Documentation

Obtaining JadeNote

On your Android phone,  go to the Android Market and search for “JadeNote”. Then, merely click on “Install”.

Set up your account

1. First, you need an account on simplenoteapp.com, if you don’t have one already.  Remember your username (email address) and password.
2. On JadeNote, at the home page go to Menu->Settings. Plug in your simplenote username and password.

View an existing note

Merely touch the note entry in a list, and the full note will appear. Here you can view the note, and scroll if necessary. Via buttons at the bottom, you can:

1. Go back to the list
2. Edit the note
3. Delete the note

Add a new note

While viewing a list, press the Android Menu button, and then press “New Note”. You will be presented with two edit boxes. The top edit box is for tags. Here, you can optionally add one or more words to use as tags, separated by blanks. The bottom edit box is used to enter the text of the note. Simplenote always uses your first line as the title.

Edit an existing note

When viewing an existing note, select the “Edit” button, and you will be able to edit the note. Like “Add”, you will have two edit boxes – the top one for tags, and the bottom one for the note proper. When you are done editing, press “Save” to save, or “Cancel”, to throw away your edits. In either case, you will be taken back to the list.

Delete a note

When viewing an existing note, select the “Delete” button, and your note will be sent to the trash. It will not actually be deleted, but will not appear in normal lists. For now, in order to permanently delete a note, you must delete the note on the Simplenote web site.

Undelete a note

Go into the Trash folder, via the Tag menu (see below), and select the note you want to undelete. There, you view the note, and to undelete the note, press the “Undelete” button.

Using tags

View any list, and via the Android Menu menu button, select “Tags”.  You will then be presented with a scrolling list of all tags. Select one, and you will have a list of all notes containing that tag. There are two additional special tags: “All” for all notes, and “Trash”, for the deleted notes.

Syncing

This is important. Currently, JadeNote expects you to manually sync your notes whenever you want to save your work onto the Simplenote website, or to download changes from the Simplenote webset to your Android. This is easy to do: via the Android Menu, select “Sync”.   It might take a bit of time, but when the alert screen disappears, you are ready to go again!

Searching

Use the Android Search key, and enter the term you would like to search. You will be presented with a list of all notes containing your term.

Using the Checklist Lens

Currently, JadeNote supports the “checklist” lens.  To do this, you must format the text note in a specific way. The first line is the title, and then checklist items follow, each on a single line. A single line can wrap automatically, but  it must terminate with a regular “return”  (end-of-line character) to be counted as a single item. If the line begins with an asterisk (*), the item will appear checked when viewed.  If there is not asterisk, the will be unchecked.  To tell JadeNote that this note should be processed using the checklist lens, add the tag _checklist to your tags for the note (notice the underscore).

Using the Map Note Lens (beta)

This is the very first version of Map Notes, and it is somewhat tricky to use. A nice gui for editing the notes will be forthcoming. But for the brave and impatient, a brief description of how to use follows. Please see enclosed note called French Towns for  a working example.

To tell JadeNote that a note is a Map Note,  include the tag _map in your tags (notice the underscore).

Currently, a Map Note must be edited like normal text – but you have to follow a precise format. A Map Note is composed of a header which contains the title line, followed by one or more address entries. The header and each of the entries must be terminated by a line which starts with a ‘%’ (per cent sign). Here is a simple example:

This is the title line of the note. It must be a single line (which can wrap)
%
Dijon, France
Hi, this is a great and lively town. This is the note, and must be a single line.
%
1234 Avenue Foch, Nancy, France
Another note, for a different location
%

As you can see, all you have to enter in the header is the title. And each entry needs two lines:

• the first line contains the address. This can be a city, state, and zip or city and country, full street address, or anything that Google geocoding can recognize. Comas should be inserted in the proper places.
• the second line is optional, and contains the note for that location, on a single line. The line can wrap, though, so the note can be somewhat long.

Just remember to terminate each entry with a ‘%’, including the last one.

Once you have tried to display a map, the internal map compiler will alter your file somewhat. It will add a few extra lines to the header, for saving the center and zoom of your map view. And it will attempt to find the actual latitude and longitude (map coordinates) of each of your addresses. If it finds the address, it will append to your written address  with a ‘:’ followed by two large numbers separated by a ‘,’ (comma), like so

Dijon, France : 47327213,5043987
Hi, this is a great and lively town. This is the note, and must be a single line.Would like to return
%

If the the map compiler cannot find a location corresponding to your address, it will add the numbers 0:0.

Please don’t change the numbers. If you do change the address, however, remove the numbers so the map compiler will recompute a new set of map coordinates.

Once you have finished editing, and save your work, you can view the map. It might not be showing where you expect it to. So by panning and zooming, get the view of the map to be exactly like you want it. Then, via the Android Menu, press “Save View”. The next time you view this Map Note, your view should come up automatically.

On the map, each of your addresses with map coordinates will display a little smiley face. If you touch that face, you will see the text of your note.

Again, please remember: this is a beta, and might not always work as expected. We will be adding a nice gui to it, and allow options like choosing symbols, etc. Comments are always welcome!

Futures

• more options for syncing (auto sync, background sync, etc.)
• pin and read (as per Simplenote)
• options for sorting items in a list
• more lenses: csv files (tables), encryption, simple markup,  others to be defined
• user options for styling item appearance
• improved user interface

Have fun keeping track of things!