Slashdot Asks: What's Your Preferred Note-Taking App?

Earlier this week, popular note-taking app Evernote announced major changes to its service. The company announced that free users on the app will now only be able to sync across two devices. The company also raised the prices of its paid tiers by 40%. This move, as you can imagine, has resulted in Evernote facing a backlash from many of its users. To give some perspective, Evernote paid plans ($36/ $70 a year) now costs as much as Office 365's $70 Personal yearly plan. With Office 365, obviously, you get more stuff -- including access to Microsoft productivity suite, and 1TB OneDrive storage. Microsoft was quick to release a free tool for Evernote users should they want to move their data to its note-taking service OneNote. OneNote is free to use and offers 15GB free storage to all users. Google's Keep is another good option with 15GB of free storage. Which note-taking app do you use? Anyone who still prefers taking notes on a notebook with a pen?

Comments

Pencil and Paper

[sconeu]

n/t

Re:Pencil and Paper

[zlives]

yup on postit notes

Re:Pencil and Paper

[BiggoronSword]

As a former drafting student, writing small was drilled into me. So, I use small post-it notes.

Re:Pencil and Paper

[thegarbz]

That's great right up until I need to carry notes around with me. Going digital and having access to notes from anywhere is a real game changer.

Re:Pencil and Paper

[jbengt]

Yeah, because it's so hard to carry paper.

Re:Pencil and Paper

[shaitand]

Hands down. Digital solutions are horrible for quickly scribbling freehand notes with sketches. Even with touchscreen and a good drawing stylus on a tablet you only have one page you can view at a time.

Re:Pencil and Paper

[Jzanu]

Scanners have long solved the problem of transforming paper into electronic documents, and enforce an editing and record keeping discipline. Pen or pencil and paper (notebook or pad-folio style) are vastly more reliable input devices, and more flexible output devices in terms of visual real-estate and cost; it doesn't cost several thousand dollars to put together a 20' by 20' display with paper, instead maybe $20 if you use very nice paper. In many cases where content is digital first, practical use requires it be turned into paper (printed); displaying a five thousand step flow-chart process is much easier with a printout than anything digital.

Re: Pencil and Paper

[ogdenk]

Being able to take notes with a Wacom on my tablet during meetings or class IS a game changer. Especially when I can mix my scribbles with drawings, photos of the whiteboard, change colors on a whim, draw diagrams, throw in some audio.... AND NOT LOSE THE NOTEBOOK. You can also e-mail your scribbles to others, access them from anywhere. Use HWR to import chunks of them into word. Study them on your phone while taking a shit, etc.

Taking notes on a post-it sized phone screen is useless but good note-taking apps on a tablet with an active stylus really are a game changer. Hell, I figured this out in 1994 on my Newton. Why are you reading Slashdot if you're that much of a luddite? Why not trade your PC in for a typewriter?

Re:Pencil and Paper

[Tony Isaac]

Yes, exactly. Then take a picture of it if you want to keep the notes for later, or send them to someone.

Re:Pencil and Paper

[shaitand]

"If all you do is take quick notes and scribble freehand sketches, then by all means go out and get yourself a pad of paper and pencil."

Ummm... yeah. That would be the topic of conversation. The tool one uses to take quite notes and scribble freehand sketches.

"On the other hand, how are pencil and paper for searching? How are they for indexing and cross referencing? How are they for storing blocks of text or images from a web page or an email or a document? How are they for syncing from home to work and back? How are they for being able to go back at a later date and add additional details to notes you've already taken? Etc, etc, etc."

What do those functions have to do with scribbing down content and brainstorming realtime? Those features are handled by your phone/laptop or maybe tablet in the case of search and for the rest they are a job for the application that you feed more fleshed out information from your quick notes into. What application is best for that job depends on the content of the notes.

"But if you actually store, organize and use significant amounts of data, then you need a note taking app"

No, actually you don't. If you are using a note taking app to store, organize, and use significant amounts of data you are attempting to bury nails with the handle of your screwdriver to make one tool fit all. That is the point really, notes are by definition a highly generic solution that easily encapsulates almost anything in small quantities for a short period of time. For almost anything you'd take notes on, there is a more specialized format/application to put that information in when time permits. It might be calendars, todo lists, project management software, accounting software, a diagram, or even simply a more organized outline in any number of formats. In some cases the note might simply be a task that gets executed very quickly like a reminder scribbled before lunch to call someone after lunch... in that case is a note the most organized way to record that information? No, it certainly is not but it highlights the utility of a note vs that more comprehensive and feature rich solution, a post-it is faster and easier than sitting back down and logging back into your computer, pulling up your calendar software and recording that phone call. Maybe the call is for the middle of next week, in which case you'd record it when you return.

