Cirk's Notebook
 

Notebook allows you to write, send, and receive Notes.

Current version
Notebook is currently version 2.2.0.

Download page
http://www.wowinterface.com/download...sNotebook.html

Known bugs
None when running with the default client.


-- Cirk of Doomhammer

I have but one question..... where the heck did you come from? You've been pumping out some pretty well-made and well-working addons in very short order. I have two theories. Either you're some form of alien intelligence on the far side of the moon with nothing better to do that write addons for a game, or you've been working on these off and on for the last year and only now got access to the right client version with the right features to start making them work.

:eek:

I like it =D
Maybe an option for a movable minimap button? Moveable like... Autobuff's one is, just click and drag it mmm

=D

Haha Gaal, thankyou, that made me laugh!

Truth is that I've been working on these mods for a while, on and off, but until now they've really only received circulation amongst my friends and guild mates, who were really the ones that helped me determine the features (and direction) of what the addons became. Anyway, I finally decided I should see if they would also be popular in general, and well, here they are ;).

I use the US client (I live in Australia), and so far everything is localized for that. Although I've not explicitly added support into my code yet for localization, the structures are all in place for it (strings, etc., all contained in several global tables in each addon, no strings in the XML, etc). I'd be more than happy for feedback on what localization text to use for them though :)


I did originally think of a mini-map or other movable button (like Blessings and Chatmanager), but in the end went with the simple approach of just allowing a key-binding since that is frequently the way people will use it once they get it setup how they like it (I use CTRL-N for example, and its kinda become second nature now). If there is enough interest in having something like a button for it though, I can definitely look at adding one.


Thanks for the feedback!

-- Cirk

Tack option
 

Cirk
Do you think it might be possible to add a tack option?
What it would do is allow a semi-transparent movable window to show on the screen,like a sticky note, which would contain the just the note.
This would allow to sticky by copy, paste, tack differen notes about quests, locations etc. on the screen.
And while asking about options.
Resizeable too maybe.....?
Titan compatible....?
Thanks
:)

The problem with adding a "tack" feature is that notes can be a lot larger than your screen size (depending on how much you have typed into them), so it then becomes a question of it should handle scrolling, etc., in this frame outside of the Notebook frame itself.

I did think about giving Notebook a transparency option (to make the entire frame semi-transparent) to allow for players to have Notebook up while doing other things, but haven't implemented that yet.

Note that you can already move Notebook wherever you want on the screen by dragging within the top of the frame where its window name is.

For me, when using Notebook for keeping track of directions, locations, etc., I just switch to the Note I'm interested in for this, drag Notebook to a suitable location on the screen, and then just use the bound key to quickly show/hide the Note whenever I need to look at it.

At this point I'm not keen on allowing resizing of the window, firstly because its based on the existing frames that the WoW client uses (same dimensions, etc.) and that means that the textures, etc. that can be used are limited in size; and secondly because getting the scroll behaviour working right with a resizable window can be a bit painful!
As for Titan compatibility, I've not used Titan, and I'm not sure what you would actually want here? Is there a mechanism for adding it as a button or something? Any pointers/links you could give describing how this would/could work would be useful.

Cheers!
-- Cirk

minimap button
 

i'd love to have a mini map button, too...lol.... Maybe i'm just addicted to those so easy to access buttons, but it is a nice feature! :D i got used to having one with Parchment... lol... great mod!! love it!!

Thanks for the answers on use.
There are at the moment a bars addon which basically is a way of reducing stuff on your screen by giving a place to put a button in a organized way. These are Titan, Bhaldie, Ace BossPanel. But so far I have not dabbled much in Lua, as to know the implementation(just a few rough cut & pastes). Using Titan ATM.
A minimap button would probably work if one is able to find space around it lol.
Thanks

I've been looking for something better than Jotter-K for ages! I hope this does the trick. Feature requests:

- per character notes
- page numbers
- /notebook open <page number> to open that note
- Jotter import if possible! (I know it's unlikely...)

Also it would be nice if there was maybe some way to increase the amount of text viewed - maybe with a double pane a la UberQuest? Or a smaller list of notes?

Anyway, fantastic job - cheers!

- Fin.

Getting a weird bug where my right-click menu is showing up at the bottom of my screen (nowhere near my cursor).

I have MG2 and TipBuddy installed both of which modify tooltips, but I'm not sure if that has an impact.

It doesn't save anymore. :(

Hi tkieffer. Hmmm, it is possible that MG2 or TipBuddy might be interfering with this somehow. If you disable them (or either of them) does the problem go away? Is it caused by either one, or by both of them together?

Saves for me just fine Ninjaneer. Do you have any more details?


