NS Blog

It’s been a very long time since we’ve communicated with our Note Studio users. As many have pointed out, inexcusably long. So let me start by apologising for our complete lack of communication, and some broken promises.

• We have failed to get version 3.4 out anywhere near when we thought (and promised) we would.

• We have failed to update our blog regularly.

• We have failed to maintain the standards you would expect on our forum, and despite some heroic work by our moderator, people have been exposed to all sorts of pornography and spam.

• Our support has been haphazard - some people have received fast, good support, others have received slow, bad support, or in a few cases, none at all.

I apologise. I am very sorry that we have let things go that way. If this apology is not enough, and you’re still mad, well I don’t blame you. It has been deplorable.

So, are we still alive? Does the company still exist? Does Note Studio have a future?

• Yes.

• Yes.

• Not at the moment.

In writing this, I’ve deliberately kept it brief. Any time I started to go into the whole story, which gave more background on our thoughts, our lives, or justifying how we came to various conclusions, I edited it out. It’s not the most important thing at this stage.

So here’s the summary, as short and sharp as I can make it:

Part 1: The Current State of Things

1. Approximately 80% of our Note Studio revenue comes from the Palm version (Pc-Palm, Mac-Palm, Palm-only). The remainder comes from standalone versions (PC, Mac).

2. We are not confident of the long term future of Palm. Sales of Palm devices seem to be dropping.

3. Sales of Palm Note Studio have been declining, probably mainly due to the above factor. Note Studio has gone from producing more than 50% of our company revenue, to less than 5%. To support our families, we have had to seek other sources of income.

4. Note Studio still requires nearly as much time and effort as all our other ventures combined, despite providing only small proportion of revenue. Personally, we have experienced a number of big changes in our lives, which have also changed our priorities. We have reached the point where we can no longer develop and support Note Studio in the manner we, or our customers, are satisfied with.

5. In its current form, Note Studio is not commercially viable for us. Something has to change.

6. We still use Note Studio every day. We feel that it is a very useful product, and would like to see it continue to improve.

7. We have tried to find a partner who would take over the Note Studio product. We have had a few promising leads, but none have turned into anything solid.

Part 2: Where To From Here?

1. We believe that Note Studio can be a commercially viable product, provided it has:
a) the right people developing it,
b) the product is simplified, so it is easier to develop and support.

2. The current release (3.3.2) will be the last commercial release.

3. We are putting Note Studio ‘on hold’, which means that we are taking the following actions:

a) disable posts on the forum. We don’t actively monitor the forum, and we have had an increasing problem of spams, so that visitors to the forum (who may be visiting from their workplace) are being subjected to entirely inappropriate images etc. This is not acceptable. The forum may be re-opened in the future, but at this stage it is disabled.

b) disable comments on blog. Same reason.

c) taking Note Studio down from sale this week. At this point in time, we cannot =in good faith= continue to sell Note Studio, when we are unable to support it properly or guarantee any future.

Personally, I am reliant on Note Studio. I have been keeping a daily journal since 2004, which by now contains so many details - contact details, meeting notes, decisions I’ve made, research I’ve done, and so on. I would be lost without it, so I will continue to use the current version for the foreseeable future. I have a strong idea of how I would like to see Note Studio develop, but at this stage, we are cryogenically freezing Note Studio.

Again, I apologise for the lack of communication leading up to this announcement. We have really been wrestling with the issue of Note Studio’s future for a long time, and I didn’t want to make any announcement while things were so uncertain. In hindsight, an announcement such as ‘we are uncertain about Note Studio’s future’ could have been helpful a number of months ago. Sorry to leave people wondering.

This announcement will surely contain bad news for a lot of customers, particularly those who are still reliant on the Palm platform, and have been looking forward to 3.4 for a long time. I just want to say again that we were financially unable to develop or support Note Studio in its current form.

A Wiese, Dogmelon Pty Ltd

Well, the new GTD website has been up for a week now, but we’ve been so busy with NS 3.4, we forgot to mention it here.

You can visit it here:

http://www.dogmelon.com.au/ns/GTD.shtml

Check it out, and please let us know what you think by leaving a comment!

On another matter- we’ve decided to hold off the NS 3.4 release to January next year.

Why?

Because we didn’t think it would be wise to do a release this close to Christmas. A release of NS inevitably involves a lot of support (People that can’t download, people with upgrade problems, etc), and with Christmas holidays coming up- we wouldn’t be working everyday to provide the needed support.

So we’ve decided to hold off the release until next month, so that we can provide the necessary support, so that people wont be left waiting for replies.

This was a hard decision to make- NS 3.4 is considerably better than 3.3.2, and we want to get it into our customer’s hands- but we decided it’s better to do the release when we can support it properly.