This has nothing to do with being a Luddite it has to do with using the best tool for the job. Currently, the most technically superior solution for the function of notes, which is recording random ad-hoc information on a short term basis, is in fact some form of pencil and paper. All other purposes notes once served are long since obsolete and a big part of what makes for their obsolescence is that there isn't a single replacement but rather than you can readily access many many specialized tools from any computing platform rather than depending on a single monolithic and generic digital note system like some Luddite who doesn't understand modern technology. What next, building a general ledger and book of accounts in excel because you converted from a paper ledger after you took a MS Office class instead of using a modern purpose built accounting system?

pen and paper

[AndroSyn]

Nothing works better than the old fashioned pen and paper. Simple and straight forward. The batteries don't die, sure my pen might run out of ink, but I can always keep a second one with me.

Sometimes simple tech works the best.

Re:pen and paper

[tripleevenfall]

That's great if you want to roll a filing cabinet with you everywhere you go. Or, I can just use Ever/OneNote and have it all in my pocket.

-

With regard to EverNote's changes, I'm not sure why I would use EverNote at the same price as I could acquire the whole Office suite including OneNote, which IMO is better.

Re:pen and paper

[Anonymous Coward]

I second this. I fill notebooks, then they get added to the stash. It encourages you to not take more notes than is necessary. I can usually find things chronologically. It's kind of off-putting in meetings when people are constantly hammering away on their laptop or tablet because you never know whether they are taking notes or on Facebook. Protip: spend some money on a decent pen, you won't regret it.

Re:pen and paper

[AndroSyn]

A filing cabinet? A simple small spiral bound notepad fits in my pocket. There is also the aspect of when you are in meetings that people realize you are actually taking notes and not just looking at your phone and possibly not paying a damn bit of attention to the meeting.

I can take notes on a notepad without looking at the paper, it's a bit harder to do that on a phone. Afterwards it's not too terribly difficult to transcribe my notes to electronic format if I need to.

*Shrug* Maybe I'm just old.

Re:pen and paper

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes simple tech works the best.

Ans sometimes it is the worst possible option.

I won't dispute the advantages of pen and paper. Hell it is my number one medium for both note taking and work enviornment (mathematics). But the failure, the real failure of pen and paper, is when it comes times to organizing your notes.

It's basically impossible. So far I have found three main options:
1) Chaos. Notes are all over the place in ad-hoc refill pads, big piles of paper, or multipurpose bound notebooks with no dating or organisation whatsoever.
2) Entombing. Notes are organised and neatly stacked into ring binders/folders/file-boxes, there to rest unread for all eternity since it is just too much hassle and stress to unearth them again and risk a re-ordering. God help you if you chose poorly the first time.

Scanning helps, but the notes are now more or less uneditable. I want there to be a better solution. I want paper to be as easy and portable as text, but with the immediate convenience of dead wood and ink, there ultimately comes a price in the inconvenience of lots of dead wood and ink.

Re:pen and paper

[Mr. Jackson]

Search - much better with digital notes. I used Daytimer for decades at work. Great for secure areas where devices were forbidden. But I remember talking to a guy named "Dave"-something a few years ago. Would like to look him up. Maybe someday during a blizzard I'll spend the hours flipping through a file cabinet full of old Daytimers. I use Keep but if there were a non-Google alternative that was as handy I would use it.

Re:pen and paper

[hairyfeet]

I use colornote myself, nothing fancy but its great with lists and quick notes which is what I am always using so it works perfect for me.

Re:pen and paper

[war4peace]

Strictly note-taking, maybe.
But Evernote offers way more than that.

Examples:

#1 I walk on a sidewalk and see a concert poster. I pull out my phone and snap a picture, save it in Evernote. Works for any ad I see in the physical world.
#2 Recording my thoughts is a breeze in Evernote. I pull out my phone and start talking. Sure, you can do that in any number of voice recording applications, but Evernote helps me centralize that data.

