Quote:
Originally Posted by ManDay
Watching that part of the video you linked, it occurred to me how that whole "Pentagram & Asterisk" thing is another indication of how a different team led the design and development of the software, compared to the S1.
The S1 had a thoroughly thought-out, complete, and clean software (apart from the web browser, perhaps, which arguably felt somewhat like a makeshift solution which didn't fit in all too well). In the S1, the user would place a bookmark by tapping the screen in the corner and be done with it. Clean integration, quick interaction, semantically meaningful.
The team for the RP1, on the other hand, just seems to have put together a bunch of features which seemed "cool", but without giving it much thought. Instead (as I understand) of bookmarks, you now "scribble" one of two icons on the page. One might assume that this leads way to some clever feature but, oh, turns out in the end all this ends up with but the same semantic content of two kinds of bookmarks. But instead of being clean and semantically meaningful, we have entangled more degrees of freedom (e.g. "putting multiple pentagrams onto a single page", "drawing pentagrams in different styles", etc.) with technical redundancies ("useless", "useless", etc.), introduced pointless technical complications, and made interaction slightly more akward for the user.
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Hmm, so, the RP1 keeps track of the pages you've written on in one list, the "Handwriting List", and your highlights in another, the "Highlight List". Both of these lists are displayed in a two tabbed list in the "Annotation List" option on a document. You don't have to draw pentagrams, stars, or any geometric shape. I guess you think that because one silly reviewer drew pentagrams! LOL. You just write something on the page in order for it to be bookmarked.
A rendering of the complete page, with handwritten notes, is shown in the "Handwriting List", such that you can actually read the text and see the context, an excellent feature, in my opinion. The Highlight list shows the actual text that you highlighted, also a wonderful thing, I think.
I find this approach to be simple, clean, and more powerful than the original approach. I think the second team, if there were two teams, thought a little harder about the problem and decided that if you took the time to write something on a page, a bookmark should be automatically generated.
How many times do readers forget to click on a little bookmark icon and lose an important place in a document? A lot, I would say, it certainly happens to me all the time. The new approach allows a user to focus on reading and marking up a document and does not require them to interrupt that flow to create a bookmark.