Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Professional Journaling/Notes Software?
netdicted writes "At the very outset of my career the importance of keeping a daily journal of activities and notes was clearly evident. Over the years I've always had a college ruled composition notebook nearby to jot down important ideas, instructions, tasks, etc. Putting away the rock and chisel was not optional when the volumes grew beyond my mental capacity to successfully index the contents. Over the years I've tried countless apps to keep a digital journal and failed miserably.
In my mind the ideal app or solution is a single file or cloud app where I can organize personal notes on projects, configurations, insights, ideas, etc., as well as noting major activities or occurrences of the day. My original journals saved me on a number of occasions. Unfortunately my tenacity for keeping one has suffered from a fruitless search for a suitable solution. Currently I'm experimenting with Evernote and Tiddlywiki. They approach the problem from two different angles. What do you use?"
In my mind the ideal app or solution is a single file or cloud app where I can organize personal notes on projects, configurations, insights, ideas, etc., as well as noting major activities or occurrences of the day. My original journals saved me on a number of occasions. Unfortunately my tenacity for keeping one has suffered from a fruitless search for a suitable solution. Currently I'm experimenting with Evernote and Tiddlywiki. They approach the problem from two different angles. What do you use?"
Dear Slashdot, I'm afraid that years from now, my nuggets of wisdom will be lost, and I will not be able to find the appropriate pithy thought to properly respond to a Slashdot Troll... What ever shal I do?
Dear "Netdicted", first of all, your screen name for some reason reminded me of getting my cat neutered. Second, unplug. There is more to life than a 24/7 high speed connection. Third, consider your follow-on. Your children and grand children will not be able to read your e-diary, and writing things on paper long-hand will help you stave off Alzimers. In other words, keep writing in your Moll Skin, it's really the hippest and most practical way to go, and will leave something for your kids and grand kids to enjoy long after you are gon. Seriously.
Snark aside, work out a system of indexes - electronically in necessary, but please continue using that old "buggy whip", a pen and paper.
Excuse me now, I have to mow my lawn.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
It works. Runs on my laptop, server, and tablet!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_PDA
http://orgmode.org/
http://www.cyborganize.org/clarity/what-is-cyborganize/
steep learning curve but worth the climb for open vistas and a healthy body/mind
I've kept it relatively simple over the years.
I have a text file where I keep a daily log of sorts. My time is charged directly to the customer of the project I'm working on, so the main purpose in this log is to keep track of that (we have a system for entering our time, but it sucks, so I like having my own records) and keep additional notes about what I was doing that day (the system where it ultimately gets entered only cares about the numbers).
Project specific, I usually create a specific directory per task. I usually end up with a notes.txt file with random bits of info, copies of emails, data files, diagrams, etc. I do most note taking / scratch work on paper, and then either transcribe the important bits (not as arduous as it sounds) or scan them and store them in the folder (we have a really nice sheet fed scanner here). On particularly large projects where I have a lot of written notes, I'll have an actual physical folder or binder to cart the stuff around.
It's one of those things where tech should be able to solve the problem better, and I'm sure if I adapted to some specific software rather than trying to make the software adapt to how I like doing things it could work, but for now I just haven't found anything that works better or offers a compelling reason to change.
In my case specifically, one major roadblock to adopting a "paper-free" approach is I often do testing/debug work outside the office, where there is no or little access to the internet and a tablet is not an option for various reasons.
Seriously, it's the best out there.
God forbid you buy something though. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/
A lot better than Evernote, and now it's free.
http://www.onenote.com/
lucm, indeed.
I've been working on a research project in Chemical Engineering for the past 5 years as a consultant. I struggled, like you, to find a technical solution for a professional journal. I had to settle for fifty cent spiral bound notebook and pencil (I found a neat plastic case to keep them in). No other solution could provide me a way to easily keep a written ledger of text and numbers, draw diagrams, schematics, and allow me to easily edit mistakes. When the notebooks were full, they went into a three-ring binder. Searching through the pages of the binders is fairly easy, especially since *I'm* the one that wrote the notes.
Don't over-think the problem.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
I use tuxcards. I used gnote for quite a while but I find tuxcards makes it easier for me to visualize what I have.
I don't keep huge piles of notes in it, though -- mostly things like to-do lists.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Search-able and simple simple text is cross platform and easily copied and pasted. It acts like your "College ruled" notebooks and a single file could hold all. And, using the search mechanism you could search for a word or a date. The discipline you need is a really simple format: date first, topic or keyword and then just type. End with a signature, initials, keyword or "to do" note or phrase.
Why make it harder?
I am in fear of the flames now, but I started using OneNote around three months ago and I swear, it is the best note-taking system that I have ever used. I would go so far to say that it might be the best program that Microsoft has on offer. Very flexible, very easy to use, and the cut and paste feature really makes it useful. There you go....And they are giving it away free.
