Electric Jotter: computer notepad for creative thinking

Software	Language with good GUI facilities (OO or functional)
Covers	Programming, simple graphics
Skills Required	Programming, systems design, GUI design, XML.
Challenge	Conceptual ??? Technical ???? Programming ?????

Brief Description

An idea developed from a project proposal by Peter Slatter.

Many people do their best creative thinking with pen and paper: they need a notepad to dump thoughts and return to them rather than try to remember everything; and find typing at a computer too awkward and Word documents too one-dimensional for fluent idea generation. But increasingly people travel around with smartphones and tablets and expect to use them as their primary tools for work. Can a computer system - probably running on a tablet with a pen interface - provide an environment for creative thinking? The challenge of this project is to develop a concept demonstrator prototype for an app or program that supports fluent notetaking with a stylus while providing some of the flexibility and ability to work in more than two dimensions afforded by software interfaces, by showing and hiding different kinds of notes, jumping from one note to another, and so on.

The idea is that the creative thinker will use the system in two distinct mental states - creative flow, where the user wants to write down notes quickly and efficiently without being distracted from the ideas by needing to think about how the system works or how the notes ought to be organized - and reflection, where the user structures the notes as well as adding to them, by joining connected notes, splitting single notes into different chunks, giving notes titles, drawing and labelling or categorizing connections between notes to show what the relationships between the ideas is and enabling them to be followed later, moving notes around a virtual space to get a better graphical arrangement, copying notes to different spaces, categorizing notes so that main ideas can be seen with or without annotations, different types of thoughts can be seen with different colour codes, etc, etc.

The challenge has several components: a graphic interface that enables users to write notes either with a keyboard or with a pen; enabling the interface to display notes in particular locations and move them, display them in particular colours, etc; enabling the interface to display more than one note at a time, and show or hide connections between notes; enabling the interface to show and hide notes according to different selection criteria. This will involve devising an appropriate format for a computational representation of the notes, the relationships between them and their organization into larger structures; this will probably be an XML X-Schema.

Extensions

Integrating handwriting recognition so that chunks of handwriting can be converted into chunks of ASCII or Unicode.

Enabling the system to be used as a Mind Mapping tool, ideally one where the user can swap the central idea to see what the Mind Map looks like, and develop it, from different perspectives.

A gesture-driven system for the standard functions like create a new note, link two notes, and so on would help the users to construct their hypertext structures while generating ideas in creative flow mode.

Sharing notes between different devices, and even between different people, creates interesting challenges for version control and coordination.

The most similar extant systems focus on sketching of pictures and diagrams. Can you incorporate diagramming features and support the creation of layered sketches, without making the core functionality hard to use?

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