recreated using OCR-able, well-defined and optimized PDFs. If you discount lately published specific and rare text - ebooks, the publication industry should re-create mobile PDF version of considerably older textbooks; current ebook-ized versions are essentially highly compressed images of each page, have serialized and put in a PDF container.
The experience with these books requires a readable and detailed full-page view. As an additional example, the screen should also be able to produce very small symbols like indices placed below to the mathematical equations. Therefore, a tablet to be used efficiently with scanned textbooks should have at least provide following features:
* Readable full page view (high res screen of N7-2013 needs to be tested).
* Auto crop functionality for scanned PDFs. (ebook droid handles this efficiently)
* Small letter readability. (high res screen of N7-2013 needs to be tested)
The Nexus 7 particularly looks promising on these features I'd like to learn about the experiences if you had with Nexus 7 (2013) under similar circumstances. I can share a few pages of my scanned book chapters for you to test if you'd require.
I use mine (among other things) for Manga, which tend to have many small details and it's working quite well. Send me some of your scanned pages if you want and i will test drive them on my N7.
Hello, I often hear that EveryNote is the best note taking app. What is the difference between it and S Note, Lecture Note?
S Note can only sync between Samsung devices, and the old&new versions aren't compatible with one another. Evernote files can be accessed on any device that supports Evernote. Never used Lecture Note, so can't speak for that.
There's a free trial of lecturenotes. It's best to try it and see for yourself since we all have different needs when it comes to software. Then you can compare the three yourself.
Since I find the cross platform treatment of hand written notes lacking in evernote I use lecturenotes and sync exported pdf files via dropsync to dropbox. Evernote is okay in my opinion but not as feature rich when it comes to taking hand written notes.
When it's all said and done, none of the three are perfect and I personally find that I wish for a feature or two from the others.
Sent from my SM-P900 using Tapatalk
ShadowLea said:
S Note can only sync between Samsung devices, and the old&new versions aren't compatible with one another. Evernote files can be accessed on any device that supports Evernote. Never used Lecture Note, so can't speak for that.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The newer versions of s note can indeed sync with evernote. This is how I got one year of premium evernote services.
diehardbattery said:
The newer versions of s note can indeed sync with evernote. This is how I got one year of premium evernote services.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Initially when I purchased the Note Pro the notes that I'd take in S-Note and sync with Evernote were practically useless to me on my Mac/PC. Has this changed? They'd be saved in a proprietary format or an image file that was too small physically to be useful to read on my high res screens. PDF export was an option but with the limited page size support in S-Note I found myself looking elsewhere in a hurry for a note taking tool that truly mimics a letter sized note pad.
I bought a program a while back that I can comment on. It's called Handrite note Notepad Pro. By NC Corp. Needed it before I owned a device with SNote built in. I used to use my finger..... But now with my pen, I like it even more. But I already bought it so I didn't have to decide if I wanted it over the other OP ideas and other suggestions from muzzy996. It syncs using Dropbox through an additional program that is called Open Sync and that is free. Works well. But the handwriting Pro is cool and features some neat options. Might not be everyone's cup of tea with how it replaces text as you write but most things are adjustable.
Microsoft’s Onenote beta is very good. Handwriting is good, syncs with PC, you can search handwritten notes on computer (but not on tablet).
muzzy996 said:
Initially when I purchased the Note Pro the notes that I'd take in S-Note and sync with Evernote were practically useless to me on my Mac/PC. Has this changed? They'd be saved in a proprietary format or an image file that was too small physically to be useful to read on my high res screens. PDF export was an option but with the limited page size support in S-Note I found myself looking elsewhere in a hurry for a note taking tool that truly mimics a letter sized note pad.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I wasn't aware of the size issue. I had some old notes that transferred over and indeed they are not full size. I don't know if that's just for the screen, maybe they would print out on normal size paper? Sorry I couldn't be more helpful. ...
No problem. Yeah S-Note simply doesn't work for me in terms of page setup options. It's fine for simple note taking but sometimes I prefer being able to generate a set of notes with a specific page setup in mind such as a letter sized page in a particular orientation with a particular layout of lines/grids as a background.
Sent from my SM-P900 using Tapatalk
How is Google Keep compared with Everynote, S Note and Lecture Note?
Rather simplistic compared to the others. I haven't revisited it in months but as far as I know there's no active stylus support in Google keep.
Sent from my SM-P900 using Tapatalk
For me Everynote and Google keep are like a collection of sticky notes. Ln and Snote are more like a collection of notebooks with more pages and options to manage large notebooks. Those apps are for completely different use cases with Ln being focused on students and many notebooks.
{Diemex} said:
For me Everynote and Google keep are like a collection of sticky notes. Ln and Snote are more like a collection of notebooks with more pages and options to manage large notebooks. Those apps are for completely different use cases with Ln being focused on students and many notebooks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Indeed.
