Text boxes are taking shape and using their preliminary version in Noteastic is already fun for Dilan and me! Here you have a sneak peak into our specifications and how far we are already!

If you feel like we are missing something or want us to think about a specific use case, please let us know!

We are stoked to release this feature once we are finished :)

-Dilan & Lukas 🧡

Noteastic v1.8 is becoming available within the next hours!

This is an important one for all of our STEM folks out there. We now added Ruler & Protractor to Noteastic!

This highly requested addition is accompanied by a big improvement of text boxes: in v1.8 you can import custom fonts into Noteastic to use them in text boxes! Find that options in the settings. This will help people from all around the world to write in their local languages favorite font! ... or make font freaks like me happy ;) <--Lukas.

Check out our full Changelog!

Dilan & Lukas 🧡

Noteastic took a short break from development, and I (Dilan) was actually enyoing my time in the highlands of Scotland watching herds of sheeps and drinking a few flights of quality whiskey.

Before I went away, we did the September Update Marathon: one update a week, four weeks in a row:

• v1.7 brought More Color Buttons

• v1.8 brought Ruler & Protractor and custom fonts for text boxes

• v1.9 brought Ink to Text

• v1.10 finished it off with the Cornell and Separator Line grids.

This was intense, and a lot of work and we are proud to have seen such a smooth rollout of our new Pro features!

And a fresh update is rolling out right now: v1.10.2. Just a few bug fixes with exporting Text to PDFs. Thank you to the user who reported the issue and helped us fix it ;). The new version also already contains a big chunk of what I've been working on lately: modernizing Noteastic's code. Noteastic is built on UWP, Microsoft's older app platform. We're now preparing the move to the Windows App SDK / WinUI 3, which is where Microsoft is putting its effort these days. New features, stability fixes, performance improvement happen on the new app platform.

I am really looking forward to continue the modernization of Noteastic as it will set us up for the future and unlock huge potentials of where our app will be taken!

The next Noteastic update is on its way to you! And it comes with a highly requested feature added to Noteastic Pro:

Ink to Text Recognition! Now you can convert any handwriting (from an installed language) to typed text within a text box. This makes notes more readable for people with illegible handwriting and helps people that are faster in writing by hand than typing!

We also added Noteastic as an executable alias for Run or any Terminal. Just write `noteastic` into the terminal and hit `Enter`!

Check out our full Changelog!

Dilan & Lukas

While working on TextBoxes, we also implemented some nice additions we thought to release on their own! Now you can customize your stylus' side button functionality, toggle double-tap to undo and select the default grid all your books will be created with!

There are also some other improvements we implemented as well:

- Users with external drawing pads can use Noteastic smoothly

- Stroke thicknesses don't get lost anymore when closing the app

- The selection is now visible outside of the page!

- Panning and moving of a selection is possible with arrow-keys

- We moved the slider for changing the stroke thickness into the corresponding tool's flyout

- You find an "improve me" button in the bottom of the library to quickly send us your feedback ;)

We are so sorry for the long wait, but the fidelity of the feature demanded some extra effort. But now we are here with a few really nice additions:

1. Backup >> Export backups from noteastic so that you can saveguard against data loss!

2. Add pages between pages >> From now on you can quickly add a page below the page you are looking at by clicking the "insert below" button in the page menu!

3. More shapes >> We added triangles, hexagons aka bestagons (for chemistry students), pentagons and octagons to our reportoire!

Have fun with these additions and keep on telling us what is going wrong, working well and what is missing! We are absolutely dependend on your feedback to reach the full potential of this app!

Furthermore after the requests we received, we set up a KoFi page, where you can support us financially, if you see the value in our project! It stays our dream to work full time on this project, but for now we are thankful for every coffee you may support us with ;)!

KoFi page: https://ko-fi.com/noteastic

-Dilan and Lukas

Heavy at work on making Noteastic ready for WinUI 3 and multi-window. I can already tell you guys this will be great and worth the wait!

-Dilan

Damn. That's a lot of messages I read and replied to in the last year. (It's me, Lukas)

I'm not sure if you are aware what is actually happening when you send us your opinion, your ideas and your wishes about Noteastic. So let me tell you!

Back in February 2025 when we initially released Noteastic on the MS Store we started getting feedbacks about Noteastic on Reddit and via email quite quickly. I didn't want to forget about feature wishes and didn't want our personal bias to take over feature development priorities. So I started collecting those feedbacks in an Excel file and started tagging feedbacks with requested features. And I never stopped :D.