Where do we go from here
I've gotta go with the hive mind here as well. I do most of my note taking on pads of paper, then throw those pages into physical folders, and then those folders into a filing cabinet.
On the computer side, a folder with the name of the project/task/whatever to dump digital stuff related to it.
Old fashioned, sure.. but it works.
Seriously. Just put .LOG on the first line of the file and every time you open it Notepad puts the date and time.
Mostly random stuff.
from OmniGroup.com or a similar outlining app.
Text, images/screen shots, linked files, audio, all in an organizable outline format meaning I can keep a years worth of notes searchable and displayable in a small window.
The text is kept in normal Mac format, so Spotlight can easily search all OO files for a specific text item.
Microsoft OneNote.
Done.
I used to use organized .txt files but switched to DokuWiki.
https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuw...
Now I can access notes from all of my devices and share them easily with associates as well.
I tried Evernote, MediaWiki, Atlassian's Confluence and a ton of other options but DokuWiki is the only solution I have found that makes managing a notebook easy, fast and enjoyable.
Try Org mode in Emacs if you are reasonably comfortable in it (or even if you are not)
Rsync your CherryTree file, or sync with whatever cloud storage solution you use, Google Drive, Microsoft NSAAS, whatever.
It's a bit limited for complex things, but it worked for some students I know tracking the majority of their note-keeping needs. Stopped using 3rd party solutions since I eat my own dogfood, and now have notes integrated into my distributed versioned whiteboard / issue tracker / build & deploy & test product. I have issue/note/image annotation plugins for coding with Netbeans, Eclipse, Visual Studio, Emacs and Vim -- Which reminds me of a Vim plugin I just saw that you might find useful... if you can run a (home) server (and port forward around NAT), then install Wordpress on a LAMP stack (in a VM, because PHP exploits) -- I'm pretty sure Emacs has all that built in by default now: C-x M-c M-microblog.
I jest, it's just Org mode. Save your .org to your Git repo, and away you go.
I'm using Emacs org-mode w/ a vcs. Most-used features are TODO's, scheduling (agenda), document export
Your notes can be as detailed or as slim as you want. This is some pretty good project management software.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
i have kinetic memory, my body knows where it put something, even when i cannot remember a thing.
there is no substitute for writing it down, i find, and typing is definitely not writing, does not have the same effect.
the only digital solution that almost worked for me was a pen tablet, and perhaps now that our invention has come full circle, and we're back to scribbling on stone (well, sand) tablets again, i may finally lose the pen and paper..
but not yet - paper can be recycled - and as far as i know this is not true for batteries.
I have used OneNote for years, but take a look at Freemind
I like using it specifically when laying out a working outline for a theme paper, a programming problem, etc.
It allows Visual / Org-chart and outline display of notes. not just tabs. Easy to re-arrange and show different ways. Import and Export to HTML & XML. Superneato.
I've been writing ethnographic field notes for about 15 years. I had a couple of phases of trying to do this electronically, but the notes from each of those 3 month experiments are for the most part now lost or at least difficult to access - proprietary formats, failed backups, accidental deletions, you name it. Whereas the paper notebooks are sitting on my bookshelf beside my desk. For one project I chopped the spine off the notebook and dropped the pages into a bulk scanner before perfect-binding the notebook back together again, but the resulting physical notebook is a bit more delicate than I'd like. But I do like having an electronic version, both for backup and so I have a copy available when I'm away from my bookshelf. So these days I photocopy each notebook and drop the photocopies through the scanner (and more recently I've been able to have a student or an intern do it, but for a task I only needed to do every three-six months it was never that onerous to begin with), storing both the photocopy and a copy of the pdf offsite. I've played with various indexing schemes over the years, from leaving the last dozen pages blank and writing a single-line description of the contents of each page as I filled it (2002-03-21: key informant interview, ER doctor, hospital xxx), through to embedding metadata on relevant pages of the pdf to make it searchable (my handwriting is way way too bad for ocr to have any utility). But the 'write the index on the last few pages of the notebook as you go' method has been the simplest and most robust, and it rarely takes long to find anything, even with 30 or so notebooks on my bookshelf. And picking up an old notebook every few months and just reading or skimming through it is often a worthwhile exercise, reminding you of ideas and streams of thought and research context in ways that simply searching for something you already know is in there never can.
As an additional benefit, I've always found making notes in a notebook to be less intrusive in meetings or interviews than typing or using a stylus on a tablet (although changing social norms may make the latter less intrusive eventually), and the act of writing to be less intrusive to my own thought processes than typing (maybe just because no red squiggly lines appear under my notes as I type, or text reflowing, drawing the eye as it does so), but that might just be me, or I might just be showing my age.
Writes like paper
Syncs to evernote
Saves everything to pdf and can easily be printed for paper archival
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
I use this: Freeplane
It's not the right tool for long verbose text, but for collecting ideas and arranging them together it works well. I tend to think of it as a free-form web page. A few key things:
- It is portable, at least I run mine off a USB flash drive. This is a key feature, if it were not so then it wouldn't get used. It's not "cloud" but then I think of this as being better than a cloud version, as it does not require network, and you don't have to worry about cloud security.
