Years ago I had difficulty in taking notes and capturing information, and couldn’t find anything to fit my needs. I tried to create a cross-platform application to fill the gap: NotAra. I faced technological problems, life intervened, and the project just got stuck. Today, I am not even sure, whether I pushed all local changes to GitHub.

Since I am preoccupied with other projects, and having hard time finding quality time to work on NotAra, I am going to keep it, as much as possible, simple. There is going to be two types of capture method: Highlighting and clipping. For now only PDF files can be shown. Using html rendering power of Qt, displaying formats such as html and epub is also planned.

PDF annotaions is a review tool. They are useless for research notes and organizing them is pain. Also now web pages are a better resource for research or learning in general and bookmarks are incompetent to organize. There is already many applications providing a solution for this issue, albeit not completely. Some too complex, some requires a cloud subscription (though this is a plus for syncronization, even when privacy is disregarded there is the issue of file or database size limits), others do not have certain requirements, rest can only show and annotate only PDF or HTML.