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Aurora Notes

English | Русский

A notes app for Aurora OS (and Sailfish OS), written in C++/Qt 5 and QML with Sailfish Silica. It keeps three kinds of notes in one list:

• text notes: a title and free-form text;
• sketch notes: freehand drawings made with your finger, saved as PNG images;
• audio notes: voice recordings made with the microphone, saved as WAV files, with playback in the app.

It is translated into English and Russian and distributed under the BSD-3-Clause license.

Screenshots

Features

The application has the following features:

• one main screen shows every note as a thumbnail in a two-column grid, newest changes first;
• create a note with the buttons in the footer (pen, marker or tape);
• edit a note's title and content, or delete the note;
• record, play, pause and mute audio notes.

Architecture

The app follows an MVVM layout:

• the view is made of QML pages and reusable QML elements;

• view models are exposed to QML as context properties, named with an underscore prefix (e.g. _listViewModel);

• models contain the business logic and handle media files;

• the DAO is an abstraction layer over SQLite access; it emits signals when records are inserted, updated or removed;

• DTOs are plain data structures passed between the DAO, models and view models.

flowchart TD
    QML[QML pages] --> VM[Note view models]
    QML --> LVM[ListViewModel]
    VM --> M[Models]
    M --> DAO[DatabaseDAO]
    M --> FS[(Media files)]
    DAO --> DB[(SQLite)]
    DAO -. signals .-> LVM

Loading

Data storage

All data lives under ~/Documents/notes/.

notes.sqlite contains the index of all notes. The media table holds id, type, title, media (file path), created, modified. Note content is kept in a separate file, and the database stores only that file's path.

notes/
├── notes.sqlite
├── text/<uuid>.txt
├── sketch/<uuid>.png
└── audio/<uuid>.wav

Project structure

aurora-notes/
├── icons/          # app icons
├── qml/            # UI
├── rpm/            # packaging
├── screenshots/
├── src/            # C++ sources
└── translations/   # .ts files

Source code is located in the src directory and is organized by function:

• dao/* CRUD data access layer on top of the SQLite media table;
• dto/* data transfer objects such as TextNote, SketchNote, AudioNote;
• models/* per-type models that read and write the media file and update the DB row;
• viewmodels/* a QAbstractListModel for the grid plus one view model per note type, all derived from NoteViewModel;
• qmlitems/sketchitem.* a QQuickPaintedItem drawing canvas exposed to QML;
• audiorecorder.* a QAudioRecorder set to record PCM/WAV;
• main.cpp starts the app, registers QML types and wires models to view models.

QML sources are located in the qml directory:

• pages/* UI pages;
• elements/* reusable QML elements shared across pages;
• cover/* the cover shown in the app switcher;
• icons/* SVG icons used by the UI.

Other files:

• translations/* Qt Linguist .ts files (notes.ts and notes-ru.ts). CMake updates them from the C++ and QML sources and compiles them to .qm at build time;
• rpm/* RPM spec and changelog templates.

Building

Requirements

To build the application you need:

• Aurora OS SDK or Sailfish OS SDK;
• CMake ≥ 3.5;
• a C++17 compiler;
• Qt 5: Core, Network, Qml, Gui, Quick, Sql, Multimedia, LinguistTools;
• auroraapp (Aurora OS) or sailfishapp (Sailfish OS), found through pkg-config.

Permissions

The app asks for these permissions in its .desktop file: SecureStorage, Audio, Documents, MediaIndexing and Microphone.