- It can support links to other files (local on the drive) or web links to external sites. This ability to organize an amorphous collection of things (text, local links, remote links, images) is what makes it a good idea tool.
- It can collapse/expand parts of the map so you can focus on topic at hand. Just make sure to enable the setting that saves the state of the map (for some reason IIRC it defaults to everything collapsed when the map is first opened).
Once you setup a couple keybindings, and get the hang of creating and linking new nodes it becomes a pretty fast tool to work in also.
If you're just looking for a laundry list of note-taking apps, I'm sure Google can help. If you want real advice you need to provide more information. You're obviously in the habit of taking notes with pen and paper, so why have you failed miserably to keep a digital journal? What part of it doesn't work for you? Your list of requirements is missing that bit of information. You want a "single file or cloud app where I can organize personal notes on projects, configurations, insights, ideas, etc.,". Well, that about covers every single note-taking app ever written, as well as every text editor from the dawn of time. Try to narrow it down a little. Or, stick with pen and paper if it's been working for you. What do you hope to gain by going digital? Knowing that will help point you in the right direction.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
No, seriously. Amazing for journal keeping, customization to what you want, tagging, indexing, scheduling, time-logging, integration with calendars, org-mobile for your mobile needs with synchro. If I wrote something on a notebook, snap a pic, link it to a note with relevant tags. I use it for my job (post-doc researcher) to juggle all the stuff I need to do, and it is amazing on all counts.
http://orgmode.org/
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I use Evernote. But I don’t trust it.
I use Evernote for most of my digital notes stuff. I like the syncing feature which keeps notes on my mac, smartphone and tablet in sync.
However I don’t trust it for really important long-term stuff. Really essential stuff, such as long writing projects, articles, essays, important letters or digital journals go into textfiles that are in directories covered by redundant backup/archive mechanisms on detached portable HDDs with filesystems that can be read with widely available free open source software (Mac OS X HFS *without* journaling).
Doing anything else with anything valuable that’s supposed to stay useable longer than a decade is insane.
For instance, I still have CD copies of CD Archives of Zip Disk Archives of very old HDDs (2,5 40 MB HDDs would fit on one ZipDisk attached via parallel port - yepp, those were the days) with texts written in Ami Pro. The Ami Pro format is openable with a regular text editor, but it still is anoying to extract the useful data. No way am I installing Dos 5 and Win 3.11 on a Vbox just to run Ami Pro just to open them. Hence, only UTF-8 textfiles since round-about 2000.
You should do the same for any journal stuff that is supposed to last longer than 3 years.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Only slightly offtopic: Here's a similar use-case and how I solved it. The problem is 'collecting' job ads efficiently to spend my time applying for.
Requirement: Avoid redundant re-reading of the same stupids ads over and over, (so alway view ads boards by date, most recent ads first; and maybe use 'email search by date filters' too). Also, I want to avoid applying with recruiters as much as possible by applying only directly to firms whenever possible, etc.
The Scrapbook extension allows me to quickly select html verbatum from any web page and save it locally to disk with my notes, while a right-click takes me to the original web page. I save these in 'dated' folders, at least initially to save time, so I can stay focused to the task at-hand. Even when the original webpage is gone, I still have a copy of it, (and I didn't print or save any paper either).
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...
Scrapbook allows me to save these pages locally to disk in folders, *and* the extension appears in the sidebar, *and* allows me to prioritize the ads worth applying to simply by re-ordering them up and down, using the mouse; and also move them to other folders
This is the best solution I've found so far, and if anyone knows something better I'm eager to read.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
What you call "notes", the local prosecutor calls "evidence". Something you write that might seem totally harmless to you - "today I spent three hours daydreaming about putting bleach in my idiot boss's Diet Coke" suddenly becomes damning when presented out of context to a jury, after someone put bleach in your boss's Diet Coke and he wound up in the hospital.
I have been keeping a plain text log for the better part of two decades. They are just individual text files, one for each day, with titles like 2014-04-20_sue_party, a date and a quick description of anything unusual. The encryption mechanism has changed, but right now they are all stored on a Truecrypt volume. A vanilla search only takes a minute at most.
Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
You are right.
I use simple text files. I like them more than paper notebooks because:
1. I can edit them from anywhere that I can use ssh
2. They are easy to search
3. They are easy to back up
The comments (including the parent) that suggest simple text files and editors have all been modded down to 0. I don't understand why.
WikidPad
I've been using WikidPad recently - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikidPad
Pros so far are that the notes "database" is just flat text files (so you can VCS them easily with git and use any editor to create them, although WikidPad has a decent enough simple editor) - the dynamic links and formatting are all done on the fly. Also, it's written in Python so the source is freely visible and hackable.