At any rate, I don't synchronize between devices for Evernote. I only have it installed on my phone (had it on my PC but almost never used it so I uninstalled it). And with my phone being recharged every night, I'm never in danger of running out of battery, as a matter of fact the last time my phone battery was lower than 30% was over one year ago - because the fucking rented car could only charge at 500mAh and my phone would drain its battery (GPS on, screen on, 3G and wireless hotspot enabled) faster than the car charger would handle. Don't buy Alpha Romeo cars, kids.

Re:pen and paper

[Mryll]

I've usually preferred to use manual note taking for long meetings. There's something about transcribing the thought to script that solidifies it in memory

Re:pen and paper

[zugmeister]

...transcribe my notes to electronic format...

If you use OneNote and sync your "notes" notebook on OneDrive, you can take a picture of your notes with Office Lens (free) and save it straight into your notebook. I've been surprised how well searching for text in a picture works with this method.

Somewhat OT but if your organize your notebook with year labeled tabs, month labeled pages and a subpage for each day your notes become really easy to browse through.

Re:pen and paper

[tsqr]

Somewhere at the bottom of your desk, old memos are being pressed into coal.

Re:pen and paper

[nehumanuscrede]

Absolutely.

Pen and paper notes are available to me instantly. No booting anything up, no need for power. No worries about who is going to hack what app or corrupt everything for bitcoin ransom.

I also typically tend to draw diagrams with my notes ( network infrastructure ) so the same pen and paper works just fine for that as well.

Someone else mentioned " rolling around a filing cabinet " but I'm typically not taking notes on THAT much information at any given time.

Besides, you tend to recall it easier once you've written it down. Not so much when typing it. ( YMMV )

Re:pen and paper

[wyHunter]

It is also easier to draw diagrams. Yes there are apps where you can do this but it is harder.

Re:pen and paper

[thegarbz]

Nothing works better than the old fashioned pen and paper.

Right until it's lost in a fire, or on your desk at home, or in your car, or you have some 20 A4 pages of notes that you carry around, or you want to email them to someone, or you want to put a screenshot in them, or have multiple people edit the same sheet from different places, or.....

Yeah pencil and paper have their place, but they are severely limited compared to your note taking abilities otherwise.

Personally I use Onenote, so does my girlfriend which makes it very easy to open her Onenote book from work and put something on the shopping list for her to get on the way home.

Re:pen and paper

[jhecht]

Short notes for short-term use with pen on paper. Longer notes that I may want to keep for later reference with a simple text editor or fast and simple word processor, so I can search afterwards. Always use text or RTF to avoid format obsolescence.

Re:pen and paper

[irrational_design]

It depends on how many notes you have. I'd have to cart around hundreds of small spiral bound notebooks to hold all of my notes. I don't just want a place to write new notes, but I want instant access to all of my previous notes as well. I have a lot of notes.

Re:pen and paper

[AndroSyn]

Well if there is a fire, chances are I'm going to care a whole lot more about other things that I've lost other than my notes.

If it's important enough, I'll transcribe it to an electronic format that is more useful for other people to use. Often I'm taking notes in a very terse format, not writing an entire document. Though often most of the notes I'm taking are ephemeral in nature. I might need those notes for a week a most, not for the next 30 years.

To each their own.

Re:pen and paper

[jbengt]

I don't just want a place to write new notes, but I want instant access to all of my previous notes as well.

Notes are not meant to be repositories of great knowledge for future generations, they're meant to be small reminders.

I'd have to cart around hundreds of small spiral bound notebooks to hold all of my notes.

At some point, you need to quit calling them notes.

Re: pen and paper

[Overzeetop]

And how, exactly, do you search your hundreds of meeting sessions for that bit of information you need to reference from 3-4 years ago? (NB: if you sit on a board of directors for a non-profit you will, at some point, need to find that entry where Alice and Bob related a critical item of organizational history on which your current board dilemma turns).

Re:pen and paper

[shaitand]

Okay, now lay three pages out with related content and sketches on the desk at once in a conference room... or even three blank pages so you can work on different pieces side by side... oh wait, you can't. At least not without paying hundreds of dollars for every digital sheet.

Re:pen and paper

[shaitand]

"I prefer to take meeting notes in a notebook then transfer them to Evernote afterward."

