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As a developer, being able to paste notes as plain text is crucial. Losing indentation, and being forced to deal with "smart" quotes is a big pain in the ass. If you agree, please up-vote the relevant issue:

https://discussion.evernote.co...

So no non-(console)-game, third party examples.

Tiny Wings is a game exclusive to iOS. It is third party, and not available for a Microsoft, Nintendo, or Sony video game console.

Penultimate is an iPad Pro-exclusive non-game third-party app from the makers of Evernote.

A Google search for apps "not on android" brought me "23 iPhone-only apps that will make your Android friends jealous" by Nathan McAlone and "20 iPad Apps That Will Make Your Android Friends Jealous" by Steven Tweedie.

I use Evernote software extensively. I actually took the time out to read both old and new privacy policies and their FAQ closely as soon as I got the email from Evernote.

The article and the Slashdot summary are, as usual, best described as FUD. They make it seem as if Evernote is compromising privacy and making it impossible to opt out of. Nothing can be farther from the truth. The change being made now is to include an additional reason for Evernote employees to access my notes - and that is to verify that the machine learning is working as intended. This change can be entirely opted out of by unchecking an option in the client. The thing that is not possible to opt out of is, other circumstances and reasons for which Evernote employees access my data, which was already in the old policy and continues unchanged in the new policy. That relates to things like legal obligations, troubleshooting, TOS violations and protecting users against malware etc, which are the norm at any service provider.

See for yourself under "Do Evernote Employees Access or Review My Notes?"
Old policy
New policy

In fact, Evernote has some of the the most transparent and clear privacy and security policies I have ever seen among online service providers.
1. It is in the form of Q & A
2. The crux of it is in the form of clear tables with "We collect" and "Why we collect it" columns.
3. It is very comprehensive, dealing with all imaginable aspects of privacy and security

Not only did Evernote provide a very clear update on the upcoming changes, they also allowed a well advertised opt-out (although an opt-in would have been better). They also have an 800 word FAQ to specifically clarify the changes and my options here. They are also clear about not using my data for other purposes. From their 3 laws of data protection -

Our business model is old-fashioned: we only make money when you decide to pay us for a great product. This means that trust is our biggest asset and keeping your data private is fundamental

.
I couldn't have asked for anything better.

I use Evernote software extensively. I actually took the time out to read both old and new privacy policies and their FAQ closely as soon as I got the email from Evernote.

The article and the Slashdot summary are, as usual, best described as FUD. They make it seem as if Evernote is compromising privacy and making it impossible to opt out of. Nothing can be farther from the truth. The change being made now is to include an additional reason for Evernote employees to access my notes - and that is to verify that the machine learning is working as intended. This change can be entirely opted out of by unchecking an option in the client. The thing that is not possible to opt out of is, other circumstances and reasons for which Evernote employees access my data, which was already in the old policy and continues unchanged in the new policy. That relates to things like legal obligations, troubleshooting, TOS violations and protecting users against malware etc, which are the norm at any service provider.

See for yourself under "Do Evernote Employees Access or Review My Notes?"
Old policy
New policy

In fact, Evernote has some of the the most transparent and clear privacy and security policies I have ever seen among online service providers.
1. It is in the form of Q & A
2. The crux of it is in the form of clear tables with "We collect" and "Why we collect it" columns.
3. It is very comprehensive, dealing with all imaginable aspects of privacy and security

Not only did Evernote provide a very clear update on the upcoming changes, they also allowed a well advertised opt-out (although an opt-in would have been better). They also have an 800 word FAQ to specifically clarify the changes and my options here. They are also clear about not using my data for other purposes. From their 3 laws of data protection -

Our business model is old-fashioned: we only make money when you decide to pay us for a great product. This means that trust is our biggest asset and keeping your data private is fundamental

.
I couldn't have asked for anything better.

I use Evernote software extensively. I actually took the time out to read both old and new privacy policies and their FAQ closely as soon as I got the email from Evernote.

