Timeframe: 05/2025 – Present
Position: Founder, Engineer
Technologies: Apache Cordova, TypeScript, Web Components, SQLite, CapacitorJS, Mobile Development, HTML, CSS, KonvaJS, QuillJS
The Story:
Throughout my game development career, I’ve taken notes on my projects, tasks, and designs. I used to have about six filled design journals, and would regularly take anywhere from one to three of them to a given conference so that I could take notes on GDC talks or do design work on my downtime.
And as much as I love that, it’s always seemed bulky because I like coloring my designs. With a tablet and OneNote, it was easier, and I was able to keep my note-taking more compact, but it felt lacking. Back in 2013, I joined InsightNG, and worked on a promising AI-based note-taking app. Unfortunately, it lost funding before gaining the traction it deserved, and eventually went away. However, it sparked in me the notion that such visual note-taking could be done, and over the years, I tinkered with ideas partly inspired by InsightNG’s relational approach, and fueled greatly by my growing frustration with OneNote.
Other note-taking apps have come and gone, and some have really stuck around, but I’ve found that many of them have a more sterile “enterprise” feel to them, based on explicit notions of how to “get things done”, when what the user really needs is to sit and be with their notes.
So I experimented with frameworks and libraries: PaperJS, Phaser, FabricJS, and then finally KonvaJS. I also experimented with frameworks like React, Cordova, and others, before settling on Cordova with native Web Components. You don’t learn if you don’t experiment!
By 2025, I had a demo version that was worthy of taking to a level past a coding project that I was up to then using as an example to show to potential clients. I polished it up, added necessary features, and navigated the Google Play store, and have been issuing stability updates and feature upgrades since then. As of this writing, the app has been ported from its original Apache Cordova to CapacitorJS, and is migrating from JSON files to SQLite-as-a-file-format for both performance, and to enable some upcoming spatial-temporal features.
