Interview with “Focus on Notes”: How is the exam artifact made?

We have previously reviewed a special note-taking tool “Notes”, which uses the Markdown syntax, from In terms of note-taking methods, it will be more consistent than Word, graphite notes.

At the same time, it also has a rich visual structure. When you open the application, you can see the contents of each page. Highlighted and colorful notes make it a good assistant for the student party.

Today we invited a product manager for Focus on Notes to let him talk to us about why this app is popular with people.

Knowing Yang Yue

I am a product manager and designer who specializes in notes, Yue, a product of seven years old. Love design and music, you can charge for ten minutes to draw for eight hours.

Introduce the Focusing Team.

“Focus on notes” is our first half-year development, focusing on iOS apps for learning notes. After going online, you will get a fresh app recommendation from the App Store in several countries and a large number of users.

Our team is called the FOCUS team and was founded in Guangzhou in 2019 to focus on efficiency tool application development. There are currently 3 people in total.

Our values are: focus, useful, easy to use, beautiful.

▲Left is on the left

Why would you think of developing focused notes?

Before developing our dedicated notes, we have had several years of experience in developing efficient applications.

Our current audience is student-oriented. Although there are already a lot of notes applied, there are some excellent applications such as Onenote, Bear, and Ulysses. But for the learning scene, there are still many places to do.

Our main focus is on two topicsAbove:

1, Writing – How to simply make more elaborate notes. For example, the features of Multi-topic, page background, scanner are designed for this purpose.

2. Review – How to read and review efficiently. Such as a variety of highlight styles, colorful notes, frames, hidden colors, bookmarks and jumps these features.

It’s a bit of a surprise that some users who like to write novels are also using our products~

Many people like plain text. I think Markdown is too costly to learn. How do focus notes solve this problem?

Focus on notes is an app with “MD above, rich text not full”.

We are exploring how to achieve a more interesting balance between editing efficiency and readability. So we can see that in the focused notes, we still have a lot of things that can’t be customized, such as fonts such as line spacing, but through our presets, users can make “exquisite and easy to read” notes more easily. .

▲Enter more complicated parts, you can use handwriting instead

Markdown is just an input feature. In addition to this, we also provide visual structure editing. With the interaction of buttons, users can easily complete the Markdown language. The thing that is done.

What do you think of Markdown’s strengths?

I also like Markdown very much.

I think the word “advantage” should be the equivalent of comparison. I like to use “rich text” to compare it with more well-known Word and graphite notes. These rich text editing clients are also “plain text”, such as the text editing tools that come with all the systems, such as Pages.

▲Familiar Word (left) and Pages (right)

Benefits are:

With respect to rich text, Markdown is highly abstracted, leaving some “styles” to make the text more organized, easy to read, and not too much The operation is extremely efficient. In my words, it is “the editing experience of hands without leaving the keyboard.”

Disadvantages are:

The cost of learning: Most people still have to spend a whole day getting started, and they have to use it often to be proficient in the language. Many people still can’t stick to it.
Readability is still a bit weak: so there are so many “auxiliary rendering” Markdown format apps. If you just write Markdown, txt is enough.

I made a diagram to show the relationship between these people:

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For the Student Party, why do you think Markdown + notes are an efficient way?

For students, I would recommend learning about Markdown.

In addition to some of the advantages of Markdown just mentioned, after getting used to Markdown, we will be more natural in the mind to draw a logical first Structure, this is a very good habit of thinking – any tool is just an aid, the most effective is the brain itself.

What features will be added to future notes?

Continue to continue exploring the “How to do effective study notes” for a long time.

In the near term, the first is to launch our Mac, Win, and Android versions across platforms (yes, we are a full-platform application hahaha).

I will also fix a bunch of bugs left or found before, and a few other useful features, such as memo cards and folders, will be launched in the near future. .

What are the biggest challenges in the development process?

One is some of the features we are trying to try. How to break through the boundaries of traditional notes, such as the “text frame” (still developing ing…), these features have not yet mature solutions, and even limited by the underlying technology of some original text editors. So do a lot of hacking underlying technology.

The second one is about some problems that editor applications will encounter, such as file storage, cross-platform file consistency, cloud synchronization, and other basic technologies. Currently, there are no particularly mature solutions. Go and explore for yourself. Especially in terms of file storage and synchronization, once there is a problem in editing, the resulting word of mouth is fatal. The difficulty of investigation is also very large. I hope that in the future, there will be some more mature technologies, which will reduce the workload of developers inventing their own wheels.

▲Text box

Develop a product, under what circumstances can you be sure that the direction is right?

About a product direction is right, some of the regular metrics: active users, growth, billing rates, retention, user feedback, etc. Whether it meets the expectations originally envisaged~

But I would care more about the moment I got it, the moment I got it, whether it was amazing. It’s only possible to touch the user if you touch yourself. Hahaha~

How do users feedback on focused notes, are there any interesting stories to share with AppSo?

When you hear feedback from users that are “elegant, stunning, exquisite, beautiful,” the previous night’s hair is worth ~

Because it is a new product, there are still some bugs. But the user still emailed us, even if there are bugs, insist on using focused notes. Instead of criticizing us and then uninstalling it, I am very touched by /(ㄒ o ㄒ)/~~

What opportunities and challenges do you think exist in the current App market?

The current app market is very mature, and innovation is getting harder and harder. For example, it’s hard to see a particularly surprising and refreshing new one in the last year or two. The app product has appeared. However, the competition for both categories is growing, and new products are constantly invading every day. In such an environment, “innovation” and “relatively high quality” are becoming more and more important.

At the same time, thanks to open source and advances in technology, making app development easier, so the hardest challenge is the “creative” that stands out.

Opportunities, hardware and technology are evolving rapidly, such as Surface’s dual screen, Apple Pencil, AR, artificial intelligence, etc. These new technical features are actually very Big imagination space.

Our team leader is creating a refined and refined product experience, although there is still a lot of room for improvement, but It is already what we are best at. In the future, we will still focus on the creation of efficiency tools to form our own brand.