Notable: At the Intersection of Annotations and Handheld Technology

The Notable annotation system enables users to annotate paper documents using handheld devices in a mobile environment. This paper describes the design issues and solutions that arose in creating Notable, with a particular focus on design challenges at the intersection of annotations and handheld technology. Novel design strategies include separating the annotation writing platform from the document viewing platform, providing search as the method for document selection, offering context-sensitive phrase completion and icon-based graphical pinning for fine-granularity annotation anchoring, and including some support for coordinating group annotation activity.