2003-08 - NoteTaker online notebooks

Another contact from NeXT brought me into this precursor to Google Docs that sadly never got traction. It was a notebook organizer that ran on Mac OSX. It featured real-time collaborative editing, but was way richer than Google Docs ever became.

Ironically, Aquaminds faced a similar onboarding barrier that Google is still trying to solve to get customers to onboard their domains with their Cloud products. To set up sharing (initially peer-to-peer than later centralized from a server), customers had to muck with DNS records and email ports—something most people just don’t feel comfortable doing.

NoteTake User Guide

This book documents the notebook organizer and sharing features. I used the same page design I developed for NeXT—even starting from the original FrameMaker template. I then got help from a graphic designer on decorative art, fonts, margins, and the like.

Explore the whole manual (very slick): NoteTaker_Manual.pdf

Click the picture to enlarge (4 slides):

NoteShare Server/Administrator guides

NoteShare Server was their product that let teams host shared notebooks from a central server, rather than sharing peer-to-peer. I wrote guides on using NoteShare Server and its companion application NoteShare Administrator. The manuals were authored in a NoteShare notebook. You need NoteShare (or NoteTaker) to see the actual notebooks, but here are some excerpts:

Click the picture to enlarge (2 slides)

Marketing videos

To really see how cool the notebooks were, check out my Marketing videos.

Click the picture to open the videos