About
The Problem
More students are using laptops at university to replace the tedious notebook and pen. Which is great, recording notes in notebooks is slow, hurts after a while, can't be organised or easily searched after it's recorded and is difficult to share.
The problem is the software used on the laptops. From what we've seen the most popular choice, if only by default, is Microsoft Word. Which opens up a whole new can of problems, having to manage individual files, manually transferring your files for use in other places, no simple way to sharing interface and your data is locked into a proprietary format. Word is barely suitable for taking any sort of notes and couldn't be less appropriate for university students.
The Big Idea
Like all good ideas, this one was part solving a problem we had ourselves and part stolen. Schoolhouse was our major inspiration. It's what we wanted, a dedicated school management application. There was two problems with Schoolhouse, it's client side so if we weren't at our own computer we couldn't view or edit our notes and files. The other was it's lack of development, it was really buggy and didn't look like being fixed any time soon.
That's where Campus Notes comes in. A dedicated class note, assignment and file manager in an online application you can access anywhere.
The API
Campus Notes is built on top of an API that uses OAuth authentication. This will make it really easy for third parties to develop secure applications using the Campus Notes data. It's unavailable to third parties until we write some documentation and develop the UIs for account holders to approve and manage access tokens.
Contacting Us
We have a blog where you can follow our progress as well as a Twitter account. For the most direct contact,
The People
Morten Fangel Assistant to the Director of Development
Fangel develops the API then connects the front end to that API, easy! He's a student at the University of Copenhagen, an avid cyclist and general outdoorsman. Find him at Seven Goslings.
Jim Whimpey Assistant to the Director of Design
Jim designs the UIs then makes them work on the web with HTML, CSS and jQuery. Often found out of his depth writing back end code that Fangel then has to fix. Living in Queensland, Australia he works for ABC News. Find him at Valhalla Island.