In other words your solution is also pen and paper. I don't really count the version I've converted to digital after the fact as notes. Notes are that quick thing you do with a handful of people sitting around a table planning and sketching out ideas. A whiteboard also works. Just take a snapshot afterword.

Touchscreens suck but with a decent stylus you can make do for very simple things. It's like having a pen that's always low on ink and only one page visible at a time.

Re:pen and paper

[Anonymous Coward]

"At some point, you need to quit calling them notes."

And? Why does it upset you that the boundary between a small reminder and a large document has been summarily broken?

Being able to efficiently search small notes means:

- a notes app can be a permanent or temporary searchable database of small records
- a note can be a single task
- a note can be a plain text draft of a much larger document (or indeed the whole final document)
- a note can be used to move text between two devices very quickly

Simplenote covers all these things very ably for me (as would Apple notes if it were not for the yellow).

It has absolutely no fluff -- it is flatter than almost any other app -- but it syncs instantaneously, searches very quickly, and is minimal enough in interface that a note can be typed or read easily on a phone. Which, along with pinboard and mobile-searchable gmail, means I carry around my progress on any number of tasks, and provides structured-forgetting, large or small. I can edit as quickly as I want on a Mac, and read on literally anything.

All that matters with a notes system is that it is accessible and consistent, so use whatever you like. But you might recognise that as the world moves more and more to non-page-structured, quickly-disseminated text, keeping your notes in a notes app means that the boundaries between five words that remind you of something and a full draft of an article or email have been permanently broken.

Re:pen and paper

[Oligonicella]

When you must resort to extreme hyperbole, your argument is pretty weak.

Re:pen and paper

[thegarbz]

Well if there is a fire, chances are I'm going to care a whole lot more about other things that I've lost other than my notes.

Depends on the fire and it's location and the contents of the notes.

Re:pen and paper

[irrational_design]

I don't care what you call them. Call them documents of indeterminate size. I have some notes that are one word and others that would probably be ten+ pages if printed out. Most of the thousands of the documents of indeterminate size I've written are somewhere in between.

Re:pen and paper

[Jzanu]

That's what smartpens are for. I use the LiveScribe Echo routinely; it records audio, scans my writing (as I write) into a database lined to the audio when connected to a desktop/laptop, and provides me a large and easily viewed workspace. Additionally I have both small and large notebooks each stored independently which allows me to use the one best suited for my purpose when I need to write notes. The only issue is that I'd like a plain-text output option, but I can easily output images of my scanned pages to share with others. I suppose I could configure the storage to be on a network share and setup other clients on other computers to use it for more routine and comprehensive sharing, but that is overkill for notes and it's better to write a full report to communicate with others to about detailed technical material anyway.

Re:pen and paper

[breeze95]

I use colornote myself, nothing fancy but its great with lists and quick notes which is what I am always using so it works perfect for me.

Yep, I use ColorNote as well. Simple and easy to use, great for simple notes. I also use Google keep a lot. I like Google keep ability to set reminders and voice to text feature to take notes.

Re:pen and paper

[ogdenk]

Touchscreens suck but with a decent stylus you can make do for very simple things. It's like having a pen that's always low on ink and only one page visible at a time.

Onenote on a tablet with an active stylus like a Wacom w/ an erase function is actually quite powerful once you get used to it. You can also mix photos of the whiteboard in with your scribbles, throw in some audio or video, links, etc. Multitouch gestures take care of the one page visible at a time issue. In a classroom or a meeting I rarely have the space to spread out multiple pages anyway. And syncing it to the network makes it damn near impossible for me to lose my notes. And since I have decent handwriting, HWR lets me import it into Word fairly painlessly.

It's not for everyone but it works damn well for me. I still don't think the OneNote interface is stellar, I actually preferred the way the old Newton MessagePad 2000 Notes app worked a bit more. The drawing cleanup functions were pretty slick too.

Re:pen and paper

[mcswell]

And if your second pen runs out of ink, there's always blood.

Re:pen and paper

[Tony Isaac]

Or you can just take a picture of your scribbled notes, so you can file or email it electronically.

Re:pen and paper

[Kuutti]

Exactly this. When the tablets come all the TV-presenters and commentators had them. Nowadays it seems almost all of them have returned to the good old paper and pen.

Re:pen and paper

[sh00z]

Pen and paper notes are available to me instantly.

How's their keyword search feature? You can put your hands on the paper instantly, but how long does it take to find the stored information?

