Introducing Notebook.ai’s template editor for all your pages

You can now customize any category and field — even Notebook.ai’s default ones!

A rather large update just went live on Notebook.ai that completely revamps the system used for fields and categories on your pages. Rather than simply adding or deleting categories and fields from a small modal, there is now a dedicated page in your notebook for customizing the template of each and every page type: characters, locations, languages, and more.

The template editor is very much a foundation: it can do everything you used to be able to do and more — with more coming soon. Here are some of the new features:

What’s new?

• There’s an all-new page for customizing the categories and fields for all of your pages. Rather than a small modal, there’s now a more intuitive, full-page experience that I hope to keep adding more features to.
• All categories and fields are treated the same now, whether you made them or not. You can add your own fields to default categories, continue to add your own fields to your own categories, and even delete default fields if you’re not using them.
• You can now temporarily hide categories and fields. Rather than outright deleting a field (and its answers), you can simply choose not to show it. This could be particularly handy for already-made pages that you might want to continually reveal more and more of the world to others through: simply create the page and then hide what you want. When you reveal a field again, all of your answers to that field will come back also.

You can now temporarily hide or permanently delete any field — even system defaults.

• You can now customize the icon used for categories with over 300 icons to choose from (courtesy of Material Icons)! Your notebook should reflect the awesome world you’re building — not the other way around.

I’m probably more excited about this feature than I should be.

• You can now make any field private for your eyes only — even if you share pages with others. Simply start your custom field with “Private” like “Private notes” or “Private plot-twist”.

Keeping any field private is now as simple as calling it “Private”.

• Writing prompts can now be generated from any field — even your custom ones. These writing prompts are rolling out slowly to all users this week, so if you’re not seeing them yet, don’t worry! They’ll start showing up automatically for you soon.

You’ll start seeing writing prompts for all your custom fields soon, too.

• Autocomplete is being turned on for select fields across all types of pages. For example, if you create an “Eye color” field on your Deity template, it’ll automatically suggest common eye colors. These smart fields are slowly being enabled based on field labels, and you can expect more and more of them to pop up over the next few weeks.

Fields with a lightning bolt icon next to them might suggest optional ideas for you as you start typing.

What’s coming next?

I wanted to get this release into everyone’s hands as quickly as possible after starting full-time development work on Notebook.ai (I’m still so excited!), so there are a few features that are still in development. There’s a quick list below, but if you have any other suggestions I always love to hear them!

This new full-page experience is perfect for adding additional features to, so here are a few more features that are coming soon:

• In addition to creating new text fields, I plan on also having the ability to create linking fields to other pages also.
• Reordering categories and fields
• Editing existing category and field labels
• Changing the fine-grained privacy of specific categories and fields (without having to have “Private” in the name)
• Autosaving — so you don’t need to manually save each change

What’s the grand vision?

I’m really excited for this new page, so I want to pull back the curtain a little bit and let everyone in on what I hope to eventually accomplish with this full-blown template editor.

After each of the above “what’s coming” features are implemented, I expect the template editor to be robust and featureful enough for anyone to start creating their own entirely-new pages in Notebook.ai. If you wanted an “Illness” page with symptoms and traits for all the diseases in your world, you’d be able to make one, or if you wanted a “Spaceship” page with rooms and technologies and people on board, you’d be able to make that too.

I want to keep adding more and more page types for everyone over time to Notebook.ai, but obviously there needs to be a little customization on top of a “one size fits all” approach — the default templates are helpful for most people, but some people want to go all-in and create entirely new page types for their world. I would love to let you, and this is how I plan to.

Afterwards, I’m really excited to put something together that lets users share their templates with others. You could share your awesome Illness page template with others, and they might share a slew of other types of pages for you as well. This could extend outward to all new kinds of page types for everyone, and it could go the opposite way as well, with people sharing, for example, really specific page templates for their own brands of creature or background character.

There’s still a ways to go before we can start building out our awesome ecosystem of worldbuilding templates for each other, but I’m working hard to get us there and I’m really excited to see what’s a little further down the road!

Happy worldbuilding!

Andrew

What is Indent Labs?

Indent Labs is, at its core, a collection of ambitious open-source natural language processing projects aimed squarely at moonshots in the field of writing. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could generate quality stories from outlines, or automatically outline a story? What about generating a story as you make decisions on behalf of a character?

The first word processor showed up in the 60’s and revolutionized writing through technology. Isn’t it time for another shift forward?