Some notes never have a sensible place to go. They are not tasks, not comments on a ticket, and not something a client should ever read. They are half-formed thoughts you need to get on paper before they are worth saying out loud. Most of us keep them somewhere else: a second app, a paper pad, or a text file whose name we will not recognise in three weeks.
Everyone in TimerOS now has a notebook for them. Some of that thinking happens on an e-ink tablet rather than a backlit screen, and until this month TimerOS looked half-erased on one. The text was perfectly readable, but every line around it disappeared.
A notebook is a canvas
A notebook in TimerOS is built on the same canvas as the board your client draws on, but it is private to you rather than tied to a project. You draw on it, type on it, add sticky notes and pictures, and move things around, because thinking is spatial and a list is not. The toolbar has nine tools (select, freehand, rectangle, ellipse, line, arrow, text, sticky note and eraser), plus pictures, which you paste, drop in or choose from a file.
The canvas has no edges by default. If you would rather it behaved like paper, turn on page outlines and it draws A4 guides underneath everything (794×1123 canvas units at 96dpi), so what you see is what would print. The outlines are only guides: nothing belongs to a page, nothing is saved per page, and turning them off hides the lines without moving a single stroke.
A list makes you decide what a thought is before you have finished having it.
You can have up to a hundred notebooks. They are in the sidebar under Tasks, in the desktop app and in the web app at app.timeros.ai. The web app is also how a notebook reaches a tablet: an e-ink Android tablet has an ordinary browser, and the web app runs in it. The code that draws a notebook is identical in the desktop and web apps, so the two versions will not drift apart.
Why a warm-paper palette collapses on e-paper
E-ink mode exists only in the web app and the Android app. The Windows desktop app never runs on an e-paper screen, so it did not get the mode. The work started with a complaint. TimerOS’s light theme looks like warm paper: a cream background at #F1EEE5, dark ink at #2A2620 and borders at #BCB294. On a phone or a laptop it reads well. The first person who tried it on an e-ink tablet said it looked washed out.
You might guess the text was too light. The text was fine. What vanished was every line, and on a notebook page that is most of the content. The dot grid went, then the A4 page outlines, then the edge of the toolbar. The same thing happened to card edges, table lines and input borders everywhere else in the app.
A backlit screen has enough range to show a 1.8:1 edge anyway. A reflective screen does not: it only has the light already in the room, and the mid-tones that outline things on a phone end up almost indistinguishable from the paper. The palette was not too pale overall. It drew its lines in shades that e-paper cannot tell apart.
What e-ink mode changes, and what it leaves alone
So e-ink mode swaps in a second palette instead of filtering the screen or turning it grey. The background is white instead of cream, because on a reflective screen cream just wastes light. Text is black, and borders go from #BCB294 to #2B2B2B, or to pure black once the device reports 2.2dppx or less. That raises a card edge from 1.8:1 to 14.2:1 against the page. Each status colour becomes a darker shade of itself instead of turning grey, so the colours stay distinguishable: as different colours on a colour e-ink screen, and as different shades of grey on a black-and-white one. The amber for warnings, for example, was #C9A765. Without its colour that is a light grey, about 70 on a lightness scale where black is 0 and white is 100, so on paper it all but disappears. In e-ink mode it becomes #6B5410, about 37 on the same scale.
Two smaller changes helped more than the palette. CSS animations are cut to one millisecond, so in practice they stop. Every in-between frame of an animation is a screen refresh, so on e-paper animation shows up as flicker and leaves ghost images behind. And when the device reports a low pixel density, font smoothing is switched off, the opposite of what the app does everywhere else. Smoothing is what turns a one-pixel letter stroke grey; without it the stroke stays solid black. It is a single CSS line and does not move anything on the page.
The font-smoothing rule depends on the density the device reports (@media (max-resolution: 2.2dppx)), not on the screen’s physical resolution. The difference matters because these tablets let you change the reported value. A Boox has a DPI setting for each app; lowering it lowers the density Android reports, and the browser passes that straight on as devicePixelRatio. The page gets more room, the interface is drawn smaller, and thin lines end up about one physical pixel wide. That is why text looks faded at a low setting, and why the rule switches on there. Because the rule is a plain CSS media query and not a JavaScript measurement, it updates by itself as soon as you change that setting. If text still looks faint with the mode on, raise the DPI instead: the interface gets larger and every stroke covers more pixels. The description of the e-ink setting in the app gives the same advice.
What the mode does not change is just as deliberate.
The canvas chooses its default pen colour based on how bright the paper is. White paper gets the same dark pen as cream paper, so if you use the light theme and switch to e-ink mode, your pen stays the same. Only the paper changes, which raises the default stroke from 15.4:1 on cream to 17.9:1 on white. The gain is small; the pen was never the problem.
