Whiteboard suggestion

[bwva 5]

I'd love to see the ability to use Evernote like a smart whiteboard (on a touchscreen).

Draw a circle or an oval and as soon as the shape is recognised the hand-drawn one is replaced by a smooth graphic one the same size.

Hand write some text in it and that text pops up inside the oval or circle in Calibri (or whatever's been set as default).

Draw an arrow between one circle and another and a graphical arrow appears in its place in the pre-set arrow colour.

Basically I'd like a way to create clear infographics on the fly from hand-drawn input.

Ideally there would be a generous collection of graphical symbols, a simple representation of a house for example, and a way to "teach" Evernote, "When I draw this, replace it with that, about the same size."

So many ideas and processes can be better explained or toyed with as sketches, but the untidiness of sketches can make them unclear or unappealing.

Of course this would work best on a large touchscreen, but until these are ubiquitous (and I imagine a world where every room has one on a wall, perhaps displaying artwork when not in use), scrolling functionality would be necessary when confined to smaller screens.

The drawings and flow diagrams should have the ability to contain rich content if necessary: icons would indicate that double or long tapping will open video, audio, a spreadsheet or regular document as a pop-up within the note.

Versions could be saved every x minutes so that if a great idea is erased in the process of developing a graphical note, it can be found again and restored.

 

 

[gazumped 11,652]

Hi.  That suggestion got posted three times for some reason - if that was you,  please don't.  I deleted the other posts.  And none of what you're describing is currently part of Evernote - it sounds like super project for a developer though.  The problem with adding any specific extra features to Evernote is always:  it costs an awful lot of time and money to develop something that works (more or less) reliably on multiple operating systems and dozens of devices.  What's the return if they do spend all that effort?  And what's the downside if you add a complicated extra feature with lots of menu options to clutter up the various screen sizes with lots of drop-down choices...

[bwva 5]

Thanks for deleting the extras. Each time I posted I got a message saying something like: "The operation cannot be completed at this time. Please try again later" so I assumed it hadn't been posted and I was going to try again today.

I believe the features I have in mind could constitute an absolutely "killer app", that everyone could use for organising almost anything. Just this weekend there was confusion amongst our parent group about who had agreed to take which kids to and from a party at what times - had we been sharing and all contributing to such a diagram it would have been clear to all. I appreciate the challenge in keeping the UI clean and uncluttered. I've played with online whiteboards and they're currently too complicated and unintuitive for what I have in mind. While this could be a new stand-alone app or program. it made more sense to me for it to be a rich extension of something that's already established in the cloud-based organisational area and used by millions.

 

Two other useful features:

 

An optional timeline down the side of the diagram (would have been useful in the parent/party example)

In addition to simple shapes being recognised as certain graphics, gestures to be assigned per note or notebook, eg tapping with four fingers could quickly add another House graphic.

[bwva 5]

PS I found the open Evernote Forum tab from when I was trying to post originally:

"Service Unavailable. The service is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later."

[MusFuzZ 1]

I was thinking about the same thing. 

With all the new mini projectors coming up, an app for writing, saving and editing whiteboards into digital documents will be a guaranteed winner. 

You get a brainfart for a revolutionary new type of fork/knife, that cuts food into bite size pieces, holds it, and scoops up gravy.

You draw scetches of it on paper or a board, write some and scan it on your phone. 

Then 4 days later brainstorming class putting a phone in a coffe cup, and firing up a evernote whiteboard app. You direct the phone torvards a white board, and the projector displays your sketch . You can edit it, turn the writing into digital text.

Then you share it with your dev team. make and share 3D models, and print it on a 3D printer.