Version 8.0
Version 8.0 (released in August 2020) introduced vertical scrolling to the Noteshelf. We had been waiting a long time for this. To change the scrolling direction from within your workspace, go to Settings > Scrolling. On the right (when your pages are zoomed out), you get a fast scrolling bar to navigate through your documents faster. It navigates through pages, not page sections (as you do with your finger). There is a gap between pages, so your handwriting can’t overlap across them. Your lasso tool also can’t move items across pages. You have to cut & paste your notes between pages, which is uncomfortable, let’s hope they can fix that for us in the future.
Our Noteshelf developers continue to improve the handwriting experience in the app. The lag we used to experience when handwriting Noteshelf has virtually disappeared over the last couple of months. We hope they have finally managed to permanently fix this bug.Â
You can now restore pages you delete from your notebooks. Most applications can restore notebooks you delete, but not individual pages. In Noteshelf, you can restore deleted pages.
Version 8.1
Version 8.1 came through in September 2020. They added the ability to rotate handwritten notes using the lasso tool. You can rotate your notes without resizing them. It’s best to rotate and resize sections independently. In this update, they also added Unsplash for stock images. It is awesome that we can access stock images without leaving the app.
We can now long-press our documents on the shelf to preview what they have. This is very useful, especially when you have similar looking notebooks in the app. Let’s hope in the future we’ll be able to have notebooks without covers, so we can at least see the first pages from our shelf. In December 2020, they added digital planners for 2021.
Version 8.2
In January 2021, we got the version 8.2 update. This one was exciting! Noteshelf replaced its fixed pen sizes with a pen slider that lets you get all the thicknesses in between the fixed ones. You still get the fixed sizes on the slider, so they’ve kept their old users happy. This makes Noteshelf the first note-taking app to support both fixed and variable pen sizes. They have also changed the colour palette to make its colour display paged. It sort of looks modern now.
Your favourites toolbar is now smaller and mobile, maybe a bit too small. You can turn it on/off and move it around the page to the four edges of the screen. You can easily customise your favourite tools and even delete them. Noteshelf improved its pen tool customisation options to make them modern and user-friendly, easy to use and intuitive.Â
Version 8.3
We are currently on version 8.3 of Noteshelf. We got its first version in February this year and it let us create quick notes with a single tap. Simply tap the plus icon, on the shelf, labelled Quick Create Note. It’s an odd name. Still, the ability to create notes with one tap is a must-have in a note-taking app. But this pumpkin yellow page colour, though, makes my eyes hurt!
Since there is no way to set our default paper template for quick notes, our developers need to pick a more neutral page colour (white, beige). We’ve tried to justify this or try to understand why they chose this colour, there is simply no excuse. This is unacceptable. The lines on the page template are difficult to see. Staring at this page for ten minutes is either going to frustrate you or give you a headache, if not both.
You can now manually sort your notebooks on the shelf. Simply drag & drop them in their new folder. This is a faster way to organise notes and we love it! We also got more options for our grouped documents on the shelf. Before, we could only Open or Rename our groups, but since Noteshelf 8.3 we can also:
- Open in New Window
- Duplicate
- Move
- Share
- Move to Trash
On the 24th of March, about a day ago, we got another update: Noteshelf 8.3.3. It brought us support for backing up our notes to WebDAV! For anyone with privacy reasons preventing you from using popular cloud services (Dropbox, Google Drive), this is good news.
‘Strokes will appear in real-time when working on the same notebook in split view,’ according to our developers. Your letters are appearing a bit quicker, but the app isn’t showing actual strokes of the letters you handwrite.
They made improvements to the zoom feature for better clarity. That, frankly, doesn’t mean anything, or maybe it’s just that we can’t see any visible changes to appreciate the update. The last update we got lets us swipe our Favourites toolbar up and down to hide/show it. No matter what we tried, we were not able to do this. It’s not working with a finger or Apple Pencil. It’s probably a bug or we’re still to figure out how that works.
Noteshelf developers have been improving the app and we love the updates we have received over the last months. Are there any changes that will make you start using Noteshelf? Let us know.