Re: pen and paper

[vilanye]

Why exactly would you need to reference something sketched on a whiteboard years later?

Notes aren't meant to be a historical record. If it is something that needs to be documented for posterity, there are better things than notepads and whiteboards.

What do you think project documentation is?

Hint: it is not notes and not pictures of whiteboards

Pen and paper

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that I would ever read the notes...

Pen and Paper

[Anonymous Coward]

I have never had to agree to having my data mined before using paper.

Sharpie and conference room table

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

The best part of this plan is that it usually keeps my invites to future meetings under control.

Re: Sharpie and conference room table

[flyingfsck]

Hammer, chisel and stone tablet. It has real archive value and is proven to preserve notes for thousands of years.

M$ OneNote

[Anonymous Coward]

So I never really got into Evernote, I'm sure it has the same features, but when I got my Surface 3 Pro and Pen, I started using M$ OneNote and LOVED IT! Handwriting recognition of my chicken scratch, amazing! I was in need of a replacement for my Livescribe notebook as they really dropped the ball and seemed to totally move towards iPad support. Love me some OneNote!

The real question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who do you trust with your thoughts and ideas? Those note-taking apps read your notes to target you.

Re:The real question...

[Cro Magnon]

I've been told that nobody has any interest in my thoughts.

Google Keep Get My Pick

[linkchaos]

A year ago or so I would have never said that, but Google has been releasing some decent features, integrating it further into other offerings like Google Calendar.

Re:Google Keep Get My Pick

[mythosaz]

I use Keep because mostly my notes are scrapbook things.

Anything more than a cut-and-paste and it goes into Collabtive or Basecamp.

Re:Google Keep Get My Pick

[GuB-42]

Google Keep is nice but I noticed a big flaw.
If you accidentally delete the content of a note (not the note itself) on the Android app, there is no way to recover it. It can happen if you select a large amount of text and press a key. The note is almost immediately synced and Android has no "undo". Also there are no convenient backup options.

So, you shouldn't use it for notes that you actually want to keep...

I use the tool most appropriate

[The-Ixian]

When I want to take quick notes, I just use a text editor.

They load fast, come pre-installed on all operating systems and work just fine.

If I want to share notes or save them for later, I will paste them into OneNote.

I rarely use OneNote directly to take notes because it takes too long to load.

Re:I use the tool most appropriate

[jon3k]

If you want to share them or save them for later why not just use your text editor with the [insert provider, dropbox/box/gdrive/etc] sync client?

What else?

[s.petry]

VI, launched through my standard "sh". Down with EMACS and ?SH!

You can stay on my lawn but you need to tolerate the taunts! :)

Org-mode

[Darren Bane]

Org-mode in Emacs, with a private git server. I don't really try to do anything productive on a phone/tablet, but there is MobileOrg if you do, not sure how it works. Org-mode can do much, much more than take notes mind you.

Re:Org-mode

[IHateEverybody]

Org-mode in Emacs, with a private git server. I don't really try to do anything productive on a phone/tablet, but there is MobileOrg if you do, not sure how it works.

Org-mode can do much, much more than take notes mind you.

Hillary, is that you?

Re:Org-mode

[ebvwfbw]

Hillary, is that you?

Easy mistake. She'll be using toilet paper for notes soon, in her jail cell.

Re:Org-mode

[mannd]

There is an Evernote mode for Emacs. Time to import my Evernote notes, organize them with org-mode, and then say goodbye to Evernote forever.

Notepad ++

[Crashmarik]

Produces nice txt files that I can use and structure on the fly

Plus it's a hell of a lot better than my handwriting.

Re:Notepad ++

[The-Ixian]

I do use np++ a lot for note taking, but I don't like to have to disable the function autocomplete feature every time I want to take general notes.

The session saving feature does make it nicer for taking general notes, though. Not having to save a document before you close is kind of awesome.

Still, I prefer notepad.exe for general note taking.

Re:Notepad ++

[Nunya666]

I do use np++ a lot for note taking, but I don't like to have to disable the function autocomplete feature every time I want to take general notes.

Why do you disable that option?

I have the "Function and word completion" option enabled, and I couldn't imagine typing without it. Heck, I even typed most of my college papers in NP++, and then pasted them into MS Word. It is so handy to have long words "pop up" and then press Tab or Enter to select them.