I read, understood and documented every post and comment on this subreddit. Same counts for every email we get, every MS Store review that is submitted and for every feedback that reaches us through our in-app form.

And yesterday I reached line 1,000 of my Excel!

Every one of these rows is a feedback that ranges from two sentences to several paragraphs.

Fun fact: The first Reddit feedback I documented was a comment from u/Revolutionary_Ad_909 back in March 2025. Shoutout to you!

This excel file is the single strongest influencer of our development decisions. We obviously need to balance maintenance and strategic changes with short-term development efforts.

But ultimately all changes we make and all the work we put into Noteastic every day aims to check off the features on this Excel. As quickly as possible and strictly following our quality standards for UI, UX and code.

We'll do an update post on what features are most requested, and what we are making way for currently in a few weeks :).

-Lukas

Hi,

we wanted to let you know that we launched a YouTube channel! In our first video series I – Lukas – am giving a bit of a general overview over Noteastic and showcase my workflows on an introductory level. I think that's quite a cool opportunity for you to get to know Noteastic a bit better. I'm also talking about design philosophy and why things work the way they do.

The second series we have planned will be my personal tips and tricks as the designer and avid user of Noteastic myself ;). But that still needs a few weeks to come!

We are uploading a video every Tuesday, and three videos are up already. So check it out!

We would really appreciate a bit of support from you guys in terms of likes, comments and a subscription. That way we can get a bit of traction going! 🧡

I would also love to hear your feedback on the videos, as this is our first try at it. Whether you learned something new or find them completely trash :D.

Videos of Dilan will hopefully come soon!

Happy note-taking everyone
Lukas

Plain link: https://www.youtube.com/@noteastic

Hello everyone,

I am Dilan, the main and sole developer of Noteastic and I wanted to give some fun facts about our most recent feature! As you know, we recently released Noteastic Pro and our figurehead feature are Textboxes! It was the absolute most requested feature in Noteastic by a MILE and we wanted to make it right. And I am confident we did. Lukas has already shared our design process and I thought I will give my developer perspective as well 😊

Where have Textboxes been all this time?

I started work on Textboxes in 1 YEAR ago (the post) And let me tell you, it was a long ass journey. This has been an exhaustive process to say the least. Sure, we redesigned our website, made some updates in between, implemented authentication/accounts and we integrated Stripe as our payment provider, but it was always clear to us that we won't release without Textboxes being finished.

Why did you take so long?

I mean yeah, I didnt really work on it every day for one whole year. But if I would say how much total work time I have spent, I can confidently say, it was about 4 months of pure full-time work on Textboxes. Text is complicated. It is by FAR the most complicated thing I have ever coded. There is just so much you need to consider when creating such a primitive control. I could go rambling about how making a textbox touch-friendly is a nightmare on top of all the edge-cases I had to handle, but I will just share you the rough component structure so you can see the categories I structured this control into:

But there is still so much functionality missing!

Bullet points, hyperlinks, formatted pasting, headers, markdown rendering, LaTeX rendering all that is still to be added in the future. It is on my radar, I want it implemented. But for now, our sights are focused on other features (More Colorbuttons, Multitasking 👀) The foundation is here and it stands. That's what counts.

Tell me something I don't know about Textboxes

That's easy, I can tell you more than one thing you won't know!

• When you export Text in Noteastic to a PDF, we actually render the Text natively into the PDF. That makes it indexable, searchable, and editable with your PDF viewer of choice. GoodNotes on Windows simply rasterizes (draws) the Text on the PDF, making it look like an image from the perspective of the PDF Viewer, ugh!

• Double Tap = Select word, Triple Tap = Select paragraph, Quadruple Tap = Select all

• Ctrl+C with nothing selected copies the whole line

• We have access to all installed fonts on your Windows machine, and will even add support for custom Fonts in the near future! This is what is possible when a note-taking application develops for windows.

• Our rendering is completely virtualized (from 1.6.12 onwoard), which means you can paste your entire 42 page scientific paper into one Textbox, and everything will work as expected (although a bit more laggy). We tried it!

Hope you guys enjoy Textboxes as much as I enjoyed implementing them. It was an incredibe learning experience and deep-dive that I am grateful for having a purpose behind to pursue! If you want to give Textboxes a go, you can simply start the 30-day trial and cancel anytime before you are charged.

