What Is Prontonote?

Introduction

Prontonote is a note taking application written in Java. It is released under the GNU General Public License, this means that it is free to download, free to modify and free to distribute!

Note: This document is written in the context that the application is finished, please see the roadmap for details of what features are available in the latest version.

Multiple Versions

Prontonote can work in two different ways: Standalone and Network-Client. The Prontonote Client is able to connect to a Prontonote server as well as run in standalone mode.

Notebook Structure

Prontonote employees a tree structure for the representation of a Notebook. The components of a Notebook is as follows:

• Notebook - contains Categories and Notesheets.
• Category - contains child Categories and can also contain Notesheet.
• Notesheet - contains Notes.
• Note - contain Note Items, which are the different components for a Note.

Different Types of Notes

There are different types of notes that are available to be used, it is even possible to create your own types of Notes (this requires an understanding of Java). The built-in Note types are:

• Text Note – this stores and displays text, you can flag your Text Note Items as things like todo and important.
• Image Note – this stores an image and allows you to add text labels and to draw your own pictures.

Multiple Front-Ends

Prontonote Client is designed so that it can be used by different types of users in different types of environment.

• Command Line Interface (CLI) – for people who want to use Prontonote through the command line.
• Swing – for people wanting to use Prontonote as a window type application (works in any environment that supports Java’s Swing).
• Web (in JSP) – this will require the installation of Apache Tomcat on the Prontonote server. Some features will be unavailable in some of the front-ends (e.g. images will be unavailable in the CLI).

Multi-user

Prontonote Server is designed to be a multi-user system, this means that you can have different user accounts for different people. It is also possible to set permissions for Notebooks and it’s child items, giving different users and groups different privileges.

Server-Client or Standalone

The Prontonote Client can run both as a client for Prontonote server as well as in a standalone environment. This allows you to work collaboratively on Notebooks within a group as well as privately.

Database Connectivity

Prontonote Server allows you to use a database for the storage of the Prontonote data. Some of the biggest Databases will be supported from the outset, remember that this is Open Source, if the database technology that you want to use isn’t supported then you can write the support yourself!

Standalone XML Support

The standalone version of Prontonote uses XML to store the Prontonote data.

Target Audience

Prontonote was initially conceived to be useful in an academic environment, however it has been designed in a manner that will be useful to corporations and home users.

Academic Usage

As a student I have discovered how tricky it is to combine notes taken in lectures with the lecturers notes. I conceived Prontonote as a way of sharing personal lecture notes with friends, being able to access lecturer notes, and being able to easily combine these into notes that will be useful for future reference and revision. An example of how I can see Prontonote being used is as follows:

1. All students and lecturers in the academic establishment are set up on a Prontonote server.
2. For each module (we’ll call it moduleX) the group of students studying the module are added to a group (we’ll call it moduleX_stud), and all staff are added to another group (moduleX_staff).
3. The lecturer will create all of there lecturer notes using Prontonote, giving access to it to moduleX_staff. If there is any notes that they want the students to be able to view before the module starts then they can give read-only access.
4. Before each lecture the lecturer can give students read-only access to the notes for that lecture. With this read-only access they can copy the notes their personal store.
5. If the student has a laptop then they can work on the notes during the lecture, adding to the lecturers notes, or adding their own. Alternatively they can take notes manually and add them later.
6. If they have a friend who for one reason or another has missed a lecture they can send them their lecture notes by email.

Corporate Usage

There are many ways that Prontonote could be useful in a corporation. It could be used for keeping information on the progress of a meeting, sharing information within a team, or even an elaborate method of brain-storming.