Cheers
-- Cirk

Well, everytime I'm done writing in the notebook.. it doesn't save anymore.

Notebook crashes WoW on logouts and UI reloads (although it never used to)
 

Hi,

I've been using your Notebook for a while now, loving it (despite the lack of response to my feature requests :P). Unfortunately however I've just had to disable it. The problem is that every time I reloaded the UI, or logged out, or even sometimes when zoning or just logging in, the whole of World of Warcraft would crash. Windows reported an illegal error about being unable to read a certain memory address.

I am 100% certain it is Notebook - when it is the only addon enabled, I experience the crashes as described above, when disabled, the game plays fine.

The only reason I can think that this might be is that I've made too many notes, going over some internal memory limit for WoW that causes it to try and read outside its limit, or something.

Unfortunately I can't send you my saved variables file as it doesn't seem to have most of my notes there anymore. Sorry about this.

I hope this can be fixed soon - good luck figuring out what it might be. If there's anything I can do to help, please let me know (I'd be happy to test any lua SV files you might want me to, etc.). Please send me an email [via PM] if so.

cheers,

- Fin

Hi Fin, that is a very weird bug! From an addon perspective, we aren't really able to do very much "wrong" in terms of memory spaces, etc., although it is quite possible that some of the APIs that Blizzard provides to us could have some underlying bad behaviour. I know 1.11 was supposed to address some memory leak issues, although I'm not sure where they might have been occurring. In terms of memory usage, LUA itself is quite happy having literally millions of distinct entries, and the WoW client itself has very generous buffers for writing out data (consider that many item and auction database addons have multiple megabytes of memory just for their own save files) so I can't see much there that could be going wrong either.

Only thing I can suggest is try increasing the memory allocated to your addons and see if that makes any difference at all. (To do that, login to WoW and go to the character selection screen, and then select the Addons button at the bottom left. At the top-right of the Addons window is a number indicating the amount of memory allocated to addons. Try increasing it by 8 or 16 and see if anything changes).

Cheers,
Cirk
PS: You might want to edit your post and remove your email address from it - I can contact you via PM or similar if we need to do that :D

In reponse to the error when exitting WoW: It seems to be an issue with corrupted or malformed saved variables. The only option I've found to fix it is to delete them. I had the same problem with some other addons.

This mod is wonderful! I've been using another one that's smaller, but this has more what I was looking for. Thank you!

In concurrence with some of the the other feature requests, I'd like to see:

- Categories using the [+] icons, etc. Similar to the quest log. (I saw this mentioned in the future enchancements section, but thought I'd mention it anyhow.)

- Per character saves, but only if specified. Some things I might want to look at across other characters, but there might be a few things that I don't want to clutter the book of another character. Not sure how you could do this unless you had a "Share" category or something. But that might lead to the need for subcategories, heh.

- Character count. I use this mod this to store some of my macros and knowing the character count would be wonderful! :)

- Font adjustsment features. Just changing the font would be great, but color would be fun too. I don't expect to see a full in-game RTF editor, but you get my meaning.

Thanks again! :)

I like Notebook the way it is: simple and functional. I chose Notebook over the other in-game note addons out there because it has one single purpose, and does it well. It isn't cluttered with frivolous features like tacks and buttons. It just saves plain text in a nice, non-ugly window, and lets me send this plain text to chat. :)

My only "feature" requests are quite small:

1. Non-server-specific notes. One of my many uses for Notebook is to store my "group leader" speech about loot rules such. Another use is to keep track of bugs and wanted features for the many addons I use, in a central location. I don't mind editing saved variables, but while my loot rules might not change often, my addon note gets modified quite regularly, and all this manual copy/pasting takes away from my valuable WoW-playing time! :p

2. Add the Notebook window to the "special frames" list or whatever that is so it plays nicer with the other nice, non-ugly windows. i.e. if I have nothing open, Notebook opens in the normal window place. If I then open up the character pane, Notebook moves over into the second window place, or the character window opens there, or something. I don't know how well this would work with the movability though.

This is the ingame notepad of choice for me since several months for the same reasons
pretty much everyone listed: Elegant, Targetted to a single purpose which it serves well etc.

I do have one potentially serious issue with it though.
It has happened on more than occasion to be chance now that I lose all my notes after and official patch
is applied to the game.

I have no idea how the two could be related, but it has happened many times now to be unrelated.

In fact I have come to expect it and I backup the Datafile to an external location the night before the patch...

A few suggestions...
 

1. When a note is sended to the raid channel, the text of the note can be shown slowly line by line in the chat window. If possible, it would be very useful in the briefing note for raid.