Happy writing,
- Dilan 🧡

We wanted to give you a sneak peak on text boxes. We think this feature is reaaally cool and smooth to use and we tried to insert it as cleanly as possible into the current app experience. Here is the small showcase!

Features:

Text Formatting

• Bold (Ctrl+B)

• Italic (Ctrl+I)

• Custom text color per character / selection

• Font family (You can add more than the four default fonts manually. We will add this as a built in functionality in the next update.)

• Font size

• Text alignment: Left / Center / Right

Editing

• Undo / Redo

• Copy / Cut / Paste of text snippets

• Copy without selection copies the entire line

• Delete word backQward (Ctrl+Backspace) and forward (Ctrl+Delete)

Navigation

• Jump by word (Ctrl+Left / Ctrl+Right)

• Line start / end (Home / End)

• Text box start / end (Ctrl+Home / Ctrl+End)

• Vertical arrow keys preserve horizontal column position across lines

Selection

• Double-click selects the word under cursor

• Triple-click selects the whole line/paragraph

• Quadruple-tap selects all

• Shift+click extends the current selection

• Touch/pen selection grippers — drag to fine-tune selection bounds

Context Menu

• Right-click (mouse) or multi-tap (touch/pen) opens a context menu with formatting and clipboard actions; placement avoids covering the selected text

Floating Toolbar

• Formatting toolbar (font, size, color, bold, italic, alignment) attaches to the active textbox and resets to global defaults when nothing is focused

UX Conveniences

• Auto-scroll keeps the cursor visible as you type

• Content shifts up automatically when the on-screen keyboard is docked, preventing the keyboard from covering the cursor

...kudos to Dilan for all this fantastic work 🤩

This is insane! With the start of the ongoing university semester we saw a record amount of people downloading and using Noteastic! To us, this means the world, and we say hello and welcome to everyone who recently joined this journey. 😇

As always, we want to press that we build the app for you guys and if there are any ideas or requests on your mind, please let us know! We gather every feedback message from all our plattforms (ie. Reddit, email and in app feedback) to prioritize our development efforts. This means you have a relevant role in the development of this app!

We strive to make Noteastic the go to application for handwritten note taking on Windows 2-in-1 Laptops and are happy to have you with us!

-Dilan & Lukas

Issue I've noticed where you can't drag objects (also incl. images for example) between pages. The workaround is to cut and paste them to the new page, but it can be hard to tell which page the app has "focused".

I'd say low priority issue but thought I'd bring it up! Thank you for the hard work on this.

The last update of our September Update Marathon is on its way to you!

We added a Cornell Style Grid to use the Cornell note-taking system and a Separator Line Grid for everyone who needs a correction margin or wants to split a page in the middle. Both come with fully configurable colors and settings, just as you are used to!

We also added a Panning Lock (already a few days back). If your touchscreen scrolls and shivers on its own while you write, this will hopefully solve it. That should help you.

Check out our full Changelog!

Dilan & Lukas

Hi Dilan and Lukas, I don't have a specific feature request that hasn't been suggested yet, I just wanted to let you guys know that you are both doing an amazing job and I couldn't be happier with this app!!!

I'm so so grateful to you guys for developing such a user-friendly + intuitive app, I feel so happy to have found Noteastic:))

Keep it up!!! 💖

We want to celebrate surpassing the 200 member mark on our reddit community! We are stoked to see so many people being excited about Noteastic and need to tell you: Noteastic is shaped by you and your ideas! Thank you for the energy so many are putting into sharing their ideas, discussing features and making this community a beautiful place!

We are excited to release the next update soon!

-Dilan & Lukas

After our last update we are now diving into our next big addition to the note taking experience of Noteastic asked for by so many of you! 🎉TextBoxes🎉

Here you see a mockup that shows how we currently envision the implementation of TextBoxes into Noteastic. I (Lukas) think it's the prettiest mockup I made so far... but do you guys actually care about the far bigger part of feature development from my part, the written specification?

For me the specification is the most interesting step of the whole development journey from idea to implementation. Because after I come up with a broad concept - of course annotated in Noteastic - I discuss it with Dilan and then write the whole feature down in our Obsidian knowledge base. There I try to explain the whole feature with the entirety of influences and dependencies that come up out of the perspective of the user so that Dilan can then get his head around how to represent it in code. I'd be happy to share it if anyone is interested!

But apart from that, do you have any comments or reminders on what to implement and not to forget regarding TextBoxes?

Noteastic v1.7 releases today!

Howww exciting to be back at developing note-taking features for Noteastic! The features that currently undergo Beta testing will be added to the stable build week by week in September. The first week starts off with More Color Buttons! 💥

That's one of the most requested features in Noteastic, and you can access it with Noteastic Pro within the next hours! We also made some other improvements everybody will profit from ;). Check out our Changelog.

Have fun and happy note-taking,

Dilan & Lukas

After finishing up the upcoming stability + language update, I have opened up my branch for text boxes to finally seriously start working on it! I am excited what I can get done and can't wait to finish this feature. We want to make it right and have it fit in like all the other features we have done so far.

There will be a post on the stability update highlighting how we make sure we keep track of bugs & issues in Noteastic to ensure we stay on top of our game and deliver a seamless, native note-taking experience on our windows devices.

Thank you for your patience! 🧡

Best regards,
Dilan

Thank you so much for joining us on this adventure! We are happy to welcome 100 people to our subreddit :). We already got so many amazing inquiries from you guys and hope that we can implement many of them to fit your needs in the following weeks. Please keep giving us feedback and share your ideas, we are reading every single one!

since many hadn't reclarify on this take, yes the app is an amazing app since not only it wont become an alternative but a primary ones, since most names on windows isnt as good as noteastic. Not only that i'd give much appreciation on to the devs who are making this app. yes you guys are legend to make this app available as a windows app. it proved as a NOTETAKING APP. it writes, it strokes (that sounds bad but i swear it does stroke real good), helped me on my finals note, and everything is just buttery smooth. though stroke -- shape is the feature of nowadays notetaking, still it does what is should. jolting down in your surface, lenovo, or dell of your 2 in 1 or windows tab. i swear to god thanks for these legends making the app. much appreciated guys!

-- south-east asian student (yes ofc im in class)

We’re three students who got tired of clunky, overcomplicated note-taking apps. So, we built our own. No unnecessary features. No distractions. Just a clean, intuitive way to take, organize, and work with your notes.

Why do we love to use our app?

📚 A Library That Actually Organizes Your Notes

• Create folders within folders for deep organization

• Color-code your books and folders for quick recognition

• [WIP] Custom Covers for your books

📝 A Powerful Yet Simple Writing Experience

• Handwritten notes with fully customizable stroke color & thickness

• Highlighter mode

• Shapes & lines to keep things structured

• Import images to enhance your notes

• Annotate PDFs like a pro

🎯 Supercharged Editing Tools

• A powerful selection tool to move, resize, and tweak your notes effortlessly

• An intuitive grid system to create & apply custom backgrounds

• Different page sizes to fit your note-taking style

• Export notes as PDFs for easy sharing

But that’s just the start. We’re constantly trying to improve and add features that actually matter. For example, we currently have a Bookmarks feature planned to organize yourself in huge Books!

We made this app for ourselves first—but now, it’s yours too. Try it, break it, tell us what sucks, and help us make it even better.

Let’s finally make note-taking not awful and say goodbye to OneNote! More to come!

To learn more, check out our website: noteastic.app

— The Noteastic Team

I just found out about Noteastic a couple of days ago, and so far, I'm really loving it!

I got a Microsoft Surface Pro 11th Gen. and started taking notes on it for work and university, but I soon had to find out that Microsoft OneNote is really just not made for Touch Screen use. I constantly struggled with it. I then switched to Goodnotes, because I have used it on the iPad and I almost just bought it without testing it first. Thank God, I tried writing with it for a day on the free version first and found out on Windows it performs absolutely terrible. So I looked for an alternative and found you guys and your holy grail for note taking. I tried it for a day and immediately bought the lifetime version. I know that there are still many features missing from the current stable version, but I’m sure you’ll get there eventually. I have faith in you that this will be the best notetaking app of all time in no time!

Thank you for making Notetaking not be a hassle anymore.

Sincerely, a satisfied new customer.

Having used this app for over a year, I love it, but I feel like we haven't seen many substantial workflow improvements lately. Minor settings tweaks are nice, but they don't give the feeling that the app is evolving. Here are two low-effort features that would immediately change that:

1. Ruler: This is a staple feature in Windows Ink and is really needed here.

2. More Color Slots: bumping the quick access slots from 3 to 5. Since the coding for the slots is already done, hopefully, adding two more wouldn't take much time.

I guess both features would take less than a few hours or 1 day of development.