My reMarkable finally got the v3 update and, a day and some change later, the desktop client realized it had all the new features.
Most practical quality of life thing: You can do more notebook and note management in the desktop app. You can make new notebooks, move things around, add new pages, etc.
Most interesting thing I’m not sure how I’ll use: You can type notes into your notebooks on the desktop app. The ability to do that with the mobile app is coming.
One thing I love about the idea is that I could conceivably leave my reMarkable at home or not have it on hand but still open a notebook on a laptop or (eventually, soon?) a mobile device and start a note. Suddenly you’re free of the worst paper-like characteristic of a reMarkable, which is that its coordinates in time and space have to match yours to create new content on one. Now you just have to be near a device with a client app.
Interesting – or is it? – to note that in the release notes they want you to think about this as a way to add structuring text – headings – and not body text.
Thing I’m least sure about: … but I’m willing to see how it goes, because it could be great: Endless pages. reMarkable has spent all this time committed to the bit that it is just like paper, including finite page sizes, meaning if you got to the bottom of the screen you had to make a new page. That made for some very sprawling notebooks and tedious paging around to get to stuff. I much prefer the idea of having one page per idea or logical divider or whatever in a notebook. For instance, I’m sketching out an image feed tool. It has:
- Concept
- Requirements
- Implementation Ideas
It makes more sense to me to have each of those areas on their own pages of whatever lengths.
When I think to another kind of note-taking I’d do, meetings, I think I’d much prefer to use the marker tool to open a new page for a given meeting, write the topic and date using the fat marker, then start writing notes on a single page. That makes for a much less cluttered and more easily scanned notebook.
Whether I am going to like this long term has a lot to do with how fluidly scrolling on these endless pages works. People on reddit are complaining about the whole thing, but I can’t sort out how much is bad implementation and how much is people who hate change.
Anyhow, glad to have it all updated. Part of Phase 1 involves getting back into my morning pages routine, which I’d like to try on the reMarkable again.