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Notes

Prologue
With notes being one of the most distinctive features of Opera, I believe their improvement should be one of the main priorities, as they could be extremely useful with some changes and a better interaction with other features. Nevertheless, I think many of these wishes are somewhat “advanced”, so they could be hidden until the user wants to use them. After all, one of the main advantages of the notes, currently, is that they are simple.
While now they’re useful, especially, to keep general information about a specific page, they could be the starting point of Opera in an area that I’m very interested about: semantic web. That, however, might be a bit far off, so I’ll just leave a few “generic” wishes. Once (if) they’re implemented, then we’ll talk more seriously about that


Choose folder on right-click menu
In addition to the current option for saving in the default folder, it would be useful to have a submenu with all the existing folders, which could be chosen in order to save the note to that folder.


Append to existing note
Sometimes, a note can work as a “repository” to where I want to pass several items on a page. It would be of great help if we could append the selected text to an existing note, instead of creating a new one. Displaying all the existing notes in the menu would be too confusing, so I think an “append to last note” option would be good enough.


Note header
Just like in mails or newsfeeds, I’d like to be able to see some information about the note in a header. That information is only accessible by hovering the mouse over the note, which, in my opinion, is not the best choice. That information would include, at least, creation date, last modification date and website.


Note titles
Using the first line of the note as a “title” works in many occasions, but it really looks like a missing feature. We should be able to define a more meaningful title for each note, although the current solution could be a reasonable default value.


Tags
The possibility to define tags or keywords for each note would help a lot in searching and filtering them. While it’s not easy to find a way of doing that with the current system, I think that could be worked out with a properties window that would (optionally) be called when adding a note or editing an existing one. This window would also be another way of fulfilling some of the previous wishes, with an “add bookmark” style of adding notes.


Filters
Connected with the previous wish (maybe I should merged them… aaah, never mind ). I’m thinking of mail style filters that could use dates, tags, sites, titles or the note text.


Note in page icon
This appeared in 9TP1. When some page had a note stored, an icon appeared in the address field. If we clicked it, we would be taken to the note. That had a few problems, namely coming together with the bookmark icon and being “fixed” to the address field. I’d like this icon to return, if some changes were made. Some time ago, I posted this in the forums


Scope definition
This could make sense if the previous wish came true. I’d like to be able to define the “scope” of the note. I can think of three main choices:

• server
  
• page with parameters
  
• page without parameters
  

To explain the difference between the last two: let’s say I make a search for “notes” in the Opera forums. The result I get is a page with some parameters, including the keyword I entered. If I save a note in the scope “page with parameters”, it will only be applied to this specific search, with these specific options. If I save the note in the scope “page without parameters”, it would apply to every search, i.e. as long as it is the same page, the parameters would be ignored.


Export / import notes
Not much to detail here. I’d like to be able to export notes to a few different formats (html, txt, xml, …) and import them from those (and maybe other) formats. This user should be able to export / import a single note, a folder, or a selection of items (including all items).


“Sticky” notes
This would be extremely useful. Right now, I’m using insert_nick’s version. Anyway, using the notes directly would have many advantages, including the possibility to have cookies disabled or an easier way to export those notes.
The basic idea is simple: having the notes working as a kind of post-it. That way, we could attribute a note, not only to a page, but also to a specific point in that page.
That would probably demand some other improvements in the notes. Mainly, they should be able to accept HTML, so that we could format text or insert links. And of course, the “scope definition” wish also had to be fulfilled.