Why it does not detect your screen for you
E-ink mode is a single checkbox in Settings → Appearance, off by default and remembered separately on each device. We tried to make it automatic and could not. An e-ink Android tablet runs an ordinary browser and reports itself as a normal, fast colour screen. The CSS checks that sound right, (update: slow) and (monochrome), both return no. Guessing from the brand name the browser reports would go wrong in both directions, and a wrong guess turns somebody’s phone stark black and white, which is far worse than one checkbox.
The setting is stored beside your theme rather than inside it, because it has nothing to do with taste. Light or dark is a personal choice; this setting depends on the screen in front of you. That is also why it overrides both themes: on a reflective screen, dark mode gives you grey instead of black, and a fully dark screen needs heavier refreshes. On e-paper, a light background is always better.
Notes that point at the work
A notebook that only holds drawings is just a drawing app. This one can be linked to the projects and tasks it is about (up to fifty of them), and you can find it from either side.
The link is stored only in the notebook. Your notebook points to the task, but the task stores nothing about it and cannot answer “who has notes on this?”. On the task, the panel shows only your own notebooks, and nothing at all if you have none. You can only link to something you can already see. The link’s label is saved once and never updated, so if you later lose access to a project, your notes cannot show you its current name.
Search covers the notebooks you can open, both your own and those shared with you. If you somehow have more than three hundred, it covers the three hundred most recently updated; renaming, linking or sharing a notebook moves it up that list, but drawing in it does not. Search looks inside the canvases: it finds text in text boxes and sticky notes and returns the notebook, the item and its position, so a result takes you to the exact spot. It does not read handwriting: a word you drew stays a drawing.
None of this tells anyone what you were working on. The notebook is only a place to write things down. It is not read by the feature that decides which task your tracked time was booked to.
Yours, until you hand somebody a pen
A notebook needs no permission and no particular plan: notebooks are on neither the permission list nor the plan feature list. The only access rule is ownership, which comes from your login rather than from a role somebody could edit. No administrator has to decide whether an employee may keep their own notes.
To bring someone in, share the notebook with a colleague, either to look or to draw. A shared notebook updates live, on the same engine as the project whiteboard: you see their cursor with their name under it, and their strokes appear as they draw. Ownership stays with you. A colleague who can draw cannot rename the notebook, share it further, change its pages or delete it.
That last row is part of the design, and no setting changes it. You can only share a notebook with people in your workspace’s own employee list, and client accounts are never on it. The portal has no way to open a notebook, and any portal request for one is refused before anything else is checked. This is where a notebook deliberately differs from the project whiteboard: both are canvases, but the whiteboard exists precisely so a client can draw on it.
Deleting takes two steps. A deleted notebook goes to the trash, where you can restore it for thirty days, and only something already in the trash can be deleted for good. Pictures are stored privately, never at a public address, and every request for one checks who you are again. So a picture is exactly as private as the page it is on. The rest of our private-by-default design follows the same rule.
The limits
- No handwriting recognition. Search finds typed text and sticky notes only; nothing in this release reads what you write with the pen.
- No pressure, tilt or palm rejection. The canvas treats a stylus, a finger and a mouse exactly the same way, using whatever line width the toolbar is set to. Two-finger pinch and pan work, and the browser’s own gestures are turned off inside the board. But it does not feel like a drawing tablet, and it is not meant to.
- E-ink mode is web and Android only. It is left out of the Windows app and the client portal on purpose.
- Drawing needs a connection. Nothing is queued offline. A brief disconnect is fine: the board tells you, and when the connection returns it reloads in full, so nothing saved is lost. But a stroke drawn with no connection at all is discarded.
- Caps are enforced in two different ways. A hundred notebooks per person, five thousand items and a hundred pictures per notebook, ten megabytes per picture, fifty links, and thirty people you can share one notebook with. The canvas limits (item count and board size) are enforced on every save. The counted limits (notebooks, pictures, links and people) are checked just before each save, so two saves at the same moment can take you one item over. That is deliberate: strict enforcement is not worth it for one extra notebook.
- No SVG pictures. PNG, JPEG, GIF and WebP only. SVG files can contain scripts and would be served from our own domain, so they are excluded on purpose, not just missing for now.
What this changes in your work
The drawing tools are not the main point. You were already doing this thinking somewhere, and wherever that was, it did not know which project it belonged to, could not be searched with the rest of your work, and lived on a single laptop. In TimerOS it sits next to the projects it is about, so you search it with them, link it to them and open it wherever you open them.
The e-ink work also taught us something that applies well beyond the notebook: if you build anything someone might open on e-paper, check your borders before you check your text.