Happy New Year from Notebook.ai! Here’s what’s new in the new update.
Happy new year! I’m so excited to keep improving Notebook.ai every month, and I have huge hopes for 2020. I hope you’re all enjoying the site as well. Thanks for being along for the ride!
A pretty chunky release just went out (gotta start the year off right!) so I thought I’d write up a quick something about what’s new.
In short:
- The questions Notebook.ai asks about your pages are smarter, faster, and available on more pages
- The template editor for all of your pages has been redesigned and improved
- Tons of bugfixes, quality-of-life improvements, and UI polish
And, in a longer format…
Smart questions for your pages have been significantly improved
By now, you probably know that Notebook.ai can ask you questions about the pages in your notebook and automatically save your answers in the proper place. This code has been entirely rewritten, and is now significantly faster (like, seriously, almost 500% faster — it’s super fast now). This should lead to faster page load times across the site, but also open up new avenues to improve the question system that wouldn’t be possible with things being so slow before.
Additionally, you’ll now also see questions more around the site. If you click over to see a list of your characters, you’ll be presented with a question about one of those characters. If you look at locations, you’ll get a question about one of your locations. If you filter your notebook by universe, your questions will also be limited to pages within that universe. And if you filter any type of page by a tag, you’ll — surprise — be guaranteed a question about one of your pages that has that tag. This should make questions a lot more relevant to what you’re working on at any given moment.
Finally, prompts around the site now support linking to other pages while you’re answering them. Simply type @ to bring up a list of pages at any time and select the one(s) you want. It’ll insert a code (like [[Character-123]]) that’ll convert to a link to that page when you save.
Manage your image uploads and bandwidth in your data vault
There’s a new section of the recently-released data vault dedicated to letting you manage all of your image uploads in a single place. You can see a list of images you’ve uploaded, what pages they’re attached to, how much account bandwidth they’re using, and how much bandwidth you have left on your plan.
Profile and personal settings improvements
Your account settings page has been redesigned to match the rest of the site, and there’s several new fields for you to fill out for your profile. As always, these are all optional, but sometimes it’s fun to let others know about your favorite author, book, quote, inspirations, and more. You can now also link a website from your profile page too!
Additionally, you can now upload an avatar for your profile directly to Notebook.ai, instead of the old system of creating an account on Gravatar and uploading one there. But if you prefer to use Gravatar, you still can.
Worldbuilding page updates
Items, Sports, and Flora pages have had their site-wide icons and colors adjusted to be easier on the eyes and more readable. Also, the icons are way cooler and look nicer on high-resolution devices.
Additionally, you can now add links to other pages in the name and description fields of any page (the fields that get shown on cards for that page around the site). For example, you can write “[[School-1234]] Headmaster” for a character’s role and it’ll transform into “Hogwarts Headmaster” with a clickable link directly to your Hogwarts school page.
Template editor improvements
The template editor for each of your pages (where you can customize, for example, what categories and fields you’re asked about on characters, locations, etc) has been redesigned. It should not only be more intuitive to use, but also much faster to make changes in. I’m working on enabling multiple types of fields you can choose between (text, link fields, and more), but it’s not quite ready yet; while I continue working on it, you can still enjoy the new editor!
There are also 51 new icons for you to choose from when customizing your categories, bringing the total up to 357. A lot to choose from! :)
Lastly, the template editor can now suggest categories and fields for you! I think this is super cool, because it learns from how other pages get built. For example, if you create a category for “Looks”, it’ll suggest fields like “Hair color”, “Eye color”, “Height”, and so on. It technically works with any category, but might not have suggestions yet for all categories — it’ll only get better as the system learns more over time!
Export your notebook in the new YML format
You can already export your entire notebook in a variety of formats already, but more formats means more likelihood that your export will already be in the right format for wherever else you want to take your data. To that end, you can now also export your notebook pages in the popular format YML. If you’re working on any software for writers and need another format to let users bring their data over, please let me know!
Other miscellaneous improvements around the site
- Recently-deleted documents are now available in your personal recycle bin (accessed through your data vault). Like any other page on Notebook.ai, you can recover any recently-deleted document for up to 48 hours after deletion. Premium users can recover documents for up to 7 days after deletion.
- The recently-updated dropdown that lets you quickly switch between pages you’ve recently worked on has been redesigned. It’s now a full-page sidebar on the right side of the page that lists each page (with a link to it) and how long ago it was last updated. The number of recent pages shown has also been increased from 10 to 20 for premium users.
- A bunch of niche bugs around the site have also been fixed. If you’re still seeing any problems anywhere, please let me know!
That’s all for now, but I’m already at work on the next big release. I can’t wait to see how much Notebook.ai improves in 2020! :)
Happy worldbuilding from Notebook.ai!
- Andrew
