Notes app several bugs
I have the Nova Air C with 3.2.3 firmware.
Using the stock "Notes" applications there are several bugs that diminish the usability of the table/app. (I'm not sure if this is the same on other tablets using the "notes" app because it's the only one I have).
-When writing anything at zoom level other than 100% and the device enters sleep mode and then I wake it up again, the display changes back to 100% but the displayed zoom level in the toolbar keeps displaying the previous zoom value.
This is very disturbing because it's not possible to continue writing / drawing at the same position as before the device went to sleep - the user has to zoom in again and find the same position again. This is even worse when using a canvas different than 1x1. Please .. don't zoom out and recenter the display when going to sleep ... just leave it as it was.
-If the transparent "screensaver" is used and the device is put into sleep mode shortly after writing / drawing anything (by pressing the power button shortly for example), the display does not actually show what was written or drawn just before -the part that was written lastly just disappears ... the displayed picture while in sleep state is an older representation. Once the device wakes up, the content of the display is refreshed once again, this time containing all that was written. This is counterproductive if you take notes during meetings and there are long pauses because when you look at the screen, whatever you wrote lastly, it just isn't there - using longer time settings for entering sleep mode just isn't ok because than the battery usage is too high for too long (using led lighting). Is it not possible to simply refresh the screen drawing once, before entering sleep mode, so that the correct contents of the screen are displayed in sleep mode too ?
-When selecting predefined pens, an overlay with the pen settings appear; if you now select another pen that is already define, without closing the overly, this other pen seetings are shown .. the brush type is showm the dot underneath the color changes position BUT the color name and hex color value do not change and remain the same as the first selected pen. Please update the color name and hex value when changing pen selection with the overlay opened.
-When pressing on the page numbers in the upper right corner, ("< 3/15 >" for oxample) thumbnails are displayed for all pages in a 3x3 grid. This is very useful for managing pages, howevere they are rendered ona by one each time this is displayed. With complex pages / notes / drawings this is extremely slow on my tablet...it takes several second per single thumbnail to be rendered and since there are 9 of them this page overview, it take almost a minute to display .. it is very non responsive. Why do you not create and store thumbnails for this display and only re-render them when there is actually a change on a certain page ? At least on one ocasion the display did not finish updating at all for me and remained unresponsive until exited. This needs to be improved.
-The way the marker brush works is not what you would expect / works wrongly / differently than in other note taking apps. In the Boox Notes app (and also in the pdf reader) this brush draws over any other text and additively changes even the color of black ink text. This is not how an actual marker works and not even how other note taking apps do it. For examply using a yellow marker and drawing over any black or dark text, it becomes almost illegible. This pen type should either use a multiplicative calculation to actually "mark" the text and not draw over it, or a simple solution is if this pen would simply draw to a layer that is below the current one with the actual notes ... this can be done by hand by inserting a new layer and position it below the one with the actual notes ... if you now use the marker on this layer you can see that the result is much more what would be expected. It is however impractical to keep switching between layers just to mark anything and you quickly make a mistake by forgetting to switch the layer and then you write the actual notes to the wrong one which leads to a big mess. Please fix this by changing the way "marker over text" is drawn / calculated.
Best regards
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Dear customer, we apologize for the inconvenience.
Below are the responses for each problem of the Notes app:
- The zoom level of the canvas is back to 100% after waking up the device. This is a known issue and will be fixed in the next firmware update.
- When into sleep mode with a transparent screen saver, strokes in the notepad do not update. To solve this issue, you could change the settings "Auto-refresh stroke" and set it to 400ms. Below are the steps:
With this setting, the stroke will be updated and shown when into sleep mode.
- "When selecting predefined pens, an overlay with the pen settings appears", we are sorry that we are unable to reproduce this issue, and we appreciate it if you could send us a video to show this problem. You could send us the video by submitting a request ticket via the link here.
- It is normal to take some time to render the thumbnails when the first time opens the page manager, and the number of strokes will affect the rendering speed. When the first rendering is complete, the note thumbnails will not be re-rendered each time opening the page manager, and the note thumbnails will be displayed very quickly.
- Regarding the marker pen issue. Our tech team will improve it in future updates.
Many thanks for your feedback and understanding.
0 - The zoom level of the canvas is back to 100% after waking up the device. This is a known issue and will be fixed in the next firmware update.
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1. Looking forward to this fix (please make sure that the view position will not change after waking up, not just the zoom level)
2. This works, thank you for the tip. It is still a workaround though, since the tablet probably consumes more power if the auto-refresh stroke is enabled the whole time; and battery life is quite important. So please just consider refreshing the screen / last strokes before entering sleep when transparent screensaver is used.
3. Actually I can demonstrate the issue with just two screenshots. I have 5 pens defined. Just select the first one on the top (Black pen for me) ... and then another one without closing the window (Red pen for me). Observe that the written name (string) and color numerical value (hex number) don't change but still say Black(#FF000000)
4. I agree with the statement that time could be necessary for preparing the thumbnails the first time the page manager opens, and when all the thumbnails are prepared then scrolling through the list is quite fast. However my experience differs from what you describe in the second part...if I select to display a page (clicking on the page) maybe go to the previous or next page - without changing or writing anything - and then reopen the page manager the thumbnails are re-rendered most of the time (but not really always). I don't know if you either just keep a buffer of the thumbnails in memory and then you release / flush it for some reason, but no .. my device does not behave as you describe ... thumbnails are re-rendered without there being any change, just by going / scrolling through the pages. This seems to happen more often and with more obvious consequences with increasing complexity of the pages (I have several notes with 70+ pages of around the size of ~ 90M+).
