The above quote summarizes my idea for trying to build another note-taking app. Don't worry, I am not trying to bring everyone back to the caveman era, where they communicated using sketches on rocks. Instead, I am trying to bring your handwritten notes into your knowledge management system. Why? Because of the obvious reasons that digital knowledge systems can be edited with different versions, easy to transform and share and so on. Some sharp readers may notice that we already have diagrams and charts as a replacement for pictures (in both pen and paper and in digital systems). But converting them from your notes to your PKM (Personal Knowledge Management System) is a hassle.

We have many modern tools available today to convert images to text, but they do not understand the nuances of our free-form notes with symbols, abbreviations, diagrams and charts that represent our thoughts. So, here is my idea. Build an app that can capture your own ways of note-taking and convert these into its digital counterparts. It is more like an IDE to your thoughts, which takes input from your handwritten notes.

Your thoughts and ideas can be represented in the form of an essay with long descriptions, but to summarize and understand, using symbols as substitutes for your main keywords, and to map relationships between concepts, diagrams can be way better. I want to build a canvas that can bring your essay or diagrams into its digital counterpart, and provide the freedom to tinker, transform and change perspectives on your ideas.

Being a note-taker, I love digital note taking tools like Obsidian, Notion, OneNote and the rest, but I could not utilize them to its fullest unless I am sitting in front of my laptop. Mobiles are great, but being a great source of distraction, I could not use it for note-taking. There is this element of simplicity and ease of use with pen and paper, that even the most sophisticated software could not replicate. I find myself writing my thoughts on a paper, which brings more clarity to my thoughts and makes it easier to capture at the speed of my thoughts. And I have the freedom to doodle anything that comes across my mind without having a boundary or constraint. This is why I love physical notebooks.

Being a fan of note-taking tools and physical notebooks, I thought, why not bring the best of both worlds together without merging them. As a note-taker and note-maker, everyone should have the freedom to choose and switch to whichever mode of note-taking as they wish, without having the hassle of painfully duplicating them from physical notes to digital (for the reasons of transformation and sharing).

The application is going through its first iteration, where you can expect a minimum viable product with basic symbol and text transformation from your handwritten notes into a canvas with a picture representing your notes in a way that you would easily understand. If you have suggestions or want to discuss about kontemplate, ping me a message to my email - connekttovignesh@gmail.com and we can have a chat.