The article and the Slashdot summary are, as usual, best described as FUD. They make it seem as if Evernote is compromising privacy and making it impossible to opt out of. Nothing can be farther from the truth. The change being made now is to include an additional reason for Evernote employees to access my notes - and that is to verify that the machine learning is working as intended. This change can be entirely opted out of by unchecking an option in the client. The thing that is not possible to opt out of is, other circumstances and reasons for which Evernote employees access my data, which was already in the old policy and continues unchanged in the new policy. That relates to things like legal obligations, troubleshooting, TOS violations and protecting users against malware etc, which are the norm at any service provider.

See for yourself under "Do Evernote Employees Access or Review My Notes?"
Old policy
New policy

In fact, Evernote has some of the the most transparent and clear privacy and security policies I have ever seen among online service providers.
1. It is in the form of Q & A
2. The crux of it is in the form of clear tables with "We collect" and "Why we collect it" columns.
3. It is very comprehensive, dealing with all imaginable aspects of privacy and security

Not only did Evernote provide a very clear update on the upcoming changes, they also allowed a well advertised opt-out (although an opt-in would have been better). They also have an 800 word FAQ to specifically clarify the changes and my options here. They are also clear about not using my data for other purposes. From their 3 laws of data protection -

Our business model is old-fashioned: we only make money when you decide to pay us for a great product. This means that trust is our biggest asset and keeping your data private is fundamental

.
I couldn't have asked for anything better.

Perhaps you weren't able to read the actual announcement from Evernote. They state that employees WILL be manually reading the notes, in order to improve their machine learning capabilities.

These are human beings reading confidential material. Abuse is incredibly likely.

From the FAQ:
"This is primarily to make sure that our machine learning technologies are working correctly, in order to surface the most relevant content and features to you. While our computer systems do a pretty good job, sometimes a limited amount of human review is simply unavoidable in order to make sure everything is working exactly as it should."

The article says "The only way to fully protect your privacy is to delete all your notes and close your Evernote account." Evernote comes with built in encryption, you just have to use it: https://help.evernote.com/hc/e... Moreover, evernote warns you "WARNING: We do not store a copy of your encryption key. If it is forgotten by you, your note is lost forever". So it is NOT true what this article says!

If you believe them - and since you can't audit their code personally you shouldn't - then they cannot decrypt your encrypted notes without brute forcing it. They claim not to store you key: https://help.evernote.com/hc/e... You have to decide whether or not to believe them.

Previously I've used the free version Catch on mobile and desktop with zero problems, but then Apple bought them out and shut down the service. I migrated everything to Evernote just because they're the de-facto note taking service; I didn't want to have to switch again.

After using it for a while I discovered its flaws, like having your notes be inaccessible during their weekly maintenance Wednesday evenings. What is this, the 90s?

Anyway I couldn't complain too much because it was free. Now that they're hitting us up for money I'm inclined to just pay them the $35 yearly fee so I can access it everywhere and start complaining. I tried Google Keep but it was extremely bare bones; the notes couldn't be shared and were limited to less than 1K of text.

In any case, it's better than pen and paper--these notes never get lost and are easily searchable. If those features aren't useful, you haven't taken that many notes!

It all depends on what kind of notes you take and what for. I am a professor and I tend to jot down lots of quick thoughts that some day I may work into a publication or else post online. I also write down detailed notes on books, i.e. what important thing I found on what page. I tend to hand write notes on color-coded post-its in the book and then I transcribe these on the computer either by typing or by voice.

I used to use OneNote a long time ago because it is very versatile and it's easy to make charts, etc. I switched to Evernote (free) because I wanted my data to be synced and because of the utter simplicity of it. At the time I didn't like how I couldn't do color and formatting on Android and I still hate Evernote's awful tables.

However, I developed a Perl script that allows me to type up my book notes in plain text and then easily format and color-code them. the script then automatically imports the output into Evernote. The API--at least back when I made the script--is not terribly great, but it at least works and I don't have to fuss with stupid VBA. I think I just used a command line script.

