Large Number of Scripture Notes Workable?

I'm wondering if it's practical to take all of the red-line comments in my paper scriptures and enter them into my online scripture study notebook as Notes. I'd hate to do that and then find out that it takes ten minutes to launch my scriptures because of a huge download or sync time, or something like that. Are the notes stored on the target device (iPhone, iPad, Mac or PC), or are they downloaded on demand? Has anyone done this with a huge number of notes, and found it to be a problem (or to work great)?

Also, one of the things I like about the paper scriptures is that the red-pencil notes are there, in your face, to glance at, in the margins, etc. But with the online apps, you have to click (or hover) on each one individually to see your comments. Could they be shown in a side panel, or a panel at the bottom of the screen, or something like that (perhaps color coded in some way to indicate which verse they correspond to).

I also don't like the way the hover works on the PC/Mac. When you hover over one of your notes, the main thing your eye is attracted to is the color-change boxes and other control items, while the actual note text is small and a faint color. It's kind of displayed like it's a second-level detail, as opposed to the most important thing. Seems like the main thing you're interested in is seeing the note text, not all the controls.

If you're using a web browser to access the scriptures, your markings are going to get downloaded with each page you go to. So, for example, if you go open Alma 12, you're going to get your notes for Alma 12 at the same time, but it won't download your notes for the rest of the scriptures when you do that.

(I'm speaking from a user experience perspective here, not technical implementation, which would have a different explanation.)

However, if you're using one of the applications built for various mobile platforms, it appears to sync all your notes to the device. I'm not sure how/when this happens, but I believe you can read your notes without a live data connection. I don't know the technical details on how they've implemented this, but I would presume it downloads your notes incrementally, versus a massive data update. This means if you had a lot of notes, when you first install the application it would take a lot of time to download all of your notes (and you'd need adequate space on your device), but after that, it would just download your changes, and would be fairly quick. If you want more details on this, I suggest you post your questions in the Mobile Applications forum.

I think you're probably right. I've been entering information into my online notes, and haven't seen any indication to contradict what you've said. Thanks for the response.

BTW, I find that it's sometimes hard to enter the start and end of a note. For example, you might select four words, and when you release your mouse, you end up with five or six words, or maybe even an extra line. And then it's tedious to edit the endpoints to get what you really want. Kind of like it's a crap shoot as to where the mouse U/I thinks your desired end points are. It seemed better with Safari on my Macbook Air than it does with Firefox on my PC, but that may just be an observation based on limited experience.

Yes, I've noticed similar issues with the start/end of a note. You need to be careful and sometimes cancel and reselect. However, as I got more experienced, I don't have problems very often. (I'm usually using either FF Mac or Safari Mac. Maybe I'll have to try some other browsers and see if I find any issues.) Using my finger on an iPhone I found it difficult to select specific words. I haven't tried it very much, as I'm usually studying at the desktop, but sometimes reading off the phone.

I am also interested in an answer to one of the questions. I use my iPad a lot for scripture study, and it has the scriptures in a panel on the left side, and my notes/footnotes in a panel on the right side, which I find very convenient. Is there a way to get the same appearance on my PC?

Trohfling: Everything syncs to the LDS Cloud, so it's my understanding that as long as you are connected / your sync is turned on, it happens simultaneously. Don't quote me on that.

csanders: You cannot change the appearance of online Notes. You might want to consider submitting feedback from any LDS.org page about this. Choose Suggestion and Study Notebook when asked for type of feedback. And then submit your suggestion.