Lecturenotes has quite a bit of features though it doesn't always do a good job of providing them in a user friendly way. As an example, pen colors and line thicknesses can be shown in a toolbox on screen but for everything else one must drill down through menus. It would be nice if toolboxes were available for other functions as well in that software.
Its definitely more powerful than the others though even if there are limitations in some respects. An example of the power of lecturenotes is the ability to work on multiple layers (i think the limit is 3) which can be helpful when one is working with graphical elements vs writing/text. An example of limitations in Lecturenote is whereas in SNote when an image is pasted into a note it always remains as an editable image (you can click on it to move it and resize it), in lecturenotes that isn't necessarily the case. In lecturenotes if you want to change the size or location of a pasted image on your page you must select the image using the marquee tool and then expanding the image at that point comes with loss in clarity as it is scaled up. Overall the power of lecturenotes is great though.
diehardbattery said:
I wasn't aware of the size issue. I had some old notes that transferred over and indeed they are not full size. I don't know if that's just for the screen, maybe they would print out on normal size paper? Sorry I couldn't be more helpful. ...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What is the page size issue in S-Note?
If you import s-note files into evernote they are physically smaller.. in other words you can't use the s-pen to edit in evernote because the size of the note is too small and does not take up the entire screen like in s-note.
It goes beyond that for me. If all one ever wants is to work within the confines of the Samsung Galaxy Note ecosystem everything is good when it comes to S-note. However, if the need is to take notes on predefined page sizes for printing there is no way to do so. All one has in terms of page types is landscape or portrait orientation with a variety of backgrounds and form types, there is no way to control paper size. These do not print well at US Letter or other page types. I bought this larger note because it's screen is closer in size to a real letter page and yet the applications baked in don't support that.
The is why I use lecturenotes. I have complete freedom to do custom sizes for printing.
muzzy996 said:
It goes beyond that for me. If all one ever wants is to work within the confines of the Samsung Galaxy Note ecosystem everything is good when it comes to S-note. However, if the need is to take notes on predefined page sizes for printing there is no way to do so. All one has in terms of page types is landscape or portrait orientation with a variety of backgrounds and form types, there is no way to control paper size. These do not print well at US Letter or other page types. I bought this larger note because it's screen is closer in size to a real letter page and yet the applications baked in don't support that.
The is why I use lecturenotes. I have complete freedom to do custom sizes for printing.
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Do you mean electronically speaking, the notes are fine. However, they do not print well on papers? How about saving/printing them in pdf format and then send the file to the printer? I use A4 size notes as notes for my work. I am considering to write notes electronically on the Note PRO 12.2. Of course, I do hope to be able to print it out like a A4 size note. Is this possible? If not, from your post, it seems that lecturenotes can do it.
petercohen said:
Do you mean electronically speaking, the notes are fine. However, they do not print well on papers? How about saving/printing them in pdf format and then send the file to the printer? I use A4 size notes as notes for my work. I am considering to write notes electronically on the Note PRO 12.2. Of course, I do hope to be able to print it out like a A4 size note. Is this possible? If not, from your post, it seems that lecturenotes can do it.
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On a standard yellow notepad in US Letter size there are 28 lines available to write on. In S-Note if one creates a notebook using the standard lined page in portrait orientation there are only 18 lines available. To fix this one has to avoid using lines completely by using a blank portrait template. Then what you do is go into the notebook, click the gear icon and change the background, click the upper left box for blank white page, then hit pattern, then pick the second from the right box on the top row.
Once this is all done you have a page that approximates a standard yellow pad.
EXCEPT if you print this thing, it doesn't fill the entire width of an A4 or Letter sheet. When printed to fit on letter, you lose 1.7 inches of width of the page. When printed to fit on A4 you lose 1 inch of width. Doesn't sound like much but on average you're losing 20% of available space on a page.
Its all a bit convoluted and honestly I rather not deal with the BS of it all and I opt to go to LectureNotes instead. With it, I'm able to set up all aspects of a notebook at the time of its creation. Additionally I can place items on different layers to move things around if I wish. The only thing I missin Lecturenotes is how S-Note handles images that are pasted in. In S-Note these pasted images remain as editable objects allowing you to move them and scale them about as you please. In LectureNotes you need to be careful of where you place images because they no longer are treated like smart objects.
Thanks. By losing certain inches of width of the page during printing, do you mean those parts are being cut off? Isn't is possible to scale down the entire page to make printing of everything possible?
If I just draw images, than there should not be a problem in LectureNotes? So, there is no perfect app. I don't want to choose an app, make a lot of things using it. Then, later find that there are some limitations and switch to another app while losing the stuffs I create using the first chosen app.
There DEFINITELY is no perfect app.
See the attachment below. Notice the white vertical strip. That white strip you'll never be able to write in . . . the darkened corners of the notepad image is the absolute corners on the tablet itself when you zoom/pan around in the notepad.
Edit: To clarify, the image attached is what a printed page would look like on US Letter when a page layout of portrait is selected in S-note and the user fills the entire page with notes (simulated by me drawing at the extreme corners). The print is maximized to the long side of the page.