Why don’t just use a digital tool for note-taking?


Image credits: Dim Hou on unsplash

For my private software projects I often find myself switching between numerous digital tools for note-taking (e.g. github wikis, notion and markdown files).

Nevertheless I still find myself using plain old pen and paper for some usecases:

Making quick notes
Drawing mind-map like or architecture diagrams
Sketching ideas when discussing with other people
Annotating print-outs of documents with questions and summarizing paragraphs

For me this mixture of using digital tools and pen and paper lead to some problems:

Sometimes the same information is spread across digital tools and pieces of paper
Information on pieces of paper is barely searchable
Manual digitization of notes (by taking photos or scanning them) creates additional effort which often results in not doing it at all
When annotating larger documents, I have to print the whole document at first and then rescan it again to retain my notes

For keeping the feeling of “writing on a piece of paper” and tackle the aforementioned problems of analogous note-taking, an e-ink note taking device seems to be the obvious choice.

Bridging the gap

My setup consists of my Macbook and a cloud based file share (HiDrive in my case). The cloud based service is accessible via SFTP and also via native Android/iOS apps and a web based interface. For my e-ink note taker I would like to have the following 🧰use cases supported

taking notes and saving them as an image to the cloud service
mirroring the screen of the note taking device to the Macbook so it can be used during online meetings or for presentations
annotating pdf documents on the cloud file share

Of course a long 🔋battery run-time and a moderate 💰price are also favourable. For the device I am not looking for any functionality besides note-taking (like a media player or web browsing). Also OCR is not a high-priority feature for my usecase, as I consider my notes to be more sketching than texting.

I’ll document my findings in the posts to follow. Stay tuned :-)