Whitelines Paper Review
Whitelines is an easily scannable college (A4) paper that usually comes which squares or lines and an iOS or Android app. Its goal is to allow you to easily scan your notes to an image or directly upload to Evernote or Dropbox.
I've written a bit on it and want to let you know what I think, because the bridge between analog and digital is yet far from perfect and digital tablets or viable sketching or drawing methods still have not saturated the market appropriately, so this seems like a great "in between" solution.
I've previously eyeballed remarkable but it comes at a bit of a price tag and it's not real paper after all.
Why Sketching? Can't you just use a keyboard, like a normal person?
Yes, I totally could, but drawing or writing by hand can actually enhance how well and how detailed your remember something.When I'm in a meeting or on a phone I typically write notes down by hand and it's serving me quite well to be honest. Maybe only because I need to go over the information twice. Once when listening and writing down (by hand) and then again when I type it into a digital document (usually more elaborately).
Sketching UI elements or UI interactions on paper is also pretty important for me when talking to someone about a client request or just how they want part of a website to work, so I can easily sketch away, but I'm not forced to keep track of which of my many paper journals I've put something in if I scan it, which is actually giving me some more peace of mind on busy days.
I can't stress the point and benefit of sketching enough and how vital it is to everybodies understanding of what is going to happen or how something works right now.
Recently I did a flow chart, not for application logic, but simply for using a specific (not very well thought out) form of a third party provider that's being used to distribute tens of thousands of EURos of value per year. Getting something wrong in that context is an expensive mistake for everybody involved and it was so much easier to draw, because the human brain responds so much better to visual information.
How it works
Each page has a small square with a pattern in each corner. When using the Whitelines app, that's what the camera "locks" onto to provide a scan without the lines in the background (just black on white) and it produces a pretty clear image, since the white lines on the grey background only give very little contrast.
Below: a scan sample of a page written on whitelines, an upcoming review of Andreas Jorns Sensual Nudes photobook.
When crossing off the Dropbox field in the bottom, given that the apps are connected, it uploads automatically to a selected Dropbox folder.