Re:Notepad ++

[Lakitu]

I do use np++ a lot for note taking, but I don't like to have to disable the function autocomplete feature every time I want to take general notes.

The session saving feature does make it nicer for taking general notes, though. Not having to save a document before you close is kind of awesome.

Highly agree and slightly disagree. I use sublime text 2 like this, partly because it had some multi-cursor and other text editing stuff that I thought was neat, including the autocomplete junk. It's not that important, but I like it. I would definitely shut it off if I weren't used to it, or if it completed things without me noticing more often. I do love most of those little features like autocomplete and matching brackets and the minimap.

Highly agree because the major, major reason I like it is that I can just open up tabs and close the whole thing without having to save, or organize, or whatever. I make a new project, give it a general topic, and then have tabs of notes with the tab getting an auto-title from the first line. Because the main difficulty for me with taking notes like this is with organizing them, this setup is almost perfect for me. I just never have to worry about it other than not deleting my projects folder. The sessions are all in plaintext, too, in what looks like json, so if you encounter an error or need to grep it or something you can do that.

I also installed some emacs-style keybinds. I'm sure something like np++ would be just as good, I just happened to start doing this with sublime.

Paper by 53 (iPad)

[bsolar]

I use Paper by 53.

Pen and paper.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing else works. Freehand on anything is cumbersome, and every note app has put constraints making you think of the operation of the software not the subject you wish to note.

And it never needs updates to your OS.

Google Keep

[adam.jimenez]

Google Keep is really simple and works well for me. I dearly hope it doesn't get struck by the Google Axe any time soon.

Re:Google Keep

[leuk_he]

Great tool to use the same note on different (browsers/app) platforms.

This will never be a killer application, just nice to have.

Re: Google Keep

[mrmaster]

I switched from Evernote years ago. Using keep and liking that they areconstantly improving it. Text editors are fine and I Use pen and paper less and less. Problem is I lose my paper notes too much or they aren't with me when I really need them. Yes, taking s picture of them is something I do but then they aren't searchable. I also need the notes to sync to every device I use. Those using VI or notepad++ would also need to remember to save those files in a sync folder.

Re:Google Keep

[azcoyote]

I think it's dishonest for Google to name something "Keep." We all know in a few years (or less) when Google inexplicably decides to focus its attention elsewhere, it will screw all of its users and take down the service. At that time I'm sure people will come up with plenty of complaints and puns for the name.

Re:Google Keep

[Nunya666]

Google Keep - works everywhere, it's free, has decent search, does everything I need.

Until it stops working because Google kills the project.

Re:Google Keep

[AmiMoJo]

Google Keep certainly does work very well, but I'm reluctant to trust it. Remember Google Notes? Similar kind of thing, killed off with a pathetic export function that didn't really work for all the refugees. Even Google Reader, that was really popular, was killed off because they couldn't figure out how to make money with it.

I'm using OneNote at the moment.

Re:Google Keep

[irrational_design]

I tried it yesterday when I found out about the evernote announcement. I grabbed a random note from evernote and tried to add it to keep but I was told that it was too long and I was asked if I wanted to create a google doc! No, I don't want to create a google doc, I want all my notes in one place, just like evernote. I'm still looking for an evernote replacement.

Re:Google Keep

[SleepyHappyDoc]

Are you kidding? Millions of people are still bitter about Google Reader.

Re:Google Keep

[IHateEverybody]

And I'm one of those people. I would have switched over to Keep already if Google weren't so fickle about their projects.

Emacs Org mode

[Seth Morabito]

I am an adherent of Emacs "org-mode" ( http://orgmode.org/ ) for note taking. I use it almost exclusively.

Org mode is insanely powerful, but like everything in emacs, it has a steep learning curve. Still, if you're taking a lot of notes, I fully recommend it.

Re:Emacs Org mode

[mugurel]

Org mode is insanely powerful

I just looked at the feature list. Impressive indeed! It's a like having emacs within emacs: a very nice operating system, but ...

Don't subscribe

[LichtSpektren]

I've researched OneNote and EverNote before and neither of them have any features that would be worth losing all of your personal notes when you don't pay your monthly ransom.

If you need your notes to sync across devices, why not just use ownCloud or the like?

Re:Don't subscribe

[Anonymous Coward]

I get the Microsoft hate, but OneNote is free. There is no monthly ransom.