I think these recent changes my seriously chase me away from Evernote, because I need more than two devices and the subscription fee is just outrageous. I have seriously thought of paying it before, but it just is not worth it when there's plenty of competition. Evernote is far from a great company; their UIs are often terrible and they hardly ever improve their apps in ways that actually help the users. For example, their UI just keeps getting more and more blinding white, and they will never add any option to be able to make it sensibly dark for those of us who have to stare at it all day. Thankfully I recently found an easy hack that at least improves it a little bit: https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/86645-solution-to-not-having-white-background-for-notes/

Nowadays I take most quick notes--like shopping lists--on my OneNote app on my Windows Phone. It sucks terribly, but it's much quicker than waiting for Evernote to load.

We're just getting ready to publish or Test Case Management plugin to the Atlassian marketplace. I can provide trial installation packages to people interested in trying it out. Collaborative editing, tight integration with Jira, great UI. https://www.evernote.com/l/AAL... Comment if interested, I'll set up trial link.

I have a repository for a project that's been going on for a few years and has a few hundred photos of whiteboards. Trying to find one is almost impossible because there's no full-text search for photos of whiteboards.

Isn't that exactly what Evernote is supposed to be able to do?

I was about to respond with "You want to capture notes and not have them sync with the cloud" which is desired for company private materials (and for other privacy reasons). I did a quick search online and http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/43171-evernote-without-the-cloud// shows that you can have local Evernote notebooks that don't sync with the with the cloud too (although you do not to create an account).

http://blog.evernote.com/tech/2012/09/25/protecting-your-data-the-broken-drives-edition/

http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2008/06/24/evernote-public-launch/

keeping things in sync between many devices could be done with a floppy disk as early as 1982

If you went back in time by 15 years, and suggested on Slashdot that keeping data in sync using a sneakernet was a better option than using the Internet, you would've been laughed at. I mean, that's what networks are for, and only knucklegrinders and noobs copy files around on physical media. But now, we don't call it a a "network" anymore, we call it the "cloud", and so therefore it's stupid?

I know that the term "cloud" is overused and silly, but networks are a great piece of technology and remote storage often makes more sense than local storage. Especially for applications like this.

Also, if you're concerned about data mining, Evernote don't do any data mining (or at least, that's what they claim in their TOS). Just because a service is on the cloud, doesn't mean that they are necessarily mining your data.

here's the keyboard in the patent.

Evernote has encryption:
https://support.evernote.com/link/portal/16051/16058/Article/549/Overview-of-Encryption-in-Evernote

Of course then you have to decide if you trust them. Personally I use PGP to encrypt before I sync.

Try using Evernote and scan as you go, keeping up on all current items. Do extra ones when you have the time.

I recommend Evernote

+1 iusethistoo

Evernote has clients for OSX, IOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm, and the web. OCRs images you put in it. Syncs between your devices transparently. All clients are free but there's a max of like 60M/mo transfer; if you want to exceed that it's $45/year.

I haven't put alllll my data in it and probably never will but for reference material and general notes? It's kinda where everything goes now.

I try to make sure everything important ends up on my iPhone and laptop - sometimes I'll even scan in hardcopies with my iPhone.

I don't use to-do lists--I enter both to-dos and meetings as events in my iPhone calendar, which I sync regularly to iCal. I try to make sure my iPhone is the "current" version of things. Items that don't have a specific time associated with them end up at 11pm - not ideal but seems to work. I make copious use of the notes field, and when I use it, I try to put an asterisk in the "subject" line.

Anything I need to refer back to often goes to the Notes app, which syncs to the Apple Mail client. I'd sure love it if the calendar could link to Notes, and vice versa... Seems this is why people like Evernote but I'm not a fan of keeping everything in the cloud...

I'm don't consider myself a Mac fanboy, but like you I find myself juggling a ton of info all the time and this is how my system evolved.

you can't actually download and save papers from the iPad itself.

Seriously, you haven't researched this any better than just using iBooks for managing your research library? Three solutions right off the top: GoodReader, Evernote and Papers all offer a selection of features that address (each a bit differently) your scenario. Many folks I know use more than one of those tools depending on the specific situation.

