Colorful notes and tags

[avently]

Hello. Found your app today in F-Droid. What can i say: it is awesome and can be the first real alternative to D Notes which I use the most for years. So i have a thousands of notes probably and based on my experience I want to share some ideas (some of them were shared with D Notes author before).

Anyway, the first thing I'm missing in your app is colorful notes and labels. Labels can have a default color that will be used by default in every note created under same tag. But user should be able to change that color, of course.

By colorful notes I mean an ability to choose appearance color of the UI where notes are visible in editor (maybe title of the note font color and status bar color) and background of a card for the note in categories/main screen.

So, for example, if a note have dark color the font in the card should be white and for light color the font should be black. This way you'll have content visible regardless of the note color.

P.S. Also I would say that a tag and a reminder in a card should have less round corners like a card itself. Now it feels strange and attach too much attention to itself when corners of the tag (and a reminder label) and the card do not match.

[maltaisn]

I looked at a few screenshots of D notes; that's not really the design I'm after. Labels already allow you to group notes, and you can pin important notes if needed, so I feel like adding colors isn't really necessary. I won't close the issue for now, but consider it unlikely to be added.

I would say that a tag and a reminder in a card should have less round corners like a card itself. Now it feels strange and attach too much attention to itself when corners of the tag (and a reminder label) and the card do not match.

I try to follow Google's material guidelines, see the section on chips. I'm not against the idea, but I prefer to follow the guidelines.

[avently]

@maltaisn you probably don't use your app much. Since I have sooo many notes (hundreds) I know how important is to differentiate one note from another based on color. It's much faster to find and really useful. Without the color i would need to read all titles to find the one I added some days ago.

You say about Google's guidelines but Google has Google Keep which is using colors too.
Blindly following guidelines limits the abilities of your app to be more comfortable. Of something is not written inside guidelines it doesn't mean that it's not possible to have a unique look and feel and be comfortable at the same time.

[Waqar144]

+1 for colors. I think it would be great to have label colors i.e., each label has a color, and if I create a note for a label, the "card" of that note takes the color assigned to the label.

This I think is very minimal and allows you to visually categorize the notes, red => important, green => personal etc

[maltaisn]

It should be an easy enough feature to add. The Google Keep style looks fine, I'll probably copy it. I don't have much time right now though, don't be surprised if this is implemented only in a few months.

[Glitchy-Tozier]

+1 for colors.

• Personally, I don't need colored tags
• Individual coloring for notes would be really helpful, however. It helps in quickly finding a note within a list, without having to read each title.

Of course, there may be some way to combine these ideas. This is just theory-crafting, but you could create a list of colored tags that come with the app by default. They could be named according to their color (Red, Green, Blue, Black, White, Purple, ...)

However, a better idea might be to simply add a new Tag-like construct, colors, and allow users to define both tags and one single color for each note. Omni Notes does something like this, and it's the reason why I'm still having a rough time moving away from it, even though it requires way too many permissions.

[maltaisn]

I won't work on this. I estimate this would take me about 10-15 hours.

If someone wants to make a pull request, here's a rough breakdown of the work involved:

1. Add a color field to Note. Ideally an enum and not a color int, because colors will probably have to be slightly different depending on the theme. The color should be nullable for the "no color" situation. Aim for a reasonable amount of predefined colors, 10-20 is sufficient I think.

2. Define the colors for each theme. Add a scrim above the background (e.g. a FrameLayout) in the note preview item layout, and bind it to the color in the view holder.

3. Allow setting a note color when selected. A menu item can be added for this in the contextual action bar. I suggest using a bottom sheet dialog to select the color, as the one seen in Google Keep.

4. Allow setting the note color when editing. The same bottom sheet dialog can be reused here. The edit fragment background can be themed with the color if you want. If this is the case, the system status bar, navigation bar & the toolbar should be themed accordingly (warning: it's a real pain to make it work).

5. Add database migration to add the color column.

6. Make sure JSON export/import still works and is compatible with previous versions.

7. Add tests for everything to keep good coverage.