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by jjoonathan 1429 days ago
Snap & Sketch is my core workflow (it's by far the fastest way to get information from meat space into notes), and the best app I've found so far to facilitate this is GoodNotes. It has three critical features:

1. Native snap & sketch support (no fussing with embedding every time you want to create/edit, which is all the time for me)

2. Stores notes as folders-of-PDF in dropbox, not proprietary format locked behind a subscription.

3. Fast OCR search (I'd happily swap this for good native text editing, but having some smooth search mechanism is very important and many graphical apps don't.)

GoodNotes has plenty of weaknesses -- the drawing tools are primitive, the desktop text editing story is almost nonexistent, it's tied to the mac ecosystem -- so I have been delighted to see the explosion of good Markdown tooling which is strong in these other areas, and I have been hoping that one of them would be good enough at snap & sketch that I could jump. Obsidian.md+excalidraw comes dangerously close to challenging GoodNotes, but my brief trial on an iPad involved too much fussing around to make the snap & sketch workflow happen, so I don't think I'll jump quite yet.

Just including my thoughts for anyone else out there approaching notes from the Snap & Sketch angle.
1 comments
cush 1429 days ago
What is Snap & Sketch? Google's turning up nothing
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jjoonathan 1429 days ago
Taking a picture and drawing on it. Yeah, I should have clarified that it wasn't a proper noun.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/iuo9vjmb76d8kmx/8360%20Low%20Band....

Here's an example to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses. The biggest weakness is that it doesn't support prose very well, so it doesn't double as a blog post or as a full lab notebook that can communicate the story of what is happening to someone who doesn't already know. The strength is in the sheer amount of stuff I am able to document with extremely little effort: physical layouts, circuit structure, instrument setups, probe configurations, and results across a bunch of devices ranging from the 68000 era through x86 and ARM. Consider the number of diagrams I didn't have to make, the number of screenshots I didn't have to schlep, the number of measurements I didn't have to export, import, format, and describe. I just point my iPad, tap, and scribble.

Making a proper lab notebook for this little repair exercise would have doubled the timeline. In academia, the need to communicate would have justified the time investment. For someone who just needed to generate a 2GHz pulse modulated clock and had a broken signal generator, quick & dirty won the day.

Needless to say, I'd like to have the best of both worlds, but at the moment I regularly put up with the weaknesses of snap & sketch because its strengths are so important to me.

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