As mentioned in the post Introducing LightPaper Mini, LightPaper lightpaper version 1.2 comes with an awesome mini app aptly named "LightPaper Mini". It sits in your menu bar waiting for you to take quick notes.
One of the things that you can do with LightPaper Mini is to take notes for almost anything - an app, a file, a folder, a browser and even a URL etc. We are calling it Shadow Notes. We wanted to call it Meta Notes but decided against it because it sounded too "geeky".
Shadow Notes completely changes the way you'd take notes. Many times you want to take notes for your files or some documents in one of your favorite apps. So far one of the ways to take these notes is to just write the name of the document next to the content itself. This, in many cases, is inconvenient.
LightPaper Mini, and not just Shadow Notes, allows you to take notes in Markdown as well as allows you to quickly see the preview without actually leaving it. When you fire up LightPaper lightpaper, it shows a list of all your Shadow Notes so that you can continue editing it with the full power of LightPaper lightpaper. You can also save the note as a regular markdown file.
LightPaper Mini should support all the apps out of the box. All you have to do is just select the app, click LightPaper Menu icon, go to Shadow mode and take notes.
You can not only take notes for an app itself but in some cases you can also take notes for individual tabs or documents - just select one of the options from the dropdown. For an example, you can take notes for URLs and not just for a browser. Out of the box, LightPaper Mini supports Chrome and Safari.
Out of the box, LightPaper Mini supports almost all your favorite Mac apps for taking Shadow Notes but only supports tabs/documents for some of the apps. There are so many apps out there that it is practically impossible to support them all esp. because they have their own ways of defining what a document means or what a tab means. However, the nice thing about Tabs/Documents Support in LightPaper Mini is that it is extensible and you can provide a script to get a list of tab/document of your favorite app. What's even better is that you can write this script in JavaScript. These scripts are JavaScript variant of AppleScript. All the scripts are free and open source and are hosted on GitHub. Go to the Shadow Scripts repo for more details on how you can contribute or use these scripts.
Shadow Notes opens a lot of possibilities. There are few things already in the pipeline to make it even better. If you have an idea to make it even better please reach us out on hello@42squares.in and let us know. Your feedback and suggestions are always welcome.