Six Months with the Supernote Nomad

It’s been a few months since I wrote about the Nomad (and around six months since I started using it), so I thought some kind of update would be in order and gathered my notes into a sort of mid-term review.

In short, pretty much all the pluses and minuses in my original conclusion have panned out: it’s become a part of my writing workflow and a device I reach for several times a week to do a substantial part of my reading, but not taken over either completely, largely for the reasons I pointed out at the time–and a few more.

The Nomad has been a great reading device. I really like going through The Economist on it every week, and with the longer afternoons leading up to Summer I’ve also been using it to catch up on my book queue as the larger screen size makes it more comfortable than my aging Kindle.

Ratta has been updating Chauvet (the Android underpinnings of the Nomad) as well as the bundled apps (including passing through some updates to the Kindle app) and adding a few entirely new features, like drawing straight lines (great for diagrams), a sticker feature (that I also tried to hack for drawing architecture diagrams with relative success), and even an entirely new app that lets you use your Nomad as a drawing tablet for your Mac.

That’s not bad at all considering the above also includes quite a few minor bug fixes and improvements (and is already a better track record than most device manufacturers), so that has been a definite plus–as has the fact that none of those enhancements included AI features, which remains a plus for me.

And I have no doubt that the periods of time I spend using only the Nomad to organize my thoughts have been more focused and of (arguably) better quality output, but I can’t just look at it in isolation, and some shortcomings have come to the fore.

For instance, I’m still using my Kindle every evening, simply because I can’t keep my bedside lamp on into the wee hours–a back light is still much less intrusive and, let’s face it, a killer feature for night time reading.

Then there’s the actual note taking. As it happens, inspiration for a lot of the notes I take comes from some kind of reference material–papers, web pages, RSS feeds, etc., and all of it is effectively digital in nature. This means two things:

• Trying to use a paper metaphor for most of it doesn’t quite fit.
• Getting my notes across to other devices is really important, and not necessarily in ways where the Nomad excels.

For instance, I find myself constantly wanting to annotate stuff inside the Kindle app (which doesn’t really work), and trying to find workarounds like syncing EPUBs or PDFs back and forth ended up breaking whenever I tried to get my notes outside the companion app (which I went back to for a bit).

There is another constraint where it comes to annotating PDFs–as I originally mentioned, the Nomad’s size doesn’t help a lot there, and zooming and panning is so slow that it makes it hard to quickly skim and clip off things from a document–something I can do much faster on an iPad, with the added benefit that I can round-trip annotations to my Mac. We don’t have Preview on the iPad–yet–but I can still do it better and faster than with the Nomad’s features.

This is not to say that using the Nomad is hard or unnatural, but paper is still a separate medium, and there are all sorts of corner cases when you try to make it digital. Moreover my review was done during a period of time when I was actively trying to minimize both my screen time and the number of things I was doing at once, and after the Christmas break I had to go back to actively multitasking, which in my case makes it hard to set aside even half an hour of uninterrupted time for quiet writing.

And when I am on a roll, waiting a few seconds for the Nomad to catch up on anything (switching apps, searching for info, syncing with my other machines, etc.) significantly increases friction and actually causes me to lose track of what I am doing.

One of the things that really drove home the point that my note-taking is primarily digital was that once I got Obsidian to run on the Nomad, I pretty much stopped using the built-in Notes app except when I wanted to do a simple diagram or needed a distraction-free environment.

Obsidian completely replaced the Nomad’s (very limited) task list for me as well as a good chunk of the (largely missing) calendar functionality, since I do a bit of journaling and planning, and I think this says a lot about what I need in a note taking device–I could do the exact same thing using Apple’s Notes, Calendar and Reminders apps (especially now that Reminders can do kanban very well), but having the lot integrated in a single cross-platform experience is hard to replicate.

That doesn’t mean I can’t use the Nomad to capture notes on the go (and I’ve settled on a mix of SyncThing and the unofficial Supernote plugin for Obsidian to have my handwritten notes synchronized to my other devices), but the initial note is such a small part of the process that I sometimes question whether having a more focused, distraction-free device for capturing the initial idea is really important.

After all, I spent many years using Palm devices and early smartphones to capture To-Dos, and a surprising amount of text on this site was painstakingly edited on an iPod Touch (and then an iPhone, iPad, etc.), so looking back, I think that the key challenge for me with the Nomad over the past few month has been exclusively a matter of focus.

I do so much context-switching (and need to carry so much across contexts) that the Nomad tends to fall behind–things like the iOS share sheet, AirDrop, cutting and pasting snippets of text via Continuity or just plain Apple Notes have less friction and are faster than switching to Obsidian or waiting for the Nomad’s cloud services to sync.

Of course, Summer is upon us now and I fully intend to take the Nomad with me on vacation, so maybe I’ll again be able to hit that sweet spot of thoughtfulness and patience that made it feel so good–and it would be nice to at least be able to read my handwriting again.