Lachlan's avatar@lachlanjc/notebook

Daylight feedback, summer 2024

When I beta test products, I regularly send feedback to the creators with narrative on how I’m using the product plus friction logs of issues I run into. I wrote as a second feedback letter after a summer of using my Daylight DC-1. I’m publishing it here in case other Daylight users are curious how I use mine, and to open source my thinking.

Overall, these days I love my Daylight. I use it for several hours a day even before school starts (when I'll be using it much more heavily), for internet/email, reading books/articles/RSS/courses. The multi-day battery life compared to iPad is a huge improvement. I love taking it outdoors, I’m all-in on outdoor computing. Keeping it near my bedside table at home works best, since nighttime is when I most reach for it. And I'm so much more focused using Daylight than iPad. On all my summer trips, I took Daylight instead of iPads and the only thing I miss is FaceTime/Zoom. Since my last update, I've started using the speaker, though it's not ideal, since I've found there's certain classes of YouTube videos I watch like tech talks that don't need color, and since Apple Podcasts has launched as a web app, and for Duolingo. I still use my NuPhy Air60 keyboard with its handy little stand case, but I'm still in the market for a smaller/quieter keyboard for taking to classes/meetings; I'm considering buying a Logitech Keys to Go 2 and adding my own kickstand to its cover to make a similar design.

Android's software landscape continues to be a challenge, but it's improving. GoodNotes was near-unusable this spring with its level of lag and lack of offline support, but they're charging ahead with new features and the app is now a better choice than Reader or Noteshelf. (This fall, they're launching cross-platform sync with iOS/macOS, which will be incredibly helpful.) Notion Calendar launching on Android last month has been a big help in my life. Arc Search is working on an Android client which will be great, since I'll be able to sync tabs with my iOS/macOS browser.

The biggest challenge continues to be finding high-quality software that works across all my devices. In nearly every category, choosing software that works decently on Android means accepting a worse iOS client than what I could get natively on iOS. On most of the cross-platform apps I use on Daylight plus iOS/iPadOS, the Android app is a scaled-up phone design with fewer gestures, features, and richness than the iOS equivalent. You see this in apps like Duolingo where you can't rearrange words with drag & drop on Android, in GitHub there's no multi-column layouts, apps like HEY where there's no swiping between tabs. It's an advantage in other ways: you can use native Threads and Notion Calendar apps on Android tablets in full screen even though they're phone layouts, which you can't on iPad. Going back to school soon, I'll have to decide on a task manager for a busy assignment schedule that I can access on Daylight, likely Todoist or Superlist, but I'm sad to give up Things or Apple Reminders since they're far superior on iOS.

The other side of this challenge is syncing content. It's vital to all my workflows that the files I'm currently work on be automatically synced between my Daylight and iOS/macOS devices with offline access; I've been using iCloud etc for years and am unwilling to go back. I pay for Obsidian Sync which works seamlessly for this for me, but none of the cheaper or mainstream options work very well. Google Drive doesn't support offline folders at all, and Dropbox makes you pay a staggering $13/mo for this basic functionality. I set up my sister with a Daylight, and the best solution we landed on that was free was a nerdy sync utility app that links the Downloads folder on the Daylight to a folder in her Google Drive, so she can drop files in there on her Mac and every hour they sync to the offline storage on Daylight. We moved her Obsidian vault into that folder as well so all materials she's actively working on sync the same way. This app was not easy to set up, but it's worked seamlessly since then.

On my Daylight home screen these days:

  • Reader for PDFs
  • Lithium ePub reader
  • Obsidian for writing & syncing content
  • Nebo for handwriting
  • Chrome for web, plus its New Tab shortcut
  • Notion Calendar
  • Omnivore for read later
  • HEY Email
  • GoodNotes
  • Dropbox (sometimes it's the best way to sync things)
  • Perplexity (to be replaced by Arc Search when it arrives)
  • Substack for reading newsletters
  • FeedMe for RSS (hoping to replace with Omnivore as it improves)
  • GitHub
  • Duolingo
  • Apple Podcasts web app
  • Discord, mostly for messaging links without iMessage
  • 1Password

