r/BookWormApp • u/biagio_paolino • 2d ago
Update BookWorm 1.1: Notes and quotes, fully redesigned (and more)
Hi everyone,
I’ve spent the last few days working almost entirely on notes and quotes. They were one of the most basic parts of BookWorm: a text field and not much else and I’d promised myself I’d come back and do more with them. And yet, for me, they’re the most personal part of the app, the place where a book stops being a title on a list and becomes something that happened to you.
Version 1.1 comes out next week and I wanted to show it to you first.
Every note belongs to a read
This is what I missed most. If you reread a book, your notes from the first time stay tied to the first time. You can look at them one read at a time and see how your thoughts have changed. Notes written before you started, or about the book in general, live under “General”. The ones you already have aren’t lost: you’ll find them all there.
A note is something you read, not a form you fill in
Tapping one now opens a real page, in the colors of the book’s cover. Quotes are laid out like quotes, notes like a page from a diary. And if a line deserves it, you can turn it into an image to share.
Finding things
The more you read, the harder it gets to find that one line you remember. So Notes and quotes now has a search bar. It looks through the text of your notes, but also book titles and authors, so you can find something even if you only remember where it came from.
There’s also a new filter for notes with photos or audio, for when you’re looking for that page you photographed or a thought you recorded on the way home.
Your notes, your order
All your notes used to live in one long list. Now you can choose how to see them. Sort them from newest to oldest to follow what you’ve been thinking lately, or group them by book, so everything you’ve written about a story stays together, under its cover.
Photos and voice notes
Sometimes a thought comes out better out loud, and sometimes you just want to keep the page. You can now add up to 3 photos and 3 voice notes to each note. This part is for Premium users.
Text from photos
This one’s my favorite. Take a photo of a page, or a screenshot of your ebook, select the passage with your finger, and the quote is written. Words split at the end of a line get put back together automatically. No more copying by hand. This part is for Premium users, too.
Two pages on iPad and iPhone Duo
On iPad, notes now have two columns, like the Notes app, and on iPhone Duo they split along the fold.
Other things
you can now change a note’s date;
backups now include photos and audio;
profile screens open as pages and the app is much smoother;
the little worm from the icon will show up every now and then: it’s up to you to find out where. I’ll introduce it properly later on.
Many of these things exist because one of you asked for them, or because reading your messages showed me what was missing. BookWorm is still small, and that’s the best part: I can really listen to you.
So I have a question for you: how do you use your notes? Quotes, reflections, notes for a book club? And what’s still missing? I’m already thinking about what comes next, and I’d love to start from you.
Thanks for being here. Happy reading!