Furthermore each time I open any note (even if I close and open the same one) the thumbnails are re-rendered even if there are no changes to the notes themselves.
To improve this I suggest you render a thumbnail in the form of a small bitmap for each page and then display this bitmap when the page manager is opened. Only update the thumbnail when there is a change on the page. Keep the thumbnails within the note file (if the file format permits this) or use a separate metadata database with thumbnails. This would improve the speed of browsing page thumbnails and reordering pages considerably.
(This can / should also be combined with the new point 6. I describe below.)5.) Looking forward to this fix
6.) I see that I forgot to mention one more issue with the note app.
Whenever I open any notes, just view them and scroll through the pages (no changes to the content), they are re-saved when exiting the app. This happens even if I select a specific page to be the static cover page. Why is the note re-saved each time when there is no change ? This takes a lot of time and battery for bigger notes (re-saving on every exit of the app). The second bad consequence is that each time the date and time of the note is changed too ... so if you have the notes ordered by time, this messes all the ordering and you loose the information when there was actually anything written in the notes...the date and time actually always shows the latest time it was accessed / read instead.
I don't see any way of opening notes and looking through the pages without triggering a re-save on exit and without changing the timestamp.
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Both 4. and 6. could be elegantly solved if you would keep the status of actual changes being made on the pages (simply having a "dirty" flag / bit for every page that you set when there is any change on the page).
-don't re-save the notes if there are no dirty flags
-don't change the notes timestamp if there are no changes
-keep the thumbnails in file / metadata database and invalidate / re-render them only when the page is changed / has a "dirty" flag
-thumbnails for page management can be prepared in a background / low priority task for pages that don't have them yet or are marked dirty; this way they would be already available when opening the page managerThis would make the Notes App muich more responsive and lower power consumption by reducing the number of unnecessary re-renders and re-saves. If resources permit, keep the thumbnails and other metadata for navigation / organization for as long as it is still valid...store them to persist sleep/wake up and restart cycles.
Please let me know if there is any other suggestion / information I can help with, to expedite resolving and improving this. I like using your product mostly (apart from the EMR / magnetic case problems described in another post), but I find that the Notes app could be improved greatly bi fixing the issues above.
Best regards
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Dear customer,
Many thanks for the additional info.
1. We confirmed with our tech team that the zoom level and view position will not change after waking up. The notepad will display the last screen before into sleep mode.
2. We have also forwarded this point to our tech team, they will put it in the to-do list and optimize the notes app in the future.
3. This issue is also on the to-do list and will be fixed in future updates.
4. We created a notepad with 80 pages and took notes on each page. And we also notice the thumbnails will be re-rendered even if it is not the first time to open the page manager. We reported this issue to our tech team and it will be fixed in future updates.
6. We received feedback from our tech team that it would be helpful for us to address the issue if you could submit feedback on your device once the notepad is re-saved without modifications. You could submit feedback via "Settings" > "Feedback" on your device. Please make sure that you tick the option "send logs" while sending the Feedback. Our technical team will reply in 2 working days after you submit the Feedback.
Many thanks for your effort and understanding.
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Hello again,
regarding 6 it is really easy to reproduce if that's ok for you to check:
Create a new note
create at least another page (so that the note contains at least two pages, they can be empty)
exit the note app (the note will be saved)Check and remember the note file timestamp
Open the note again
just go to the other page (don't change anything in the notes, don't write anything)
exit the note app (the note will be re-saved)Check the file timestamp again and see that it is changed
This same thing happens for any note...with large notes this re-saving and change of timestamp each time a page is viewed (without any changes) takes a lot of time and note organization by time becomes impossible.
Can you re-create what I describe ? Do you have enough data ?
Best regards
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Dear customer,
We understand that it is easy to reproduce the re-save issue, but it would be better for our tech team to gather more info such as what settings are in your Notes app, is the notepad status actually updated (We tried opening and closing a notepad, and the updated time of this notepad did not change), and would be helpful for us to capture the operation of the notepad.
We will not be able to view the content of notes, we will only get the parameters of a notepad and that would be helpful for our analyzing the problem. Therefore, we recommend submitting feedback on the device.
We appreciate your effort and understanding.
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Hello,
yes, I'll send you the logs if you need them that's not a problem, but I also want to se if it's reproductible on other (your) devices.
Perhaps you didn't understand the sequence of steps I described above, please be sure to change the viewed page after opening and before closing the note. Just opening and closing the note does not change the timestamp. Opening the note...changing the displayed page (going to any other page) and then closing does change the timestamp. Also if you open the note, go to another page and then returning to the same page that was displayed when opening the note and then closing does not change the timestamp !
From this I understand, that you treat the selected view page as a change in the note itself...but it is not/should be not it wreaks havoc to notes organization by time and date.
Can you reproduce ?
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