AgileInk

 A year or two back I picked up a BOOX e-ink tablet to take meeting notes at work and generally pretend to be paper. There are a bunch of options for devices like this including reMarkables, Kindle Scribes, and a bunch of others.

I picked the "Onyx BOOX Tab Ultra C Pro" because I like really long product names. Also, I'm cheap and I found this one on eBay for less than 50% of the typical price. It's great and does more than my first gen Kindle Scribe did, but at the end of the day for note taking it's basically a pad of digital paper. I wanted it to do more than just record pen strokes on virtual pages.

I take a LOT of notes. I'm in 3-4 meetings a day and take 4-5 pages of handwritten digital notes for each meeting. Buried somewhere in the middle of most meeting notes I draw a few little boxes with writing next to them: the dreaded ACTION ITEMS, the stuff I need to get done, at the end of the day these are the whole point to sitting in the meetings in the first place! But buried deep inside these digital notebooks... I rarely ever refer back to them. I end up having to copy those TODOs to some other app and try to track them there. That's stupid.

They say, "you can't fix stupid". I disagree; you just have to put in some effort. These BOOX tablets run Android, so developing for them is a well-supported activity. So I thought it through, made a plan, then spent my handful of free minutes each week pushing to execute my plan: I built a BOOX-specific Android app. It does stuff, mostly the stuff that I wanted it to do. Here's what I wanted:

• Every time I take notes in a meeting, I want that notebook added to a list of notes that should be reviewed for new TODOs
• Reviewing my notes, I don't want to transcribe anything: I just want to circle or point at te TODO items and say, "there they are" to get them added to a TODO list
• I want my TODO items to be categorized somehow, so when I'm working on a dozen different projects, I can easily see which TODOs are for which projects even when the tasks themselves are similar
• I want assistance in creating, locating, naming, and linking my notes to calendar events
• I want my TODOs to have lifecycles of their own: priorities, comments, completion states, etc
• I want my TODOs to actually get done someday, so I want them linked to manageable periods of time when I'll work on them. Like sprints in an agile development flow.
• Oh, and I want all of this alongside anything else that feels like a good idea while I dogfood the app.

Right, so that's my wish list. Along the way I've dreamt up all sorts of additional features; some of them are even working already :)

I call it "AgileInk" and I Plan to publish this to the Play store soon. I posted an early preview video on reddit a couple weeks ago (reddit post) but figured it's best to post additional content here. So, this post is my additional content for now.