Mental Note 3.15

Version 3.15 is now available. This update has been a long time in the making, due to various world, life, and company changes. Thank you for your patience while this version was being completed.

Search improvements.
The search criteria is now identified inside the note. This has been a much sought after request for many years. If you want to identify the search criteria inside the note, tap the “i” icon that appears on the right edge when you do a search. If you want the old behaviour where you search for something and you just want to open that note, tap the note from the list as usual.

Email export improvements.
Version 3.15 addresses a critical customer concern regarding export using email, where the email appears to sometimes not be sent. After much thought and investigation it appears this issue can be encountered if the Apple Mail app is configured but is not being used (i.e. user uses a third-party email app). Because by default Mental Note can only use the Mail app when exporting via email, we have added a new status indicator when exporting via email to inform that the message is queued. If you tap that indicator, the Mail app will open and that action of opening the Mail app will trigger the message to be sent. If you use the default Apple Mail app on your device, or even if you occasionally use it, you would never have run into this issue and there is no impact to you; continue to use Mental Note along with email export as usual. This issue with emails not being sent appears to only happen if you have not opened the Apple Mail app in a very long time. By occasionally opening Mail (e.g. tap the indicator) queued messages will be sent. Alternatively, if you use a third-party email app, try exporting using the Other app feature and selecting your app of choice.

Bug fixes and general improvements.
Rounding out this release are various cosmetic and other minor fixes.

Thanks for continuing to send us messages letting us know you are using Mental Note. We continue to use Mental Note on a day-to-day basis. Thank you for making notes with Mental Note.

Support email issue

We recently discovered an issue with our email server that may have caused our replies to your messages to go to your junk folder. We have fixed this issue as of October 4th, 2020. If you sent us an email on October 4th or earlier and you never saw a reply in your Inbox, please check your junk folder. Please accept our apologies for this. We reply to all messages. Thank you for your continued support, and for all your messages. We enjoy receiving all feedback from our users!

Mental Note in the time of COVID-19

It has been a very, very long time since I’ve written a personal post about how I’m using Mental Note. In fact, you’d have to go all the way back to the beginning – the very first post about Making Mental Notes way back in 2009 to read about how that young, original Mental Note was so useful to me way back then. Through the years, Mental Note has continued to be my go to place for capturing thoughts, ideas, moments big and small; it continues to be one of my most used apps.

Many months ago, schools suddenly closed after Spring Break and parents were thrust into the world of home schooling. I too found myself in that same boat. As a parent of a young Elementary school student, I found myself making enormous use of an iPad – more so than ever before. The iPad was our connection to our family’s school: assignments that arrived over email, video chats with teachers over Teams, access to the library’s digital materials, video messages and assignments from teachers, and Mental Note for iPad to organize it all. The iPad became our lesson planner, our translator (we’re in a French Immersion program), our communicator, our library, our music class, our progress tracker, our idea capturer. It really was our window to the school, and mentally I associated that iPad with “School”. With so many different technology platforms being used for everything coming out of the school, we needed one common place to keep track of it all. Mental Note delivered for us.

Before we get into how we used Mental Note, let’s take a look at the environment we set up. This is our “school screen” on that iPad – everything we needed to survive the new reality of schooling at home.home screen

You’ll notice some “treat” / “reward” apps like Netflix, but even that was configured with French as the default language profile so shows play in French by default (if supported), and the whole interface is in French too such that there’s still some learning going on even when accessing and watching cartoons. I should add that I also made tremendous use of my TV, with an Apple TV and Chromecast attached, but not always how you might think. Yes, there were times when the kids had to be put in front of the TV for a cartoon, (hopefully in French; which, I might add, they actually enjoyed the novelty of). But more interestingly, I made a lot of use of the TV as a digital whiteboard, and as our big video conference screen. We mainly worked in or near the same room as the TV screen, and frequently displayed classroom materials on the TV via either the Apple TV screen mirroring feature of the iPad (for all apps we used), or through Chromecast (for something like YouTube for example).

“Reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic”

In our class, the kids were learning to read and write, and they were learning their numbers and addition and subtraction. It was easy to type out (or copy and paste from Google Translate) a phrase into Mental Note and mirror that to the TV via Apple TV, for the student to practice writing by copying, or to practice reading. One way to mirror the iPad to the TV is to swipe down from the battery indicator in the top right status bar, then select Screen Mirroring > Apple TV. With the iPad mirroring to the TV, it is possible to display the phrase directly from Google Translate (tap the button to the left of the copy button), but it doesn’t include sketch pen markup like Mental Note does, which can be helpful to highlight certain aspects of the phrase that you’re trying to teach. Having a large digital notepad type of whiteboard surface in your house also has a kind of excitement factor for the young student too.

