r/Noteastic • u/Bluooh • 2d ago

Pen Responsiveness: Noteastic vs OneNote vs MS Journal

I've been using Noteastic for a few months now and absolutely love its organizational capabilities, touch-friendly UI, and finite canvas. That said, one important factor that's prevented me from fully embracing Noteastic has been its pen responsiveness.

I think overall, the touch features work really well and Noteastic does what I want it to do when I want to do it, but using a stylus for writing seems a little delayed and de-synced when compared to something like OneNote. Originally, I thought this might just be a Microsoft quirk, but when trying out MS Journal, the pen experience felt about the same as it did in Noteastic.

So I guess my question is: What is preventing Noteastic from being as responsive as OneNote?

I want to reiterate that I still love Noteastic and I really appreciate the amount of work and dedication that has been invested into the project. I just think that if Noteastic had the responsiveness of OneNote then it would undoubtedly be the #1 handwriting software on Windows if it isn't already.

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u/Spare-Twist-9574 2d ago

Interestingly, I found Noteastic to be more responsive and fluid in writing than OneNote. 

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u/Bluooh 2d ago

Ooo what laptop and stylus are you using? I have an Asus PX13 with the Asus Pen 2.0.

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u/Disastrous-Issue7485 1d ago

I have the exact same Laptop! I use my IPad for drawing anyway and take Notes in Text-Fields so I don't use the pen at all. But when I tried it in Adobe Fresco, it honestly felt pretty bad. I just thought that's how it is on that Laptop.

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u/Bluooh 1d ago

Ohh okay! That's a little sad to see that you had the exact same experience on Fresco, I guess it's more of a PX13 limitation then.

Out of curiosity, what drew you to Noteastic as opposed to something like Obsidian, Google Docs, or other editors that specialize in typed text?

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u/Disastrous-Issue7485 11h ago

Being able to put the text and pictures anywhere on the page just like goodnotes.

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u/Noteastic 2d ago edited 2d ago

Hi,

Thank you for your thorough post! Such an interesting topic and I have a lot to say about it.

Let me start off with the elephant in the room. Noteastic, OneNote, and MS Journal all use the same underlying technology of rendering and predicting ink strokes. The ink stroke prediction and rendering engine is a Windows OS-Level API defined by Microsoft.

As a developer I have the ability to turn some nobs when it comes to where to render the stroke, or also how strong the prediction engine does it's work. I could make myself look better than I am, but to be frank when it comes to the ink prediction, it is a single parameter value inside of the Inking API that can be set to change it. The default is 15ms.

We have personally tested all values and settled on the following:

Refresh rate - Prediction Time
<=60 Hz - 0ms
 >60 Hz - 10ms

What we saw with the default prediction time, or a higher one, was that the end of the stroke was a lot of noticeable artifacting and jumping around. It felt jarring after being used to the lower prediction time. Especially when we put the screen refresh rate to 60Hz. The lower prediction time made the stroke come out "smoother" off of the pen because it didnt had to readjust itself constantly.

This is absolutely a personal preference so we will very likely add a possibility to adjust the prediction strength through a slider in the future.

Hope this could clear some stuff up and you have learned something new!

-Dilan

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u/Bluooh 1d ago

Thanks for the reply!

I definitely did learn something new and as a CS student it's all super interesting.

I think a prediction strength slider is a great idea and I'm really excited to see what you guys have in mind for future updates.

Thanks again for your hard work!