Recently in our app, we have explored possible architecture changes to our internal notebook storage system which could allow us to enable humongous notebooks. Currently, our app only allows notebooks up to 250 pages, which I personally think is fine—it's not bad. However, I know that some people would rather have notebooks unbounded by technical constraints. I mean, lots of notebook apps allow unlimited pages in notebooks, and they seem to run just fine!
So after doing some thorough planning and rearchitecting, the notebook structure has been optimized to allow up to 10,000 pages. Do we recommend having 10,000-page notebooks? Definitely not, but it will be possible. I just wouldn't doubt that the app could crash or break at that point. These changes will be released very soon.
Hardware-Accelerated Graphics
We have also made recent pushes towards using hardware-accelerated graphics. Previously, our app only used software-based antialiasing, which was terribly slow and would throttle the app. This time, it is night and day. Older devices will now definitely be able to run the app, whereas previously it would be incredibly slow. The hardware MSAA patch will be included in an upcoming release.
Bug Fixes and Stability
There have also been some bug fixes and crash fixes pushed to the app. As of right now, crashes are seemingly rare—thank God! But I have been noticing them pop up every now and then, so the team is aware that crashes are something we definitely need to target. Our notebook architecture actually makes it work really well to avoid corruption with crashes, but nonetheless, crashes need to disappear completely.
Platform Updates
These new performance upgrades will be released very soon to iOS. Android is still in an experimental state but is showing good progress towards being released sooner!
Future Features
The reason I am making this blog post is that our fundamental engine—React Native—makes it possible to integrate so many features. We are definitely exploring OCR features, AI-enabled integrations, custom PDF templates, and more. Some of these features seem more feasible than others and will definitely be implemented in the near future.
It is kind of crazy to think that I built a note-taking app entirely in React Native (with lots of native modules, of course). This makes it easy to maintain the code and to build upon it much more easily. At the same time, it is not so crazy to say that I built it within React Native. React Native might get a bad rap sometimes for being slow and clunky, but in my honest opinion, it is not bad at all and can definitely run high-performance computing applications.
Standing Out from the Competition
Compared to our competitors, the timelines of them releasing stuff is actually incredibly slow compared to ours. I have experience in software engineering and app development, but being on the React Native foundation is a game changer for us. We are definitely looking like one of the best note-taking apps for only 6 bucks.
I really hope that our strides towards computational efficiency, affordability, and potential shine a light into edtech applications to realize how expensive they tend to make things. We are the outlier (which is why I think we deserve more recognition, LOL), and we are humbled to embrace that identity.
— Ramon