2. Search feature allowing the player to browse all the notes.

3. List and text area can be arranged vertically. If it isn't possible, the seperating bar can be movable.

Above is just my wish.. I don't want to bother you. :D
Thanks~

Hi Cirk,

I recently saw this update note added to BugSack's SVN logs:

This sounds awfully familiar. I tried installing Notebook again recently and had the same problem, and I hadn't deleted my SavedVariables yet (I'd quite like to keep a lot of those notes). Is it possible Notebook might allow the creation of strings with over 983 chars?

cheers,

- Fin

That'd be a useful thing to have bitz, great idea!

Ugh, too much work, hehe!

Hmmm, making the separating bar movable might be possible, I'll keep that in mind for the next release.


Hi Fin, thanks for the update. Thats an interesting thought (and well spotted). Currently Notebook allows creating notes with up to 2048 characters in them (the size that I set the editbox to), which Notebook stores as a single string, and that's always worked fine in the past for me. One thing though is that my notes always have are quite a few new-lines in them, so I wonder if having a text string greater than 983 characters with no line breaks in it might be the cause of the problem?

Oh, are you using a MAC or PC for WoW? (Wondering if this might be a bug or problem that only shows up in the MAC client - I use a PC, as do most of my guild).

If you feel adventurous, you could try editing your saved variables Notebook.lua to truncate any really long notes you have, or maybe even add in some newlines (find a note in which you've already done that to see how to format it) and see if that allows it to work properly. (Just make a copy of the original saved variables so that you can restore it if it doesn't change anything). I'd be very interested to know whether that changes anything for you or not.

Hope that helps some, and I'll keep looking at that string length thing now I have a lead :)

Cheers
-- Cirk

I'll add another piece of info in the same vein, just in case it's related with the corrupted / disappearing
notes I get after game patch (I've reported it a few posts back)

In Telic's NotesUNeed Readme.txt file there's this section on problem notes:
Hoping some of it might help me get rid of the elusive "disappearing notes" problem in your Notebook.

Oo, thanks for that Dridzt, seems like a very similar problem indeed, particularly where Telic mentions "OR possibly adding an escape character to a full buffer leading it to overflow/lose a final character.", which is my current theory about what is going on. I.e., that the saved variable handling code has a fixed line width it uses for spitting out the codes and expressions, and if you exceed this buffer size, boom.

Again, I'm still thinking that using newline characters in your notes (effectively breaking the single saved variable note "string" into multiple lines in the saved file) prevents this problem, but I've not had a chance to test this myself yet.

All feedback very much appreciated, and thanks a heap guys for the detective work!

-- Cirk

I've finally updated Notebook (after many requests) to WoW 2.2 and TBC in general.

In regards to the above discussions and the crashing or losing data, I've implemented long-string protection in the save algorithm (thanks to Dridzt for finding Telic's post and Fin for finding the BugSack one - I know it took me a while to follow up, but your help was still invaluable). I've also implemented a "don't save if we didn't load properly" component in there, since I've been noticing that sometimes WoW likes to send a PLAYER_LOGOUT without ever sending the previous PLAYER_LOGIN. I think that is one of the things that happens on a new patch the first time.

Bitz, I've slowed down Notebook's sending speed to 0.5 seconds per line, and limited line lengths to 80 characters, so hopefully that will go somewhat towards what you were asking for for slower sending of messages.

Phanx, Notebook now saves all its notes globally (i.e., not per-server), as requested! (It also will load any old notes, so if you still have an old SavedVariables for Notebook, you can re-instate it).

Cheers
-- Cirk

You're welcome! And kudos to you for fixing it in the end. I always loved Notebook.

cheers,

- Fin

Hiya

Great you have put the delay feature in but is it possible to make this variable or even some kind of option for mapping a key / set of characters to denote a longer pause before displaying the next line.


for example:
Blah Blah
Blah Blah Blah
%wait 5%
Blah Blah
Blah Blah Blah

Lingering

It seems that now if a note is long enough to be split into multiple strings for saving, I get this error when opening Notebook:

Notebook-2.2.0\Notebook.lua:1126: bad argument #2 to 'format' (string expected, got nil)
Notebook-2.2.0\Notebook.lua:1126: in function `NotebookFrame_OnShow'
<string>:"*:OnShow":1: in function <[string "*:OnShow"]:1>
<in C code>: in function `Show'
Interface\FrameXML\UIParent.lua:1596: in function `ShowUIPanel':
<string>:"NOTEBOOK_PANEL":4: in function <[string "NOTEBOOK_PANEL"]:1>

and none of my notes are viewable. They are still saved, though, if I look in the saved variables.