When we were learning about money, it was easy to put together a quick “digital sign board price list” to cast over to the TV.price list

When we were doing an addition or subtraction exercise (or any worksheet assignment) it helped to bring it into Mental Note to keep everything in the same place, and to have some fun with it too.subtractionworksheet

Assignments were mainly sent to us via email. By screenshotting the relevant parts of the assignment, we could add those into a note, highlight the important parts, add any additional textual information, include any relevant links, and we’d have our lesson plan for the week. Throughout the week we’d return to these lesson plan notes to figure out what to work on next, and we’d use the sketch pen to cross-off or mark-off things that we’d completed. I found using the Mental Note highlighter tool like a “bingo marker” was a quick way to mark something as done, and it offered a somewhat “rewarding” feeling checking off that item. It was also helpful to see the checked-off item through the “bingo mark”, (since the highlighter has a transparency to it), so we could see what we had completed. This was a nice alternative to “scratching out” an item with the sketch pen because you can’t see the item through the “scratches”. Notes like this were indispensable as we moved from week to week through this home school adventure. Mental Note search also allowed us to go back to previous weeks to find something we’d made a note of in previous weeks.lesson plan1lesson plan2lesson plan3lesson plan4lesson plan5

Who knows what will happen once school starts up again (hopefully) in September. If we are back to home schooling, we will certainly keep ourselves organized with Mental Note.

Mental Note turns 10

The first iPhone came out in 2007, the App Store in 2008, and way back in late November of 2009 we released Mental Note 1.0.

MentalNote.appMental Note has been on the App Store for 10 years! Have you been with us since the beginning? Thank you for your support!

We’re still using Mental Note, and we continue to keep the updates coming. The latest release of Mental Note is version 3.14, and it adds dark mode and other support for iOS 13. (And for those few who haven’t yet updated to iOS 13, have a look in Mental Note settings under Appearance, we gave you dark mode as well.)

We also made a number of bug fixes and improvements in a variety of areas. Straight line sketching is an optional feature that needs to be enabled in Mental Note settings (at the bottom), and then can be toggled on/off while sketching in a note by long pressing on the pen width toolbar button. When straight line sketching is on, lines resembling a straight line will be straightened out to perfectly straight. Based on some user feedback, we’ve made the straightening more sensitive, and so you should hopefully have a better experience sketching straight lines with this update. We also made improvements to the Export All notes feature. This feature is accessed by tapping the toolbar button at the bottom of the list of notes screen. A bunch of fixes were made to this feature, including adding the ability to now exclude locked notes from the exported PDF. MentalNote.app

If you’ve never left a review, please leave us a star rating or review. Or even if you left a review years ago, please update your review and leave a comment as to how long you’ve been using Mental Note. Tap the gear icon at the bottom of the list of notes, scroll to the very bottom, and tap “Show support”.

Thank you for your support!

Mental Note 3.13.1, 2, 3 updates

Over the last few months we’ve released a couple updates to fix some customer reported issues. We’ve also incorporated some customer feedback.

We made quite a few changes to get 3.13 working on large, full screen devices, (e.g. iPhone XS). A couple things we overlooked were the switch keyboard button (that globe button at the bottom of the keyboard which is used to switch the keyboard into another language if you’ve configured multiple languages, or to jump to the emoji keyboard), and the dictate microphone button. Both of those are functioning as they should now. Thank you to all the international customers that reported those issues.

There has also been quite a bit of work done to layout of text, some fixes related to moving of sketches, and an important audio crash fix.

Delete SectionRecently, more than a few users have asked us how to delete a section of a note. That feature has always been accessed by tapping the trash can toolbar button, then the Delete Section option. Or by swiping on a section. But to hopefully make this easier, we’ve now added a new feature where you can use the keyboard backspace key to start the “Delete Section” workflow. Place the cursor just beneath the section to be deleted and press the backspace key. The familiar delete button will appear on the section to be deleted.

(Did you know you can quickly and accurately position the cursor in a block of text by force pressing on the keyboard, then dragging around the keyboard area?)

Please help us with a star rating or comment on the App Store. Thank you for your support!