The upshot of those two points is that it should be relatively trivial in future to process and export/import the notes to some other format if a better tool comes along. It has an HTML export/publish facility already, so that's a way of pushing my notes to a server that I can refer to anywhere (even if I can't edit them).
Cons are that I don't particularly like the CamelCase document linking method (I'd like a way to indicate that a CamelCase link should actually be visible in the document as "Camel Case" (or "Camel case" or "camel case")). That's fairly trivial though (I can always dive in and submit a patch that adds that option if I'm that bothered by it).
I grew up right on the cusp– I learned to print and write cursive in grade school but I always had bad penmanship and started typing papers on a word processor in middle school. Got my first computer in high school. So I am more comfortable typing than writing by hand, and Im sure anyone younger than me is going to be even more so. I can understand why so many people suggest you type your notes- it does present zero barrier to entry, and no compatibility issues, but its the WORST format by far for searching and retrieving information later on. The more you write, and the longer you wait, the harder it will be to remember where and when you wrote that one particular nugget of wisdom.
I'd also stay away from any app or god forbid, cloud service, that is proprietary. If it doesn't offer XML import/export, I wouldn't even consider it. Also, no way Im using an Omni product that will extort a $100 upgrade fee whenever they like. Plain text for me, with a copy exported as PDF and appended to a master document that I can search from any PDF compatible app on any platform.
"Eagles may soar, but weasels dont get sucked into jet engines."
please please please have some breaks in your writings. one long running block of text is so hard to wade through. three or four lines then a line break then another three or four lines and so on. think of those who may want to read your writings. please.
I went from keeping a simple and cheap paper lab notebook to just using MS-Word. Paper notebooks were fine in the olden days, I could tape in tables or diagrams from books. But paper is hard to search and organize and move from desk to desk and job to job.
I simply keep an MS-Word (or Google Docs) file where the document starts with several tables, such as charge codes, assigned staff contact data, assigned staff current assignment, and a To Do List.
Then I have a current to past date order where each date has a header with the date in Bold (using a style) and is followed by note lines indented to make each entry easy to spot and follow. When I read a document or reference a file, I add a hyperlink to the item in my notes.
With MS-Word i have active hyperlinks, I can paste in tables or diagrams, or Dilbert cartoons. Every three months I close the file, write lock it, and start a new one from the previous one. To shorten the file, I trim old entries from the current one because the original file is intact. Eery month I print the current one to have with me for reference. Each file ends up about 40 pages. I currently have less used tables at the end of the file.
My oldest one still opens and has its original file time stamp. If MS-Word ever announces it will obsolete a format, I could convert them to Google Docs or save in the new format. Lets face it, MS-Word is a defacto standard. It is used everywhere now. I have used these files on both Macs and PCs.
My method has saved my sorry ass many times. When did I talk to such and such about something? I search the files and I have dates because I record a brief summary of every discussion I hold with names. Personnel issues, I have notes. Document lost? I have links and the dates I read it, even if the link is broken, I have a record. Travel, I have a record. Meetings? I have a record with notes.
Do I want to trust a third party like EverNote, No.
Have I ever lost one of these files, No. I have them at work, at home, and on Google Drive.
The records have helped me trace missing circuit boards since recorded to whom and when I sent them.
I started using this when my manager, before I became one, would ask me if I was working on something. If I had no record of when we talked and what he said, I was at fault for not working on something. When I started keeping records, that problem ended.
I learned to keep detailed, highly organized notes while working as a field biologist as a young man. In those days, if you were lucky enough to be museum trained, you used "The Grinnell System", which was a binder-based system that specified everything from the kind of ink to use (high carbon, black india ink), the paper (acid free high cotton bond), and layout elements, such as the locations of margin lines, dates, and page numbers. Tabbed sections were used to organize notes by activity. We used 8 1/2 inch binders because the smaller size was easier to use in the field. I spent many a long rainy night, usually in a tent or the front seat of a truck, completing my notes of the day's observations. My notes are now deposited in a museum, where they can be accessed by researchers working in the regions I used to haunt.
These days, as a statistician, I still take copious notes. But the ink and binders are gone (and so are the ticks and mosquitoes!). Organization is key: I need to record the entire data analysis process, from data formatting and cleaning, to graphical analysis, coding for models and processing scripts, and finally construction of figures suitable for publication. I looked long and hard for a digital note taking system before finally settling on NoteTaker by Aquaminds. I think it's binder-like system appealed to me, after so many years using binders in the field. I've been using NoteTaker now for at least 7 years.
NoteTaker is not completely free-form like some systems: note books mimic lab books in style and format, with digital pages in a digital binder. You add discrete entries, which are organized consecutively like an outline (entries can be moved around in the hierarchy). There is a table of contents for each book, and tabs are used to organize books into sections, much as a physical binder. Content can include everything from text to jpegs to sound files and video and everything can be time-stamped. Auto-indexing is a useful feature, though of course there is a built-in search utility, too. Notebooks can be ported to PDF, and there is a free reader for sharing notebooks with people who haven't purchased NoteTaker.