Feedback

OS

  • Google sign-in alert email says: "A new sign-in on Motorola Moto Z" in email, then I got a separate email, "Welcome to your new Pixel 6a with 5G"
  • I signed into my Google account in the Notion app, it signed the whole OS into Google stuff, now I'm getting notifications about calendar events etc. Make it stop! I thought Daylight didn't do notifications & I didn't opt into any of these. Especially random sports scores.
  • I want one toggle in settings to turn off notifications across the system, then never be prompted by apps. I shouldn't see requests for my camera, notifications, etc, just deny automatically.
  • I want the task bar permanently disabled, no holding down necessary. It's aesthetically ugly and not helpful.
  • Aesthetically I’d add a tiny gap between the scrollbars and the bezel, the two look connected in dark mode
  • Chrome Minimized Custom Tabs have been a big workflow improvement this summer!
  • The automatic software updater litters my notification center every day with “Alarm Trigger”s. Daylight should be chill and never overflowing with alarms. I should see only when there’s a software update available, with a few lines of what’s included, plus ideally they install automatically. The ellipsis menu in the updater app is ab
  • my status bar has 4 squares in it on the left? Discovered that's actually because of all the failed updates. I do not care and these are not relevant to users
    • Default settings should turn on “Hide silent notifications in status bar”

Hardware/firmware

  • Networking
    • Connecting the Wi-Fi to my iPhone's hotspot has never worked. Sucks to bring it to the park, realize I forgot to download something then not be able to get it. I would much prefer Daylight had LTE/5G built-in so it always has my content synced, I don't need super fast transfers or a lot of data on here, but the next best thing is relatively easy iPhone hotspot access. This absolutely has to get fixed
    • The Android Wi-Fi menu is so much more confusing than iOS’s, especially for institutional Wi-Fi. I’m a web dev but I’ve never heard of all these certificate options etc. Probably not easy to design over those?
    • Have had issues finding Wi-Fi networks in multiple places, but a restart solved it
  • Display
    • Switch color temperature slider direction so amber is the start/left. I saw a prototype of this and liked it
    • Auto brightness does not work well, jumps erratically and will override my setting within seconds of my changing the brightness
    • Settings app promises dark mode “will never turn on automatically” but I want it to turn on automatically; I use the iOS setting where at sunset my devices switch color themes, which is the most popular color theme option on iOS. Can we add a setting for that? Daylight being in sync with the sun would work really well for the brand.
  • Set timezones automatically please! Only sets time automatically, not zone. I don't want to deal with settings like this so on every trip I've left it on the wrong timezone
  • Charging
    • battery charging animation from Android looks awful
    • Ideally I want it to boot up when it's sufficiently charged like iOS
    • if I turn off daylight, then immediately unplug it, don't turn it back on. I’m putting it into my bag

Niagara

  • Default wallpaper is ugly. Go with something plainer (the lines on the old one were chill) with an option for something geometric or more tasteful. I downloaded one from Raycast
  • Dark mode should change wallpaper! I want daylight to emanate as little light as possible, esp at night
  • enable two columns of apps by default in Niagara
  • suggestions on default apps
    • include:
      • Nebo! One of the best apps on Daylight
      • put the New Tab shortcut from Chome on the home screen. Amazing to avoid distractions of what was previously open in your browser
      • Lithium or another epub reader
      • Dropbox? Kinda sucks but it's the main way I get content on the device
      • Notion/Notion Calendar?
      • Hello Weather or another weather app might be nice
    • Remove:
      • Brave. Put Firefox if you want an alternative browser
    • Do not call Noteshelf Notebook. It's not a first-party app

Reader

  • I have two Reader apps, one hidden by default? Overall, the new Reader is so much less reliable than the old one it's a downgrade right now.
  • It's unclear whether you're editing the original file in the filesystem (so third-party sync services will sync them) or making a copy (such as GoodNotes/Noteshelf's behavior).
  • When I make annotations in files, they're not saved when I re-open them. This is unacceptable
  • Are there help docs on how to use the Daylight sync? Is it available?
  • I saw a demo of the Quick Note functionality but I don’t have it
  • Workflow issues
    • Signing in online doesn't with the text code instead of the QR code doesn't work. The code on Daylight doesn't display a hyphen, which is encoded in the QR code version and necessary for the online registration
    • Default documents should not include Bitcoin or AI. Very specific brand I don't resonate with
    • Deleting documents doesn't work. I tap delete one by one, which is a very slow interaction, see a snack bar that it was deleted (rewrite the copy: “deleting book with id: 4”). But the file doesn't disappear, even after restarting the app.
    • After I open a file, the title says someTitle instead of the real filename
    • In the gallery view, all my documents say 10 notes · -1 page
    • Library does not update after I download a PDF without restarting the app
    • Need to add tap with 2 fingers to undo, like Procreate, Notability, etc
  • Aesthetic suggestions
    • Replace the ellipsis icon in the toolbar with a right chevron, to be clearer that the button minimizes the toolbar
    • Add setting to move toolbar to left for left-handed users (not me but I imagine it’d be helpful)
    • Reduce collapsed pill size, align it under the upper palette, not lower, since that's where it's collapsed from
    • Round the corners of the palettes the same, please!
  • UI bugs
    • I have a bug where a PDF on my local storage that has a name is showing up as Untitled Document
    • Two horizontal lines above the Support code in the account panel