Taking notes during video courses has never been so easy and efficient with VideoNotes
Taking notes during online classes can be a real pain.
Saving video frames into notes requires a cumbersome process:
Pausing the video, taking a screenshot, editing the screenshot, saving it, adding it to the note app, and resuming playing.
These repetitive steps make us less inclined to take notes on important knowledge, resulting in a less effective learning experience. We’ve been hoping for an app that can effectively solve this problem, but unfortunately, none exists. That’s why we created VideoNotes.
Video Snapshot
Taking a screenshot of videos in VideoNotes is easy. Just tap the Snapshot button, and the current video frame will be instantly saved to your notes.
This leads to another feature — Video Backlink.
Video Backlink
By tapping the play button on the screenshot, the video will start playing from the exact time the screenshot was taken.
Text Recognition
Another issue when learning online is the inability to save the text that appears in videos. However, VideoNotes solves this problem by utilizing OCR technology, which enables you to select and perform various text operations on the video’s text, such as editing, searching, translating, and more.
Moreover, OCR also applies to screenshots or images in the note, making it effortless to perform text operations on them as well.
Support for Various Types of Notes
VideoNotes supports various types of notes, including:
- Text: Most note-taking apps provide tons of rich text features, but we consider rich text to be distracting while learning. Therefore, we make text notes in VideoNotes simple and intuitive. Text can be marked as Highlight, Bold, Secondary, Ordered/Unordered list.
- Handwriting: You can use Apple Pencil for handwriting notes.
- Images: You can import images, and text recognition will be applied.
- Playback: Playback notes provide a lighter alternative to screenshot notes. They do not save the screenshot to the note, but they save the timestamp, and you can add a description to it. Playback notes can be considered as sections or chapters in YouTube.
Supported Websites
In theory, VideoNotes supports most video websites. Simply open the website link in VideoNotes to start taking screenshots.
We have also optimized the app for popular video websites like YouTube and learning websites such as Coursera. By “optimized,” we mean that VideoNotes can automatically detect videos or playlists in the link, creating a course and lesson structure for note-taking without any manual work required.
We are constantly working to support automatic detection for more websites and welcome suggestions for which websites you would like us to support.
Download & Feedback
VideoNotes currently only supports iPad. You can download it via this link. If you encounter any issues, feel free to reach out to us via Discord, email, or by leaving a comment here.
Developing VideoNotes required a lot of effort from us. We spent over six months learning product design and iPad app development, and finally launched the app. During the process, we encountered numerous issues, and for some time, we thought there were no solutions. However, when the demo was released, and we started using it to learn, the results were amazing. With the promising demo, we put more and more effort into it. This even impacted the progress of writing the PhD thesis. Nevertheless, we are incredibly excited to have finally solved this problem that has been bothering online learners for so long, and we have planned more exciting features. Stay tuned!