I don't know if this is quite what you're looking for.. but I have found Evernote "The all new Evernote 3.5 for Windows Evernote 3.5 for Windows is completely new. We rewrote it from the ground up to make it faster, more reliable, and just plain better than Evernote for Windows has ever been. Our goal was to use everything we've learned since our launch to make a great Evernote experience on Windows. If you're interested in trying Evernote 3.5, install it from our downloads page ( http://s.evernote.com/windows ). There's a ton more to say, so please read our blog post(s): http://s.evernote.com/win35blog" very useful when I was doing my Open University Course ..Good Luck..mm

I don't know if this is quite what you're looking for.. but I have found Evernote "The all new Evernote 3.5 for Windows Evernote 3.5 for Windows is completely new. We rewrote it from the ground up to make it faster, more reliable, and just plain better than Evernote for Windows has ever been. Our goal was to use everything we've learned since our launch to make a great Evernote experience on Windows. If you're interested in trying Evernote 3.5, install it from our downloads page ( http://s.evernote.com/windows ). There's a ton more to say, so please read our blog post(s): http://s.evernote.com/win35blog" very useful when I was doing my Open University Course ..Good Luck..mm

Have you tried Evernote as a One Note replacement? Oddly enough, it has a native iPhone client which should work fine on the iPad (or the android, palm, winmobile, blackberry, windows, osx... sadly no Linux other than the web client). The iPhone has native exchange support, which works well for corporate e-mail.

Really the only missing link in the chain that you mentioned is annotating PDF files, which is something that I haven't looked into. Maybe an iPhone client exists for that? I don't know.

Seriously, a decent phone camera even. Just get Evernote (differences between premium and free are listed on that page) and take notes by hand then upload them that way. It's even (rather) searchable if your pendmenship is somewhat legible. Just a thought.

I've never used it, but Pogo Sketch seems to be what you're looking for. (For those who don't want to click the link, it's a stylus that works with trackpads. You can use it with any app that lets you draw with a mouse.)

If you could make it work with Evernote that would be about ideal.

I don't understand the purpose of the thousand posts saying, "Just use pencil and paper!". That's my preferred approach, but why reply if you aren't going to answer the question? You don't really think that an advanced Math student never thought of using a notebook, do you?!

-Peter

The way I read it when it first came out was, most of their feature requests were already in the product. So the ribbon was intended to (among other things) try to make it easier for people to find things.

You still have to know what you're looking for, and how Microsoft decided it should be classified. For example, to insert a new line of cells you don't look on the Insert ribbon - if you do, you'd see "Insert / Line" and be surprised when a graph pops up. It's not under Data, as in Insert a line of data. So I go to Home. There's an Insert option, but it's in the box labeled Cells. I don't want cells, I want a whole line. The "old way" was Insert -> Row, and the 2003 shortcut still works in 2007.

"Nine out of 10 feature requests we got for 2007 were already in the 2003 product," says Microsoft senior marketing manager Paul Coleman. "People just couldn't find them."

http://www.wired.com/software/softwarereviews/news/2007/01/72596

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/114467/is-microsofts-ribbon-ui-really-that-great-from-a-usability-perspective
http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/maryb/2009/07/13/dont-like-the-ribbon-you-will/
http://www.evernote.com/shard/s1/note/666e1143-e735-4d8e-a98a-931fda130235/pivic/Tech
http://www.betanews.com/article/Top-5-obvious-feature-enhancements-to-Microsoft-Office-2010/1247509742/2
http://www.factplace.com/microsoft_onenote_12.htm

I haven't come across any software that won't run on that other than bluetooth drivers using A2DP.

• Screenflow
• iBank
• iPhone SDK
• Spore
• Evernote

Need I go on?

Also, depending on who you bought your Mac through, there is usually some cheaper or free option for upgrading to the next major release

Apple.com. No option that I know of.

I'll second (or maybe 5th, since I've seen other posts above) Evernote - http://www.evernote.com/

"But Thumbtack developers think their service has a difference."

Yeah, MS always says that when they're 2+ years late to the idea party.

Evernote is super simple, syncs to my machine for offline access, has mobile access, takes input from photos (the iSight on my MacBook is great for this), accepts new items via email so I can email cell phone pics or notes... and it has built-in OCR on every item.

