Supernote Navigation

Continuing my exploration of the Supernote Nomad, I spent some time last night and today playing with headings, keywords, stars, links, Favorites, Quick Access, and Digests. All of them allow you to move between and within your notes and they offer some really clever, useful functionality which underlines the fact that Ratta abe building a digital notebook, not just an e-ink reader with basic note-taking functionality. The last two features I talk about are for PDF and epub documents but because there is a lot of overlap in how you work with notes, it is worth mentioning them here too.

Favorites

Possibly the most traditional feature for devices like the Nomad is the ability to mark files as being favourites and then being able to access them easily. In the Nomad, the Files view (page… application… I’m not sure what the official nomenclature is) you can browse through folders of your files (most of which will be stored in the Document or the Note folders. You can tap a star next to each file which then marks it as being a Favorite. You can then view a list of just your favourite files in both the Files view and the Quick Access view.

Quick Access

Via the menu, you can add the current page you are looking at and/or the notebook it is to the Quick Access section of the sidebar menu (swipe down on the primary sidebar).

Headings

Headings are a per-notebook navigation system where you can select some text with the lasso tool and then mark it as being a heading. The selected text is then added to a view in the Navigation Window (along with the page number) and you can tap on a heading to jump straight to that page in your notebook. The selected text is also highlighted in the note itself so you can see what your headings are as you look at the pages.

Keywords

Keywords are like bookmarks or tags. You can associate a keyword (which can be more than one word) with one or more pages in a notebook which allows you to jump to them quickly and easily via the Navigation Window. Unlike a Heading, the keyword does not need to be actual text that appears on the page (although it can and you can create Keywords from text you have written).

As an example, if your notebook related to work and you wanted to be able to know which notes needed some follow-up action, you could create a “Follow-Up” keyword and then tag each relevant page with it. You can then view a list of all of the pages tagged with the keyword and jump straight to them.

You can also search for keywords across notebooks via the Global Search.

Keywords can also be added to PDF and epub documents.

Stars

If you draw a star on a page then the page is listed in the Navigation Window. It’s a really quick way of marking pages which you need to jump to. There is no title or description so they are not ideal for “indexing” things but this is a very quick way of marking things on probably a temporary basis.

The Global Search can be used to search for stars across files but you do need to supply at least part of a file name.

Links

Links allow you to create relationships between items in notebooks. A link can either be created by selecting some handwritten text or from the toolbar in which case the link is to the current page rather than a specific part of it.

Links can go to:

• Another page in the current notebook.
• Another notebook (but not a specific page in it).
• A web page.

Digests

Digests are blocks you highlight in PDF and epub documents. You can then add handwritten annotations which are additional notes about the text you have selected.

These highlighted sections, and any annotations, can be viewed and managed in the Digest app.

Bookmarks and Annotations

If you are reading a PDF or an epub file then you can, in addition to doing the usual selection from the table of contents, create bookmarks and annotations. A bookmark can be given a name and a list of bookmarks is available in the Navigation Window.

Similarly you can handwrite on a PDF or epub and these comments are listed as Annotations in the Navigation Window.