There are plenty of note-taking apps, but none designed for reading notes. What I wrote at the time begins like this:
In every era, reading is an important path to wisdom. “Books belong to others; reading notes are your own.” Writing down what you take from a book deepens your understanding of it.
What I built
A phone app prototype with four screens:
You can write notes and tag them; adding books wasn’t finished yet.
Tech
Both the app and the back end are .NET:
- App: .NET MAUI, organised with MVVM;
- Back end: an ASP.NET minimal API with Entity Framework.
I had just finished the C#, .NET MAUI and ASP.NET Core paths on Microsoft Learn, and this course project was where I put them to use.
Looking back
A year later my graduation project, Bookworm, was a reading notes app too, this time on the web, with a graph database and AI Q&A. From the Notion knowledge base API in 2022, to this app, to Bookworm, almost everything I built at university revolved around reading and notes.