Here is the presentation:
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V128/N30/subway/Defcon_Presentation.pdf

Mirrors:
http://www.evernote.com/pub/ssulistyo/InfoSecStuff#07ff6ce9-1aa9-45e9-8bd2-10ce0805e534
https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/77164/anatomy%20of%20a%20subway%20hack.pdf

Also, a vulnerability assessment report:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/files/vulnerability_assessment_of_the_mtba_system.pdf

Evernote is a similar application for several platforms. It too is touted as a "backup for your brain."

Its claim to fame is a nice OCR engine. Say you are at a wine tasting event and want to remember a particular wine. You pull out your cell phone, snap a shot of the label, and email it from your phone to your Evernote account. There, the photo goes through the OCR engine, and all recognizable words are added to the indexing.

Later you can do searches on those words to retrieve the image.

review: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/21/extend-your-brain-with-evernote-private-beta-invites/

Evernote has a pretty slick web interface that is built with the Google Web Toolkit. I was positively surprised by its snappiness. Finding out it was GWT was sort of an "ah, but of course" experience.

Have you tried EverNote's RitePen?

http://www.evernote.com/products/technology/ritepen/

It's the best HWR I've found yet --- I use it constantly on my Fujitsu Stylistic (which I've _finally_ gotten booting off an Extreme III 2GB card using a CF-IDE adapter --- for some reason it wouldn't boot from the 4GB card, so it's in the second slot).

William

It's a program that allows you to easily save a copy of just about anything (certainly anything on the web...) with links to the original and everything else. The notes are automatically stored in chronological order for browsing. You can also apply tags to your liking and it has full search capabilities as well. It's free for the regular version, if you want to import handwritten notes and have them be searchable as well there's a charge.

It's awesome and I think fits your needs exactly, or at least I use it to meet the needs you described and I've had no problems with it.

Now if I could just force myself to go back and do something with the research later...

P.S. There's a writer in The Atlantic named James Fallows who has a column on useful technology tools. That's where I first learned of Evernote. He had several other suggestions to fit the bill in that column and more generally, he's usually worth a read.

http://www.evernote.com/en/

First learned of it on the Wacom drawing tablet mailing list and now could not survive without it. Endless stream of virtual paper with auto-dating and auto-categorization, all searchable. Plop in pictures, typed notes, swaps from clipboard, live weblinks, quoted text or images from websites which retain the connection. Pony for the quite reasonable paid version and write directly into it with your drawing tablet or tablet PC and get that converted on the fly to searchable text.

http://grc.com/spinrite.htm/

Spinrite has been the most amazing hardware maintainance ap bar none for...gosh. Pushing two decades. I'll never forget watching it change my RLL drive's interleave w/o formatting in ~1988. Now that Mac users are on commodity hardware they can use it for their disks without yanking them from the boxes. Not free but worth every last cent. Sales of Spinrite also pay for all the free security aps its creator offers.

Me, I'm waiting for easy OSX on non-Apple hardware. Somehow I don't see Apple helping us with that....

I have been trying to convince our management to pursue a *nix version, but we haven't so far - siting low demand.

I suppose that someone inclined enough to use it on Linux can work with the XML exports and a little XSL.

Any takers?

I like FreeMind for taking phone notes. It lets me put things down immediately even though I don't yet know the full context, then drag and drop later. It's Java, so it's portable, and the .jar is pretty small, if that's an issue.

Another good option is EverNote a more linear product. Quite snappy at what it does.

OneNote is worth a try, I have it but never use it, when weighed against the above two.

Hope it helps!

I am astonished to find out that at my current job, we are trying to solve a grand challenge.
Try EverNote. It's still in beta, but it's free.

Evernote http://evernote.com/ has a nice note taking app in beta (free download) that they say will be ported to Linux.

It does handwriting recognition and they also say they're aiming for audio notes along the lines of OneNote. The handwriting recognition is working very well for me.

My main interest in Tablet PC's is note taking. Appropriate hardware (pen input) running Linux plus Evernote with good audio notes would do the trick for me. Something like the Pepper Pad 2 http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT7558010259. html

The Evernote beta is Windows only for now and free. There's a good forum going on their site about the beta, too.

Honestly, though, I'd _really_ like appropriate hardware running OS X plus Evernote....