Thanks for the global note change, btw! <3

Can I just check, I'm so used to using TinyPad but my main qualm is that it doesnt categorise my pages under headings.. I need to flick through 9+ pages to get to what I want, so this mod seems ideal.

I also, however, use TinyPad to test out LUA code. Is this in any way possible with this mod?

Not to take away from Cirk's Notebook, but there is FuBar_TinyPadFu - you can select any page from the tooltip.

I was thinking the same thing, but not so much the movable bit. I was thinking of something like BEQL/EQL3 http://www.wowinterface.com/download...og-WoW2.3.html

That makes things a lot easier to read quickly.

Also, do you think it is possible to add a sort of "to do" list feature that can be made to pop-up on login? Because I find that I forget to do stuff I left off doing. And if I had a reminder when I logged in my life would be just that much easier. :)

Thats a great idea lingering, I'll have to think about how to include something like that...


Hmmm Phanx, thats a puzzler, since the place that erros is coming from is completely unrelated to the way in which notes are saved! Does it happen everytime you open the Notebook page, or only when you first open it, or does it happen when you login only?


It doesn't support this at the moment no, sorry :(


I've thought about adding something like that, but just haven't gotten around to rewriting the relevant sections of Notebook.


I had a guildmate asking for something much the same! No promises, but it might happen one day :D

This thread is waaaay old but the mod still works great. I was wondering if anyone knew the location of the saved notes that was typed in?

I made 10 notes and looked in the AddOns folder under Notebook and there is no file (or any file there) that has the notes that were saved.

thanks for any help

They would be in the saved variables folder.

Thanks for the fast reply. :)

Doc

grrrr. I just spend alot of time to create 5 notes in game. I went to the saved variables folder and edited the text i made in game (its eaiser to do it out of game) and then restarted wow to see my notes and it reset back to the original "welcome" text. I've lost all the notes i created.

I created a new note in game and tried to duplicate what happened and figured out that the Notebook mod automatically adds \ and \r in the code when you hit save. It did not do that offline when i manually edited the note.e

My next questions is, Is there a program or something that i can type my notes into and it add the correct coding as needed automatically? Then i could pase it back into the saved variables file and load it like that.

basically I need to type out like 80 notes then each note would have like 5 paragraphs in it because of the limit on letter characters. But I also dont want it to delete the notes at any time.

If you use tinypad, there is a program called tinypadeditor. There is a link to it in the comments.

Tinypad is hosted here.

I found tinypad, but cant find tinypadeditor. Im guesing there is no standalone version? If so, I cant find it anywhere.

Tinypad editor is in the comments of tiny pad. It's the newest one.

Dreadlorde, you are epic! Thanks for the help with locating and fixing my prob :)

ty ty

Doc

Note that you can also simply copy/paste into Notebook (and from Notebook into anywhere else) if you prefer to use another mechanism for writing your notes than Blizzard's wonderful built in editor :rolleyes:

I.e., write your notes in your windows/mac text editor of choice, copy the text, alt-tab to WoW, bring up Notebook, and paste it in.

I have a few tweaks to do on Notebook, just not getting a lot of time to work on my addons at moment, and since its still working, its dropped in priority a bit ;)

-- Cirk

I decided to use notebook. Superb mod btw. Its working for what I need it to but I dont use fubar and titan is bugged out the wazoo right now. Fubar worked for like a day and just started removing my addons i had shown and stats were off by alot. I deleted the wtf folder prior to installing fubar also.

If there was a drop down menu to select your "note topic" to go straight to it, I would bow down to you. Oh, and the drop down menu should be scrollable. I literally have somewhere around 80 notes that are all several pages long :)

thanks for a great mod!

Hey Cirk,

Any plans to update Notebook for WotLK? :)

Suggestion...
 

Hey, is it possible to add a way to keep Notebook "pinned" to the hud? I mean, do I have to type /note or /notebook every time I want to look at it? It sure would be nice if there was a handy icon I could press!! I would put it right next to my Bag Bar, all cute and cuddled up with my ammo sack. Please make an icon option! Please!

You could put /notebook into a macro... :)

Notebook has a key binding - look in the key bindings menu for it. I use CTRL-N for mine :D

mini map button!
 

i saw that several people before asked for a minimap button. i am just going to add myself to the list in case you are looking for enough people who want it before adding it. :) great addon

From my understanding of his replies to you and the other people requesting this, Cirk isn't waiting for some arbitrary number of people to request it before he adds it; he simply isn't going to add it, and I sincerely hope he never does add it. Minimap buttons are an annoying disease upon the UI. Is using a keybind really that hard to do?