Re:Don't subscribe

[RelaxedTension]

I get the Microsoft hate, but OneNote is free. There is no monthly ransom.

For now. It's still M$, meaning it likely won't end well.

Re:Don't subscribe

[apoc.famine]

I've researched OneNote and EverNote....

Obviously not, because Evernote easily exports some/all of your notes in html format along with an index.html with all of a couple of clicks. I've got a couple years of Evernote notes backed up in nicely organized folders by year and month. I set a reminder to do the export monthly. For the cost (free) and convenience, it's hard to beat.
 
It would actually be much harder to do with ownCloud, especially when dealing with IT. Evernote is on their "ok" list. OwnCloud, not so much.

Re:Don't subscribe

[zugmeister]

OneNote for whatever platform (free) + OneDrive (personal version is free) = free sync between devices. Your notebook lives on OneDrive and everything syncs to it. You know, kinda like Exchange.

Re:Don't subscribe

[BadDreamer]

It's free, you say? Where do I download the source?

Or do you mean free as in beer? Ok, where do I download the server software to set up my own OneNote server?

Re:Don't subscribe

[kbrannen]

I've researched OneNote and EverNote before and neither of them have any features that would be worth losing all of your personal notes when you don't pay your monthly ransom.

Onenote is a program on my local machine. That's not going to away so there's no ransom. When I decide to ditch Onenote, I'll export all of my stuff to HTML and then suck it into my new note program. But for now, Onenote is the best electronic notebook I've found, bar none, and I've look at a lot of them.

For me, Onenote is 1 of the few programs holding me to MS-Windows. Games? They're fun but I can give them up and most of the games I'd play anyway are older and can be found for SteamOS. I just want a good note taking program that will sync between devices and will run on both MS-Windows (for my tablet) and Linux (for my desktop).

I recently found Turtl and NoteCase Pro, 2 tools that didn't exist when I did my big survey a few years ago. I'm looking into them now and am hoping 1 of them will do the job, putting me that much closer to kicking MS-Windows out of my life (except for work).

Notepad

[tekrat]

Notepad comes free with every copy of Windows. It even existed in the days on Windows 3.1 and Windows CE.

PICO works great under Linux, I can't remember the name of the App I used in Chrome, Tex-Edit Plus on the Macintosh, and desqview I think had a notepad under DOS. iPhone with bluetooth keyboard and Notes App.

And on the Amiga, I used... oh wait, I guess you don't care about those days. But maybe you want to hear about Quick Brown Box on the Commodore 64?

What were we talking about again? Who cares about Evernote? What's the point of it unless you're someone who thinks they are doing business while they are sitting on a bus or a park bench?

Re:Notepad

[lhowaf]

Yeah, when not using pad-and-pencil, using any plain-text editor means your notes are as portable as possible. Sync the files with SyncThing to almost any device and import the text into any word processor if you need to print.
Ascii text is editable on practically any o/s - and will be for the foreseeable future.

vim

[jdavidb]

I take notes in vi all day long.

Re:vim

[Eq 7-2521]

"vi ~/notes.txt" shows in the history on every machine I use.

Google Keep

[technomom]

Google Keep - works everywhere, it's free, has decent search, does everything I need.

Old School Solution...

[__aaclcg7560]

Post-It Notes - Dead Tree Edition.

Yes, even in the paperless office.

Org-Mode

[Trix]

I keep it synced with subversion.

Re:Notes

[ZipK]

Quiver

Quill.

Your e-notes are for everyone, eventually.

[geekmux]

If security is something you're never concerned about with electronic solutions, then by all means, use the tool of your preference. Just understand that your notes are everyone's notes when the next hack is announced.

This is why I prefer good paper and pen. Not old-fashioned, just wise to what will happen eventually. It's become inevitable these days.

Re:Your e-notes are for everyone, eventually.

[thegarbz]

Just understand that your notes are everyone's notes when the next hack is announced.

I hope that Putin remembers to bring home the milk.

They are notes. Notes are disposable, they move around, end up in bins, stuck to screens, left on desks, blown away with the wind... Notes are a security nightmare, worrying about potential hacks in this scenario is a really misplaced fear.

Re:Your e-notes are for everyone, eventually.

[AmiMoJo]

No need to be a luddite. Encrypt your notes client side, make sure you use two factor auth and a good password. The probability of someone getting through all that is about the same as your house getting robbed and your paper notebooks stolen.

