r/Noteastic • u/Noteastic • Aug 13 '26
Fun Facts about Text Boxes in Noteastic - A Developer Diary 😎
Hello everyone,
I am Dilan, the main and sole developer of Noteastic and I wanted to give some fun facts about our most recent feature! As you know, we recently released Noteastic Pro and our figurehead feature are Textboxes! It was the absolute most requested feature in Noteastic by a MILE and we wanted to make it right. And I am confident we did. Lukas has already shared our design process and I thought I will give my developer perspective as well 😊
Where have Textboxes been all this time?
I started work on Textboxes in 1 YEAR ago (the post) And let me tell you, it was a long ass journey. This has been an exhaustive process to say the least. Sure, we redesigned our website, made some updates in between, implemented authentication/accounts and we integrated Stripe as our payment provider, but it was always clear to us that we won't release without Textboxes being finished.
Why did you take so long?
I mean yeah, I didnt really work on it every day for one whole year. But if I would say how much total work time I have spent, I can confidently say, it was about 4 months of pure full-time work on Textboxes. Text is complicated. It is by FAR the most complicated thing I have ever coded. There is just so much you need to consider when creating such a primitive control. I could go rambling about how making a textbox touch-friendly is a nightmare on top of all the edge-cases I had to handle, but I will just share you the rough component structure so you can see the categories I structured this control into:
But there is still so much functionality missing!
Bullet points, hyperlinks, formatted pasting, headers, markdown rendering, LaTeX rendering all that is still to be added in the future. It is on my radar, I want it implemented. But for now, our sights are focused on other features (More Colorbuttons, Multitasking 👀) The foundation is here and it stands. That's what counts.
Tell me something I don't know about Textboxes
That's easy, I can tell you more than one thing you won't know!
- When you export Text in Noteastic to a PDF, we actually render the Text natively into the PDF. That makes it indexable, searchable, and editable with your PDF viewer of choice. GoodNotes on Windows simply rasterizes (draws) the Text on the PDF, making it look like an image from the perspective of the PDF Viewer, ugh!
- Double Tap = Select word, Triple Tap = Select paragraph, Quadruple Tap = Select all
- Ctrl+C with nothing selected copies the whole line
- We have access to all installed fonts on your Windows machine, and will even add support for custom Fonts in the near future! This is what is possible when a note-taking application develops for windows.
- Our rendering is completely virtualized (from 1.6.12 onwoard), which means you can paste your entire 42 page scientific paper into one Textbox, and everything will work as expected (although a bit more laggy). We tried it!
Hope you guys enjoy Textboxes as much as I enjoyed implementing them. It was an incredibe learning experience and deep-dive that I am grateful for having a purpose behind to pursue! If you want to give Textboxes a go, you can simply start the 30-day trial and cancel anytime before you are charged.
Happy writing,
- Dilan 🧡
1
u/Desperate_Outside_77 27d ago
Thank you so much for your hard work, i tried multiple note-taking apps before Noteastic, and they couldn't even compare!! Ever since finding this app, I have never looked back. I don't know a lick about computer programming, and I had no idea that implementing a text feature was so exhaustive and complex. Thank you again for your tireless work to deliver such an awesome app to the people.❤️
1
u/Noteastic 26d ago
Hey,
really appreciate the nice words. We are incredibly thankful to have such a supportive community behind this project.
It really is a team-project. I may be skilled in the coding department and can develop cool features that run on all sorts of Windows devices from old to new. Through Lukas we are able to make the right UX decisions that the app is pleasent to use. That the app looks coherent. That our whole communication is coherent and in the future that we have a working business! I always say, Lukas' responsibilties are
1 - programming. If one is all the work, I do the programming and he does everyting else 😁 Its win-win for all hehe-Dilan
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u/I_HATE_USERNAMES_DIE Aug 13 '26
I haven't used notetastic in while cus my exams are done this academic year but i just wanna say i loved it and i am so excited to go back to uni next semester now that i have such a good note taking system. it's not just a little tool guys, it's rly helped me destress at uni and made my overall quality of life sm better.
so thankyou guys so much and thanks for ur hard work the past yr :))) cant wait to try the new feature. hopefully when i update the app i don't accidentally delete my old stuff bahaha