Nora Brown Design

Further notes on annotating using Denote

I recently posted a review of several web apps for annotating live websites (not screenshots).

Today, I’ve been playing around a little more with my favorite so far, Denote. As previously mentioned, this service is made with website designers and developers in mind. It is the most attractive and intuitive of the apps I tried.

In this instance, I was using it to take notes for a client on one of her sites that I did not design/build, and thus did not have access to the code. Because of that, I could only annotate a single page, rather than browsing from page to page on the site and adding notes wherever. Not such a big deal in this instance.

Missing essential functionality

• The ability to edit the text of a note. I submitted a question about this, and nearly immediately got a response indicating that this is on the developers’ to-do list. Excellent!
• Similarly, the ability to edit the note type (there are currently four types/icons you can use…more on that later)
• When writing (or in the future editing) a note, it would awesome to be able to drag the bottom of the note or the textarea to give yourself more vertical room. I just realized this is native functionality in Safari, but that’s a minority of browsers.

Missing nice-to-have functionality

• Instead of, or in addition to, the ‘Hide’ link, it would be great just to be able to use the placement marker as a Hide/Show toggle. It currently shows the note, but doesn’t hide it.
• Help docs…the app is so simple at the moment that you don’t really need them, but one of those systems where people can easily report bugs and feature requests would be nice, and probably save the developers some hassle.

Blue-sky functionality that may or may not actually be desirable

Maybe it would be cool to come up with your own color scheme. See, the notes come in four flavors, as I mentioned above. I interpret them as Warning, Edit This, Bug, and Watch. But that’s pretty vague, and the colors don’t necessarily jibe with that, and if you’re going to be using this tool for collaboration, everyone has to understand what each of these means. So, either allow the color scheme to be customized, OR…

Perhaps it would be better to allow customization of the icons themselves. Denote could provide a library to choose from, and maybe for a certain project, I only need “Bug” and “Add Image” or something, then I could customize accordingly.

Of course care would have to be taken so that these added features didn’t get in the way or reduce overall usability.

Other moans

In Denote, there are Clients, Projects, and Users. This seems like one layer too much, and I think it would be simpler to just have a list of Projects, to which you can assign users from your list of Users. If it’s easy enough to search projects, even if you have hundreds, then I don’t see the utility in grouping by client.

Which sort of brings me to my last moan — the price. As soon as you want to have more than one project, you’re looking at $9 per month, and that gets you 10 projects. And at $25/month you are still limited in the number of projects you can have — 30. Call me cheap or poor, but a more reasonable scheme to me would be:

• Free – whatever. If the cheapest paid plan was more reasonable, I’d upgrade.
• $5/month or $55/year (throw in a little discount for paying a full year up front) for 10 projects, unlimited users.
• $10/month or $110/year: unlimited projects, unlimited users.

Here’s the thing: Dropbox, another rockin’ web service I use, gives you 50GB of storage plus its seamless functionality (which presumably takes a fair amount of bandwidth) for $99/year. And it’s the kind of service that once you start using it, you kind of can’t live without it. Denote is going to be storing very little (mostly notes in text form, though you can attach files to them) and no matter how nice or handy it is, it’s never going to be something you can’t make due without.

Let’s hear from you!

Have you used Denote or another web annotation tool? Leave a comment below.