Blackboard by Boogie Board

Great for saving notes! Sustainable option for replacing paper and pen.

Eventerat14Mon, Apr 24, 2023

United States

I have the blackboard in note size without the carbon-copy, and I do certainly find this app useful for saving notes and finding them later. I mainly use this app on a phone, but I found that it works on iPad as well. While you can certainly use the app to save your notes, I have found a bunch of possable improvements to make the app better. (Note: This review is a long one) 1. Image share size. There needs to be an option to export your blackboard drawing as a photo in the original resolution in the image share size settings. Taking a photo of the blackboard using the default camera app on an iPhone SE 2nd generation would produce a 12 megapixel photo. Using the app to take a picture of the board and saving it as a large image scales down your save to only 6 megapixels. Yes, I get that cropping out the frame of the blackboard will reduce the amount of megapixels in the image, but yet, there should still be an option to export your save as the original photo that isn’t limited to the writing surface. 2. Manual adjustment of taken date Speaking of importing images, there needs to be an option to change the date in which your image was taken from the info editor. For example, if I took a photo with a different device and I wish to import it into the blackboard app, I need to change the system time on my iPhone so that the timestamp on the imported image can match the timestamp on the original photo. All that is needed is an option to open up a date and time picker by tapping the “Date” field to manually adjust it so that your saves can appear in the correct order. Another option is to detect the date taken for any imported photos and automatically set that as the date for the produced scan. Some restrictions that can be placed on an iPhone prevent changing the system time (like if there is app time limits set), so an option to manually change the date taken would resolve the issue for those who cannot change the system time on their device. 3. Search function is broken Onto the topic of finding your notes, it seems that the search function is broken in the current version of the app (2.1.1). Tapping the documents tab in the top menu bar just shows “No Item Found” even if you have saved scans (is this just limited to the carbon-copy models?). What’s more is that searching for text also dosen’t bring up any results, even when specifying flags (by the way, more than four flag colors would be useful), despite the text I am looking for being in the title and/or notes of a document. The search function should be able to find the queried text in the name and notes field of any document. There should aslo be an option to sort your documents alphabetically, by file size, or by flags in the all documents folder. What would be even cooler, but not required, is an option to search for text in an an image using OCR. But despite this, not having the search function working defeats the purpose of having it. 4. Cloud export/sync If I plan to use the blackboard app across devices, I have to figure out a workaround to make sure that the documents taken in my iPad match the ones taken on my iPhone. Even though I haven’t tested if your documents sync when using two devices with the same Apple ID, there still should be an option to sync your documents somehow. Maybe you could optionally sign in with an account to store your saves there and have them on all devices with the same account. Or maybe you could link your saves with a third-party platform like Google Drive. (I guess that could could automatically updated new documents to Google Drive, but there isn’t a way to automatically import them into other device) Speaking of cloud exports, there should be an option to import from a cloud save, not just only export. How else are you supposed to make a backup of your documents? 5. Integration with other iOS features This suggestion may be limited to only IOS, but there should still be more integration so that you can be more productive when using the app. Multiple menus throughout iOS can be used with the Blackboard app once you have it installed. I have 6 different possibilities for this A. In the system menu for sharing a photo, there could be an option that says “Import to Blackboard”. Doing this would take the photo provided and create a new document with it, allowing the user to set the name and notes before being saved to the app. B. Another integration could be using widgets with iOS 14/iPadOS 15. A widget can be placed on your Home Screen with quick actions to search your notes, scan a new note, or receive a carbon-copied document. Although one size of widget would be suitable, additional sizes that might be limited to one option would also be awesome. C. Having the app be able to work in landscape mode and support split view, slide over, and drag and drop (with photos to import) on iPadOS would make it more flexible in creating documents. D. Having the app be able to integrate with Siri or the Shortcuts app with actions to create a document (by passing an image to the action and then providing the name/description/flags/folder using other variables), find your documents (by filtering with similar functionalities to those in the search function built into the app) and export your documents (by outputting the selected document as an image that can be used in other actions). I’ve seen apps do all of the four things above so it is certainly possable, and although it might take some work for the developers to be able to add these features, they would make the blackboard app more useful. So that’s it. My long and detailed review describing things that could be done to improve this app that I have found while using it. Thank you for reading all of this. If you think that any of these suggestions should be added, leave this review as helpful so more people can see It. Developers, if you have any comments or feedback, please respond to my review. Thanks so much.

CorrupteDylanMon, Dec 26, 2022

United States

I did review in the past but wanted to commend the addition of automatic uploads. You might add some documentation somewhere though. I struggled to understand the settings and what was happening for a while on the OneNote upload. Haven’t tried others. Thanks for adding that! I am very devoted to using my CC Pen and Blackboards for all meeting notes!

PoisonousGusTue, Nov 29, 2022

United States