I've used NoteTaker for many academic and professional projects over the years. I've grown to rely on it as my main method now for keeping track of projects. It's not the Grinnell System, but for people trained on a binders, it feels like a natural replacement.
Several years ago I started to use PMWiki and was surprised to find it replaced my use of notebooks. There is probably better wiki software out there but it does what I need.
The search feature makes it easy to find old notes just by remebering one word specfic to the info I want. This was the key short coming of my paper notes, after a while finding stuff was no longer pratical.
The other thing was being html on a server meant I always have access from any PC or from my phone. When my job started including international travel this remote access to my notes was great.
The best system i found are plain text files for the really important things, in a year/month/day directory structure. Store it locally on a usb stick and use an arbitray sync tool or version mangement to sync between your devices.
Searching these is easy.
Notability is my favorite app, though it's only for iProducts...
I use Emacs with "Org Mode". It lets me collapse each day's information to single line, but all of the information can be searched like a normal Emacs buffer and expanded as needed. You even get the handy table formatting. If you need to output sections they can be rendered to PDF, HTML, etc.
In a band? Use WheresTheGig for free.
I like Zim for note-taking with minor formatting and image insertion. Have the folder sync to any sort of "cloud" storage you prefer and you can access it anywhere and keep it synchronised. The formatting is just a basic wiki style formatting using plain text files and folders, so even if you don't have a native client for every device (phone/tablet), you can still edit or add files and clean things up later. It also has a plugin system so you can get extra features like in-line calculation, automatic date-based journal creation under a namespace, tagging, etc.
I keep one primary notebook for notes, ideas, and random information, using separate namespaces to categorise; then I also keep some extra notebooks for specific projects or even keeping track of data for games that benefit greatly from a journal of locations and inventory, such as Minecraft or Starbound.
LightPaper is also decent but it's tied tightly to Dropbox. Visually appealing, works nicely on mobile, and formatting is Markdown so it's simple to work with on other platofrms. Bad part is it's hard to get your files out of it other than with Dropbox, and limited platform support (Android and OS X only, oddly).
No matter what you choose, though, it should be something that creates files that are human-readable or at least can be parsed by other programs. Anything else risks you losing your data
I would recommend a livescribe pen. You get the best both worlds. You use the pen with their paper - which you can download a pdf template for free from their website. And you can download what you have written, as well as any conversations that were going on while you writing on your computer which is then indexed.
The only downside is that it is an electronic device and needs to be treated as such. I had it in my soft tote book bag in the back of my car for a couple of weeks and it got banged around and broke. At $150-$240 apiece treating it like just another pen was an expensive mistake.
But even with that downside if you take good care of it the Livescribe is awesome!
So I take it that you use ed, since it is the standard UNIX editor.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I do that with vi, find and grep on a collection of plain text files. It works rather well.
http://zim-wiki.org/
I use it with Dropbox to make it available with all the computers I use.
Zim is a graphical text editor used to maintain a collection of wiki pages. Each page can contain links to other pages, simple formatting and images. Pages are stored in a folder structure, like in an outliner, and can have attachments. Creating a new page is as easy as linking to a nonexistent page. All data is stored in plain text files with wiki formatting. Various plugins provide additional functionality, like a task list manager, an equation editor, a tray icon, and support for version control.
Zim can be used to:
Keep an archive of notes
Take notes during meetings or lectures
Organize task lists
Draft blog entries and emails
Do brainstorming
Zim handles several types of markup, like headings, bullet lists and of course bold, italic and highlighted. This markup is saved as wiki text so you can easily edit it with other editors. Because of the autosave feature you can switch between pages and follow links while editing without worries.
I've been using Evernote for almost 4 years now. Overall, I like it. Having access to the same information on my desktop, laptop, tablet and phone is amazingly handy, especially at events where I go through multiple sets of batteries in a day. (SXSW comes to mind.)
The key to using Evernote, or probably any personal content management system, is organizing your data so you can find it later. I started using notebooks, but have evolved to a combination of notebooks and tags. It's important to spend some time up front, and create some management system and stick to it. It will evolve, but as with many things, if you have a good base, it will grow well. I use the notebooks to separate major contexts; like work and my various hobbies. I use the tags to keep track of individual subjects. This is handy when a given item can fall into more than one category.
I like that you can use the camera to embed pictures into notes. You can also embed other files. The free version has a fairly modest limit on the amount of data you can upload, but it's been adequate for me. You can upgrade to the pro version for $45/yr, which gives you a lot more upload and I think some enhanced OCR capabilities as well.
I also like the web clipper plug-in. It will extract the content and put it into a note. This is very useful if the content changes or even disappears. They've been steadily adding features. I'm getting into the shortcuts and reminders and finding both useful.
