Sofa 4.0: Build an Entertainment List Management System of Your Own
Sofa is a list-based record-keeping tool for entertainment content, where you can add books, audiobooks, movies, episodes, music albums, apps, video games, and more, and then categorize them. Recently the app has launched its 4.0 update, which extends the customization capabilities on top of the existing features to create an “entertainment management system” of your own.
First of all, the homepage has been overhauled, and each section now uses a card design, which is very convenient for us to fix and organize the relevant information, and many controls can be further customized, and I personally like the new design of The Pile the most, even if we don’t click to enter into the second level of the page, we can still preview the added content information from the homepage.
The second new feature is that you can now create custom categories. Currently there are seven categories in Sofa by default: Books, Audiobooks, Movies, Episodes, Music Albums, Apps, and Video Games, and the new custom categories can be expanded to add Articles, Events, Places to Eat, YouTube Videos, and more, thus enriching your lists even further! Information.
Third, you can add websites, videos, articles, and more to Sofa via iOS’s Share feature, making Sofa your collection box. It’s more of a supplement to manually adding information to Sofa. However, I’ve found that even if you add something that falls into one of the built-in categories, Sofa will still add it as a custom category by default.
The fourth new feature is the addition of Ingredients, which expands on the current collection system by allowing you to create your own rating system (you can rate the content yourself), as well as tagging the content you’re currently collecting, so in the end, you can create your own entertainment information management system.
The last new feature is the addition of a new form of lists: smart lists, which can be enriched with a collection of filters, such as Ingredients, which allows you to create a page with details about a restaurant, but of course, you’ll have to dig deeper to find out more.
MarginNote 4: Making Learning Less Difficult
MarginNote has been committed to reducing the difficulty of learning, so that we can use the tools of high-quality learning has finally been launched in the recent 4.0 version, compared with the previous version, this big version of the update to further enhance the cognitive process of learning, the pre-study, classroom learning, after-school comprehension, practice and memorization and other different learning stages to provide a more professional tools.
First, how to make learning materials more interesting, in MarginNote 4, for static PDF materials can now be in the form of book white space, static PDF into interactive learning materials, in need of in-depth understanding of the paragraph next to the expansion of the writing space to strengthen the personal reading insights, and can be updated at any time as the learning process in-depth expansion. Handwritten content can be controlled to display and hide for subsequent re-learning and practice.
Compared to passive learning, active learning can help us deepen our understanding of knowledge, so that we can better learn by example, and MarginNote 4 also provides a variety of new tools in this regard. For example, you can combine and manage course-related books, handwriting, and videos to form a learning set, which can be reused for different learning objectives. The learning set can be reused for different learning objectives, forming a comprehensive and efficient knowledge network through cross-disciplinary and cross-knowledge connections.
The bibliographic folding function in MarginNote 4 can quickly create a table of contents, embed the explanatory segments of other books into the pages of a book, and even merge multiple books or switch the order of chapters, fold unimportant pages extensively, and connect and digest the knowledge points through the way of “re-creation of books”, so as to facilitate the formation of an extended memory. Expanded Memory.
In addition, MarginNote 4 also adds enhanced bi-literal cross-referencing and focused reading, binding closely related books into one view. At the same time, the customized OCR book layout and text recognition engine make the excerpts more accurate and neat.
The learning process is more about knowing how to output while inputting, and the output relies on our in-depth understanding of knowledge, which can be reorganized through brain mapping. MarginNote 4 not only creates brain maps, but also organizes study cards by means of conceptual linking diagrams, which can be nested in multiple ways, and 10 brain map styles can be switched without any loss.
Considering the complicated transcription during the learning process, MarginNote 4 has also been updated and optimized for the note-taking process, for example, it can now automatically extract cards such as formulas, charts, etc. based on AI technology, and correlate fragmented knowledge through the card box tool, and even automate the construction of brain maps through conditions.
Contextual and situational learning can help us learn new knowledge on the basis of old knowledge. MarginNote 4 supports a variety of contextual view combinations, and supports point-and-click network engine retrieval; it also supports calling up the past accumulation of the note library by keywords and colors, and gives links to keyword titles, automatically matches what is being learned and reminds of what has been learned. Meanwhile, through the unique ID of the card, it can realize the scene memory back to the source, clicking the link of the notes can go back to the learning scene at that moment.
And through the spaced repetition theory algorithm to enhance memory, MarginNote 4 is embedded with a flashcard editor, which supports the creation of flashcards from excerpts, and calls out the flashcard editor that can edit the front and back questions in one step. It also allows learning planning based on the latest brain algorithms (FSRS) to quantify progress towards long-term memory.
With the launch of MarginNote 4, the developers are now offering three types of licenses, Basic is a free license that offers only the basic functionality, while Pro is aimed at professional users on a single device and includes most of the new features of the 4.0 update. If you need to use MarginNote 4 across devices, then the Max single license is the most logical choice; MarginNote 4 offers a free 14-day trial on all devices, so if you’re thinking about learning better and more efficiently, give MarginNote a try.
MarginNote 4 is currently only available on the App Store for macOS and iPadOS, and a standalone version is still being ported by the development team and is expected to be available in the next three months or so.
Other Updates
Tasker: The latest beta introduces several new Android 15-related features, adds a new “Set Device Effect” action, allows you to delete/clone/toggle by long-pressing on a selected option under the new UI, and adds an Edit Condition feature that allows the UI Tuner to set the border radius of on-screen elements.
Mozilla Firefox: Updated to v126, adds the ability to remove tracking identifiers when copying links, supports zstandard compressed content encoding, provides hardware acceleration of the AV1 codec on the Apple M3 chip, and adds support for the Screen Lock API, which allows PWA developers to request that the screen not be dimmed or locked automatically.
Goodnotes: Updated to v6.3.25 with Palette for the Apple Pencil Pro, which allows users to squeeze the Apple Pencil Pro to access basic tools, and Dynamic Ink, which adjusts ink flow based on the rotation of the Apple Pencil Pro for more personalized expression in digital writing. personalized expression in digital writing.