Nerdcore 4 Life

In searching the Market for a new not taking app for the G1, I happened across Magic Note. I was intrigued because it said it was based on pbwiki. I thought that a very smart idea, as my traditional note tool was TomBoy and I always thought that if you took it one step further you basically had a wiki.

So I install it, and go about the very basic task of making a grocery list. The UI is very simple: a name for the note, a text area and 2 buttons. Load and Save. I type in the name “grocery list”, add my items and press Save and at the bottom I get a message:

You can edit this not on your computer at notes.pbwiki.com/grocery-list

And I realize, it’s not some striped down version of the pbwiki source code creating a simple database on your phone. It just uploaded my grocery list to a wiki. WTF!

In fact, go to http://notes.pbworks.com/grocery-list right now. You can edit my grocery list. Go ahead, add “penis”. I know you want to.

In case you are at all unclear on what I just said, my basic note taking app uploads my personal notes to the internet and allows anyone to edit them. And when you go there, sure enough you can see other notes people have recently posted. Under http://notes.pbworks.com/concert you’ll find:

Marina del rey symphany @ 7pm..

Did I say 7? Better make it 6. Or 5, can’t be to sure. I wouldn’t want to miss the symphony(at least the wiki will allow me to fix this guys spelling).

And in case you’re doing the math at home, this seems like a recipe for namespace collisions. I can’t imagine I’m the only guy who wants a grocery list. I doubt the next one will want exactly the same things(unless he loves penis as much as I apparently do. Who keeps editing that?)

But if you want to access notes you created from your phone, you’d better remember what you called them. Because this app stores nothing on your phone. It has no idea what notes you’ve created, so if you need to load it onto your phone you need to remember exactly what you called it. Maybe that’s why that other guy called his note “concert” and not “symphany”.

So, in conclusion, Magic Note is perhaps the worst note taking application ever. I expect 2 things from my note app, it should store what I write and make it easy to access/search for my notes. Magic Note half does one of those things.

But……

While I found this to be an atrocious note taking app, it’s a pretty decent wiki accessing app. The experience is at least streamlined, not always easy with a phone app. And if you fixed the things that stop this from being a great ‘wiki page editor’ app, you’ll also make it a somewhat decent note taking app at the same time. So here’s where I think this should go:

1. Give me an identifier field. Something to distinguish my grocery list from someone else’s or a simple form of classification. Hell, just slapping my initials on the front increases the namespace by 45k. I know you could do this inside the name box but that’s confusing to users, so they won’t.
2. Don’t list the most recent edited files on the web page. That’s not going to be useful to anyone except griefers.
3. Give me a damn history. I should be able to hit menu and get a list of the pages I’ve viewed/edited in order. Otherwise you can’t have more than 3 notes.
4. Make it easy to share this page with friends, family and colleagues. I know you tell me the URL, but being able to pop up a list of contacts and email them a link would be worlds better. It would actually make this useful.

I think this app was made by a smart guy who wanted to make an Android app, but didn’t want to really think about how users were going to use this app. But a little inovation(linking it with pbwiki) means he’s actually very close to a great app. Just not the one he set out to write.