Enjoy the holidays, and please don’t forget to leave a comment about the new GTD site.

We’ve been working hard on NS 3.4 recently… but we also have been taking some time to improve our website in regard to GTD.

We’re just making some last minute changes to the new changes (after speaking to someone at David Allens company), and hope to have it live by the end of the week.

It’s VASTLY improved over the old GTD section, with lots of information about GTD, and how best to use it with NS. It includes lots of videos, which make it quite easy to understand.

Early feedback is that it helps a LOT with not only NS+GTD, but also just general GTD.

Stay tuned…

Hi everyone.

Sorry for the long delay in posting. We’ve been flat out adding stuff to 3.4…

There are quite a few cool things in 3.4, which we’ll tell you about over the next few weeks.

Firstly we’re looking at improving the syncing. We think we fixed a lot of the cases that were causing issues. And NS 3.4 will work a lot better when syncing between 2 computers (Like home and work).

We’ve also fixed the mac/pc interoperability.

You can now share a collection (using Samba), and access it on Mac or PC. You can also put a collection on a USB key (or an iPod), and share it between Mac and PC as well.

We’ll let you know more of the features of 3.4 in the upcoming weeks.

As for when we plan to release it? We think it will be ready before the end of the year. We’ll give you a more firm date when we can be sure we can reach a certain deadline.

We’ve just put a new poll up, and we would love it if you could fill it in.We’re trying to figure out exactly how people find out about NS. We used to think it was PalmGear, but some recent data has shown us that this probably isn’t true.

So where did you find out about NS?

If there’s any extra things you’d like to add (Such as which website you saw it on, what you were searching for, which magazine you were reading, etc), please feel free to leave a comment…

We’ve just released 3.3.2!

(And this time it looks like we didn’t accidentally send out millions of emails. Phew!)

3.3.2 is mostly bug fixes. Palm users will be glad to know that the joystick can now be used to check checkboxes, and that Treo 650 navigating should be working.

 Enjoy…

We were due to release 3.3.2 late last week, but we’ve had a flu sweep through our office. We should be able to do the release later this week. It’s got lots of minor (and not-so-minor) fixes, so we’re keen to release it as soon as possible!

Well, we’ve finally had time to go through all the contest entries, and choose a winner.

We’d like to thank everyone that submitted an entry. All the entries were excellent, and we were blown away by what was written. It’s great to see all the different things people are achieving with Note Studio.
Choosing a winner was hard, but in the end, we couldn’t go past Simon Baker’s post, where he talked about all the different areas in his life where he uses Note Studio. Simon’s post is included here…

I wanted a programme for my Palm which would help me to keep a large and expanding set of reference notes which I need by me all the time in my job as a family doctor ( I cant keep numbers in my head and anyway they keep changing!). What I have found is that and much more. Now i keep all my meeting notes clearly and in my alter ego as a church leader I can turn up agendas quickly and catch those useful ideas which come to mind on the fly, organise them easily, and never lose them! Now I have started to get more deeply into some of the GTD plugins I am finding that NS has the potential to help me with organising those dreadful long todo lists and actually getting stuff done.

I would recommend it to anyone who needs to keep information in an organised way…and today that means all of us…My youngest son has a busy life and has to fit in “A” levels and has found it invaluable. At first I thought it was a bit costly but now I see that really I cant afford to be without it. Get it now!

Thanks Simon, and thanks to everyone that entered.

Thanks for all the great feedback on 3.3 everyone!

We’re currently at work on 3.3.2, which we intend to release next week. This version will fix a lot of problems we have found in 3.3, including:

• Treo 650 Navigating
• Recent changes on Desktop
• Support for book backlinks on Palm, to speed up slow devices
• New page on desktop starting in edit mode
• Pasting in view mode creating a new page on desktop.
• Fix problem with ‘-’ character on the Palm
• Fix various encryption problems

There is only one extra feature at the moment… we got the Palm navigation to support checkboxes. It works well, and means you can use one hand to move between the checkboxes and toggle them.

Tomorrow we’ll let you know who the winner of the iPod will be… As you can imagine, we’ve been pretty busy, and haven’t had time to decide yet…

If you’ve upgraded to NS 3.3, and you’re seeing problems loading hook files when you’re starting up, it’s a good sign that NS is having a problem with your data.

The common cause so far seems to be from empty collections. We’ve addressed this problem, and released a 3.3.1 binary. It’s available from the same URL where you downloaded 3.3

Unless you’re having problems with 3.3, then we wouldn’t recommend downloading 3.3.1 until next week, when we’ve had a better chance to test it thoroughly.

But if you are having problems running 3.3 on the Desktop, then it’s worth trying 3.3.1, because it might help with your problem, and so little has changed, it’s unlikely to make things worse…