Going back to your original application though; if you want to keep a journal, keep a journal. Adding organized, indexed notes to it will be amazingly useful. I do keep an irregular journal on Evernote. Though, if I have an ongoing need for detailed tracking, I switch to pen and paper, usually in the form of a Daytimer. I do this for legal reasons, and not operational ones.
My only major criticism is that the iOS app is very slow on my iPhone 4.
Please don't construe the above as a diss on One Note. I haven't used it, and haven't been motivated to try it.
Play it cool, play it cool, 50-50 fire and ice.
we were fed up taking notes and other stuff and keep lossing them, now we use callij to take our notes and other stuff. I even use it now to store my admin history, important emails etc.
We love its feature of able to auto link back between the notes. Try it out.
http://callij.com/
I mostly use OneNote (was using Evernote for shared stuff, but am transitioning that to OneNote now that it's free). The biggest problem I run across is permanency. If you write something on paper, it's pretty much permanent (unless the ink fades or the paper turns to dust). If you write something in OneNote, then later accidentally select it while typing something else and don't notice it, it's gone. For shared notes, if someone wants to cover up a problem, they could simply delete someone else's remark pointing it out.
The same characteristic makes it difficult to use these note-taking apps for event tracking. For certain tasks (e.g. customer relationship management), you want an immutable record of events which you can refer back to in the future. Worst case you may even need for it to stand up in a court of law. You get this permanency with pen and paper (at the cost of disorganization). You don't get it with OneNote or Evernote.
(Yes I realize for serious customer relationship management, I should be using real CRM software. But I just fix stuff on my extended family's computers, and have been bitten by accidental deletions more than once.)
Yes, if only someone had invented a way to log things on the web. I bet that they could call it a web log, but knowing how everyone shortens things, they would probably call it a wog, or something like that.
If there was something like that, there probably would be lots of software available to do that, which would have lots of ways to index the contents with a series of tags.
If only that existed.
http://notational.net/
I've been using this for the past week at the referral of a colleague. It seems to be basically text files with full text search. Works, but hasn't replaced the mnemonic device of pen and paper. Stuff just gets stuck in my head when writing it down vs typing.
Orgmode is also the most useful note taking tool I've found. Of course, it helps if you're OK doing it in Emacs. I will point out, though, that many people learn Emacs simply so that they can use orgmode - it's that useful. If I had to guess, I would say that since 2008, more people learned Emacs to use org mode than for any other reason.
Beetle B.
I myself like Tiddlywiki, I keep a empty copy that I customized it to my preferences and when a new project comes along I create a new copy and use it for documentation and notes like TODO lists, bugs, etc.
I'm also a journal user and was I wondering why journal software isn't an easy switch, so I created doodL.E. http://doodle.redadept.com/ which should be launching on iOS this week. I made the software as lightweight and fast as possible. I'm also a doodler, so I made the tool art capable. My email address is brook_seaton[at]redadept.com if you want to begin a conversation.
Back when I had a Psion 3A organizer, it was a great tool for taking notes on, though eventually the hardware died.
After that I used a series of Palm Pilot versions, which weren't as good - graffiti was slower than typing, and the text file editor could only handle notes up to 4KB, so I had to start new ones roughly monthly (though at least they did sync with Outlook pretty well.)
For the last decade or so I've been doing most of my work on Windows, so I just keep a Notepad text file open on my laptop all the time, and update the filename quarterly to keep an archive (though I haven't actually truncated the old part of the file in a few years, since Win7's Notepad can handle decently large files.) I back it up to various other media, and I suppose I could also back it up to my phone.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I use text files written with Emacs with version control in Git. Emacs lets me commit a new revision by just hitting C-x v v and typing a log entry in the window that it prompts with. That lets me back it up trivially with git push to a remote box. I can use multiple files for different topics and occasionally move stuff from one topic to another, in which case I commit both files atomically (git is built for this). I can use a git GUI tool (I'm a luddite and use gitk) which shows the whole history and the log entries at a glance, etc. The revision history is similar to what you'd get with a wiki, but without the goopy formatting or the need to type in a browser window instead of a powerful editor (Emacs). It seems like a good combination to me of high tech and dead simple.
I'm a very committed Evernote user, the product is great, however I started migrating my data (3500 Notes/750MB) to Tagspaces, it's Open Source, relies on open standards and I feel it's the safest way for me to store my information. It's not as fancy as Evernote but I believe in project and the developer behind it. Have look at it : http://www.tagspaces.org/
http://treeline.bellz.org/scrnsht.html
I started using desktop wikis for writing down my notes. Right now I am using Zim.
Bonus: You can read and edit the files with any text editor as it's just mark-up.
It's a FOSS cross-platform personal wiki. It has all the advantages of wikis without the bothersome markup language. It is best parts of being able to link notes together mixed with a simple rich text editor.