I'm so fed up of this ridiculous claim I'm going to put my money where my mouth is. Here's an encrypted Bitcoin wallet with 1 BTC in it: https://drive.google.com/file/...

No need to even crack my Google account, you can just click the link and download it. Anyone who can crack the encryption on that file can have the money. Have at it.

Re:Your e-notes are for everyone, eventually.

[geekmux]

No need to be a luddite. Encrypt your notes client side, make sure you use two factor auth and a good password. The probability of someone getting through all that is about the same as your house getting robbed and your paper notebooks stolen.

Speaking of luddites, the probability that consumers or creators of e-note products are going to actually implement and support your suggested security model is damn near zero. The fact that the electronic device you've composed your plain-text content on before encrypting it may be already compromised (which you didn't take into consideration)

Everyone wants notes "on the go", so they almost always live on mobile devices as well. It's a bit ironic when "two-factor" mobile app security these days consists of the phone and the phone, since almost no one outside of corporate security mandate spends money on dedicated two-factor hardware designed and hardened for one purpose.

If I move to Alaska and secure my old-fashioned notes in my home, the chances of them being stolen in the traditional way remain fairly constant over the next 20 years, while your encrypted challenge remains visible and attacked by millions over that same time frame. It's not hard to see which one will likely get compromised first, especially given the payoff.

Re:Your e-notes are for everyone, eventually.

[antdude]

Well, old fashion notes can be stolen, copied, burned, etc. :P

I use the most intuitive of all.

[TigerPlish]

A nice hardback notebook with sewn pages, with a .5 mm Pentel pencil. Has a nice red ribbon bookmark and good paper. The last one lasted a good 4 years before I ran out of paper.

At home a battered old Mead spiralbound with a length of twine tied to the topmost wind and knotted at the free end to serve as bookmark.

I number pages, and have a running index in the last 4 pages to find important things quickly.

Note-taking apps take away my ability to ad-hoc sketch out some concept, or idly doodle during an endless meeting that has no IT relevance. There's a freedom with paper that I've yet to experience on Windows or iToys.

The only place a notes app I use is the Notes app on the iToys, and I use it more as a rudimentary database such as serial numbers of stuff, a list of my neighbors, etc. I also use it as a rudimentary shopping list for stores I rarely visit.

Re:I use the most intuitive of all.

[TigerPlish]

Oh and I forgot, with pencil, I can emphasize certain words or divide pages into different days by just re-tracing what I wrote once or twice. This makes them jump out of the page.

Just switched myself

[doobydoobydoo]

I used Evernote Basic (the free level) for several years but just switched to OneNote a couple of days ago when they announced I could no longer sync between my desktop, laptop, iPad and (Windows) phone.

I used Microsoft's conversion tool and it worked pretty well.

OneNote 2016 on its own is completely free - you don't need the whole of Office to use it. Evernote's tagging is better, but there are addins for OneNote that boost the tagging of OneNote somewhat (such as "OneNote Tagging Kit": https://onenotetaggingkit.code...)

Zim or CherryTree

[varag]

But my notes are on my local machine and not in "the cloud."

Having used both for an extended period of time, I've decided Zim works better for me.

My true favorite

[rickb928]

Campus smart-ring binder, B6 or A5 dot grid paper, Kuru Toga 0.3 mm, preferably metal body.

I like the Signo UM-151-28 0.28 pens also...

Evernote was my fav app, but I've got 3 devices and it's actually not worth money to me. Note taking apps are surprisingly generic in most instances.

Re:My true favorite

[Dr_Barnowl]

Love those Kuru Toga pencils :-)

Cherrytree

[hockpatooie]

In the "keep it simple" school, I like Cherrytree:

http://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/

Basic hierarchical rich text notebooks.
Just copy or sync the single XML or Sqlite notebook file.

Synology NoteStation...

[mlts]

I personally like Synology NoteStation, on a NAS that is dedicated to DMZ/external stuff. It isn't as snazzy as EverNote or other products, but the physical data is under my control, and the NAS appliance can back itself up to a number of sources (external drive, encrypted cloud storage, etc.)

Re:Synology NoteStation...

[Just Some Guy]

I second this wholeheartedly. It also has a nice iOS app (and maybe Android too?), so I basically have Evernote except with terabytes of "free" storage and my data never gets stored anywhere outside my control. