SpanNote, Android notebook
An Android notebook, made by a student
A notebook for the way you think.
Write by hand. Work through a calculation. Draw a diagram and move it around. Keep your notes, graphs, PDFs and recordings together, on your tablet.
What is new in this version.
The eraser has a new Mask mode. Paint over writing, shapes or pictures and they are hidden, while the paper and its lines stay. Draw it freehand, or as a line, box or circle, filled or as an outline. Choose what it hides, for example only handwriting. Undo brings it all back.
Daily, weekly and monthly pages, a to-do list, a habit tracker, meals, a timetable and a journal. Pick them when you make a notebook or change a page's paper.
A night sky with swirls, stars and a small village behind your library and your pages.
If you sync two tablets, your settings, pens and toolbar now go across too. So does each notebook's cover.
Both now sit on the toolbar. Hide them or move them in Settings › Tools › Toolbar. A sticky note carries its writing when you move it.
Hold a notebook to start picking several at once. Each card shows how big the notebook is.
Moving or turning a selection lines it up with what is nearby. You can now turn this off, in the lasso's menu or in Settings.
Writing is lighter on tablets with less memory or a 60 Hz screen. Saving a very big notebook is much faster.
Ink that sometimes vanished after writing is fixed. So are undo after a mask and Reset crop on a picture whose background was removed.
A few small exercises for your first evening with SpanNote.
Six tools, each with its own way of leaving a mark.
Pressure opens the line. Optional sheen adds a second colour where the ink pools.
A simple, even line for everyday writing.
Pressure and speed shape the stroke. Adjust the bleed to soften the edge.
Soft graphite on the paper grain. Press harder for a darker line, go over it again to build it up, lean the pen to shade.
Round or chisel tip. Crossing strokes of one colour keep the same shade. Lean it for a soft wide shade.
Wavy, zigzag and double lines, or a little picture repeated along the line. Bring your own picture as an SVG.
Pressure and tilt work when your pen supports them. You can also write with an ordinary stylus or your finger.
A small sketch of how the pens behave in the app.
Press the size dot. Slide left or right.
Pause at the end of a stroke and it becomes a clean shape.
An ellipse stays an ellipse.Tap a second finger while holding for a perfect circle, square or regular polygon.
Arrows that stay attached.Curved arrows too. Connectors meet the shapes' outlines and follow when the shapes move.
Draw a line, ellipse or rectangle. Hold at the end.
Shift or a second finger makes it perfect.
Shapes and Bézier curves keep their editable points. Move a handle to change the bend.
Drag a colour from the toolbar into a closed area. The colour fills that part of your drawing.
Select two shapes. Keep their union, their overlap, or subtract one from the other.
Drag either shape. See what stays.
Things a notes app usually sends you to another program for. Here they happen on the page, and all of it works offline.
Write d/dx(x³ sin x) or ∫ x eˣ dx, lasso it, and the exact answer is written beside it. Definite integrals give a number.
Gamma, Beta, zeta, erf, Bessel J and I, Legendre, Hermite, Laguerre and Chebyshev polynomials, elliptic integrals, Lambert W, Si and Ei. Ready to use in sums and graphs.
Equations such as x² − 5x + 6 = 0 or sin x = 0.5 are solved, and roots are found to about 12 digits.
Write a matrix with brackets and it is read from its rows and columns. Determinant, inverse and eigenvalues, complex ones too.
y = f(x), implicit curves, parametric curves. Shade the area under a curve and its integral is written in. Fit a line, quadratic, cubic or exponential to your points, with R².
z = f(x, y) and parametric surfaces: sphere, torus, Möbius strip, Klein bottle, helicoid, even a Calabi–Yau slice. Add a vector field, a gradient, a divergence or a curl in 3D. Turn them with a finger, right on the page.
LaTeX in text boxes and in graph labels. Written maths can become typed maths (experimental).
Wavy lines for photons and springs, zigzag and double lines, arrows that stay attached to their shapes. Draw a Feynman diagram or a free-body diagram in a minute.
A ruler and a protractor that lie on the page: read lengths and angles, draw straight along the edge, zoom to real size.
For the small calculations and the longer ones.
Select handwritten maths and the answer is written beside it. For example, 20! = 2432902008176640000.
Use the Maths panel for derivatives, integrals and matrices. Find roots of equations to about 12 digits. Place typed maths wherever you need it.
ddx(x³ sin x) = 3x² sin x + x³ cos x
∫ x ex dx = (x − 1)ex
ln(e²) = 2
Turn a 3D surface with your finger. Drag and zoom a 2D curve.
The app keeps graphs sharp in exported PDF, even when you zoom in on the page.
Cells can feed each other. Change a number here and the formulas update.
| A | B | C |
|---|
Numbers, + − * / ^, cell references and SUM.
Try =SUM(A1:A3). Select a cell to edit its formula.
A paper to read, a sheet to solve, or notes to pass on.
See the notebook as a grid. Select pages to duplicate, move, export or delete. Drag to rearrange them.
A notebook can change its mind too.
Hide the rough work. Lock the background. Reorder, merge or duplicate layers as you go.
Record while taking notes. Each stroke remembers its moment.
Play the recording back and each stroke appears, whole, when the sound reaches the moment you wrote it. The strokes still to come stay faint. Tap a stroke to hear that part again.
The bit the lecturer said, right here →
A few stored strokes with timestamps. Press play, scrub, or tap the ink.
Stickers for physics, chemistry and biology: laws and reactions typeset, molecules in ball-and-stick, and real anatomy.
Skeleton, skull, spine, rib cage, brain, heart, lungs and kidneys from BodyParts3D (© DBCLS, CC BY 4.0), and molecules from water to DNA. Turning them is a change of view, so it never fills your undo.
Maxwell, Schrödinger, Einstein and Dirac; Haber, Contact and Ostwald processes; photosynthesis, respiration and Michaelis–Menten. Tap one and it is on your page, ready to edit.
Small things that make a difference over a long day.
Open two notebooks side by side in split screen. Keep the reference beside the rough work.
Take a snip from your notes. Link related bits so you can find your way back.
Search what you wrote by hand. Handwriting is read on the tablet and never sent anywhere.
Back up to a folder, Nextcloud/WebDAV or Google Drive. Keep tablets the same through Google Drive, WebDAV or a private GitHub repo. Save .sp, PDF and audio, with a folder for each notebook. Passwords are kept encrypted on the tablet.
Dark, Light, Cosmology, Anime and Starry night themes. Invert the pages when writing at night.
54 emoji from Noto Emoji (Apache 2.0), and science stickers: famous physics laws, chemical reactions and biology equations, typeset so they print sharp. SpanNote works on any Android device running version 10 or newer, with or without pen pressure and tilt.
Twelve colours, twelve of the author's own drawings, or any photo. Write on the cover too, or leave it off.
Scroll down through the pages, or swipe sideways one page at a time, like a book.
Write with the pen in and around a text box and it is typed in for you.
Water, methane, benzene, salt, DNA and more as ball-and-stick models, and a skeleton, skull, spine, brain, heart, lungs and kidneys (from BodyParts3D, CC BY 4.0). Drag the 3D handle to turn them on the page.
SpanNote reads handwritten maths on the tablet, with physics symbols: vectors, bras and kets, daggers, dots, Greek capitals, integrals to infinity. Fix a reading in LaTeX and it learns what you meant (only if you choose to send it).
Cubes, cones, cylinders, spheres, prisms and pyramids that turn in 3D with their axes shown. Set the radius and height in centimetres.
The wand turns your written words into neat handwriting of the same size and colour, still ink you can erase. Typeset turns written maths into typed maths. Both are still learning.
14 / Free to start
5 notebooks, up to 50 pages each.
Every feature included.
Once. Unlimited notebooks and pages for good.
Updates included on all your tablets.
A year. Everything is unlocked while it runs.
Cancel any time in Google Play.
SpanNote is on Google Play as a closed test, open to selected testers for now. Everyone else will be able to install it once testing ends.
Write to spannotes@gmail.com or use the contact form, with the Google account you use on your tablet.
Once you are added, open SpanNote on Google Play with that account and install it. Please tell us what works and what does not.