Simple and Easy to use.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
I've used EssentialPIM (www.essentialPIM.com) for years. It's straightforward and simple to use, and quite nice - a Wysiwyg editor, visual notes (lets you embed images and tables, among other things). It has other features that I use unrelated to notes as such: a scheduler, a to-do manager, a calendar, a password locker. It also has a contact list and mail interface, though I don't use them for my purposes. The free download version checks for updates and nags discreetly about upgrades to the pay version. I see that there is an Android version as well.
The best app I have come across for storing ideas is KeepNote. Free and cross-platform, though it could do with a few more features. OneNote seems not bad for storing recipes etc, but is obviously unacceptable for storing personal data.
In terms of PIM, this is not really the same as OP was asking as most of them are calendar/to-do based. I've tried every single ones of these, and have found MyLifeOrganized to be the best. One of the few apps I've been happy to pay for. Microsoft Windows only but works under WINE.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
There are a variety of TiddlyWiki descendants that are good for online storage of notes while still allowing some of the TiddlyWiki goodness (disclaimer: some of these were written, at least in part, by me): TiddlyWeb, TiddlySpace, Tank and TiddlySpot.
Tank is the newest one, but probably least featureful. It distinguishes itself from the others by preferring Markdown over TiddlyWiki text.
I use the data from your Evernote and Tiddlywiki
https://labnodes.vanderbilt.ed... has the ability to keep track of resources and share them with other researchers. They were working on notebook functionality before I left, but it doesn't look like that has been implemented yet.
I use a nice ultrabook with what I found to be the most comfortable keyboard to type (lenovo t440s), installed fedora on it, and use libreoffice files to save my notes. Especially handy given that I can get a freedom of information request in my line of work.
Tablets blow donkeyballs if you can touch type. And I no longer care what people think about my typing during meetings, since I am often asked for copies of my notes.
Subjects can be organised into "webs", which are colour-coded to make them visually distinct. Each web is a directory with its own internal structure, templates, etc.
I can upload binary files which are attached to the particular topic, so I can add screenshots, config files, router configuration files, executables, tgz files, PDFs, etc.
I use TWiki to track my projects, customers, network layouts, scripts, code, documentation, pictures, basically my entire life.
In response to the idea that my descendants will not be able to access this chronicle of my life, since TWiki is basically a bunch of folders with text files, as long as one browser that can be basic HTML and text survives, this information will be available.
To me, TWiki is my superpower. It has turned your average geek into a Guru, despite being over 50 years old and not able to remember anything from last week, I have a tool that allows me to recall commands I used in Windows 95/3.11, code snippets from the green screen era of System V UNIX, MS-DOS, Novell, OS/2 and C/PM.
Because TWiki supports HTML, I have built screens that allowed me to manage networks with hyperlinks to run VNC to connect to users' desktop PCs, phones, printers, PBXes, servers. I have code from hacking cellphones, databases, weird little one-off projects like swipe card interfaces. Code snippets in dBase, C, SQL, PHP, Informix, VisualBasic.
All searchable with regular expressions.
Blessed Ishtar, how does one live without a wiki? I literally can't remember life without it.
It's a GPLv3 note taking application, which supports most of the same stuff as OneNote.
http://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree
If you're already used to using paper notebooks, this is a pretty cool system for organizing and indexing them: http://www.bulletjournal.com/
Notes change as research progresses. Links, pictures, todo along with status and disposition of tasks are usually included. Then all of that is eventually pruned and consolidated. The only thing flexible enough to keep up is a mind map. Freemind is free and powerful enough for the job. I often strayed from it, only to come back.
For me, I have never seen any of the technology solutions to have ever gotten better than this.
In terms of flexibility, robustness, availability, and the lack of the need to fiddle endlessly with technology which almost does most of what I want (but with more effort)... I will stick with my black hard-cover lab books. It's independent of my employer, my time zone, what kind of power plugs are used locally, and vendors who decide they don't want to support it any more.
I've got a stack of them which go back almost 20 years. I've used them day in and day out. If I can come up with an approximate timeline as to what I'm looking for, I can usually find what I'm looking for fairly quickly.
Every now and then a co-worker will wonder why we're doing something a certain way, or how we decide on it ... and I can usually dig it up in my notes pretty quickly.
Go ahead, use your fancy cloud technologies, your scanning pens, your digicam pics of your notes ... me, I'll stick with the low tech solution which has served me well for many years.
Sure, I'm a grumpy old man. But I was grumpy 20 years ago. Now I'm just grumpy about different things. Endlessly fiddling with technology which isn't really any better than a pen and paper is one of them.
For me, the optimal solution already exists. If you are feeling really fancy, get one of those pens with the 4 different color inks -- you can annotate and mark things up to your hearts content.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Redmine
Persian Project Management Software as a Service
I use TaskPaper. It's just slightly more than plain text, offering some automatic (and fairly unobtrusive) organization. I keep one text file for one year, and then start a new one.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
The white-text-on-black-background is discouraging. Can that be changed?
Leaving aside the editor wars, there are 2 main issues here: file format and sync. No reason to avoid text, and writing markdown has advantages. For sync, there are many options -- I like Dropbox because it's reliable and simple, and has fine-grained sharing. You can share a single file easily, and the markdown gets rendered reasonably well with no additional effort.
To search this content requires nothing more sophisticated than grep.
I'm late to the discussion but this might help. It's the solution I use every day, after a lot of effort:
- I tend to take a lot of notes, about many things. I have wanted and been thinking about what you're asking for a long time, and had discussions about it with others.
- Over time I've used spreadsheets, a paper system, text files named and organized carefully into directories, emacs org-mode, jedit, then enhanced those with collapsible outlines that do work well, but break down after a certain point.
- We made a long-term plan, then got busy with life.
- Recently I've been able to give it some attention again, and I have created the beginnings of software that I hope will become your dream software for this purpose. Really. I don't use such words frequently or lightly. It is AGPL.
- It is successfully now replacing my use of collapsible outlines in jedit (which itself much easier than emacs' org mode, which I used to use). Not replacing my spreadsheet yet, but that is in the plans.
- It has a text-based UI that perhaps only its author could love (only text-based, wouldn't be too hard to adapt to a GUI given how it's organized, I hope). It is keyboard-efficient, and (almost?) always can be used by simply reading the screen and tapping a single visible menu letter for what you. It feels a little bit like "git commit --interactive" does.
- It doesn't have a convenient installer or prebuilt binaries but I hope/plan to make something in that direction *soon*. Right now the step-by-step INSTALLING guide has you installing PosgreSQL (not hard, really), java, maven, and following some instructions. But it does work.
- When you launch it, it is a bit bare, because I haven't implemented data sharing or templates yet, to show an idea for how I use it to organize arbitrary life information in a somewhat useful, complete way.. But there are specific plans.
- Right now, it amounts to creating entities that have whatever data you want, in a fundamental model of knowledge a layer below what text (words) provides, with efficient collapsible outlines of such entities that (withing a few days) can be recursively nested or one outline can be linked in multiple places. There is some theory behind this. Not ACM-rigorous maybe, not BNF, but it's not completely loose either.
- It can import/export from text outlines like I used to use, now.
- It needs a search feature which is also coming soon, and shouldn't be hard to do since postgres is underneath it all.
- It works. I use it in my job every single day, and rely on it. With the features it has *now*, it is replacing or has replaced my personal journal, to-do lists, planning tool, notes on many subjects, and little notes like "my wife said the cord she uses for those backpacks she makes is 12' long", but *modeled* (in an early, rough, incomplete way) not just typed as a note. That note (aka Entity) is associated with my wife, or soon to be text-seearchable, and could also be associated with anything else I care to link it to. It is not bug-free, but I use it all day, every day.
- It's freely available at https://github.com/onemodel/on... . If our old mailing lists at OneModel.org (preferred) don't work any more (it's been a while), you can contact me either via github pull request, or at, let's say, removing the spaces, filling in numbers and the @ sign where I'm hinting (sorry to be obscure, spam is annoying): luke three hundred thirty-nine -------> onemodel.org.
A Free, fast personal organizer for touch typists: onemodel
I just used this for once, and not too bad, at least it can meet all my need. It can be used for free trial, but if you want some better tools of it, you have to pay a little. Just a suggestion,
I too have tried this with text files and other methods (ie. SQL databases) only to come up way short. I know you cellphone users don't like that as anything more complex than text is going to present allot of problems for an itty bitty display surface.
With LibreOffice Writer, I can save pretty much anything, except perhaps binary blobs, instead I can 'refer' to that blob's subdirectory path within LibreOffice. By referencing other documents, even images stored elsewhere, you can keep the file size of your journal from growing larger than your journal editor can handle. Wile 'hackedit' (h.exe) would let you edit a file larger than memory, like other text editors, to not have links to content and the ability to include graphics is too limiting. For windows OS I found WordPad to be adequate as it could handle pretty large files, however ultimately too limiting.
Forget about MS Office Word, if the data format is not changed on you, there will be some quirk introduced in a later version to make it more difficult to include other content.
LibreOffice Writer works very well for saving URLs in a format that you can click on to get back to the original source. If you need the material for future reference, you should store a copy of the web content in a local directory. Down the road if your source gets deleted, you can put the saved copy on your own website and call it a 'cached copy'. At least you have the source. Not much you can not download with FireFox + the DownloadHelper Plugin.
Nothing worse than trying to back up information with sources only to have those sources disappear...biggest problem on Google's Youtube IMO. (If someone does not like what you are saying, they will say you are infringing on a copyright, Google automatically pulls the content and you are required to prove that its not infriging before you can load it back...by the time you load it back, the gain of immediacy for your content is lost, thus the value of Youtube for that is diminished.)
Some Positives . . .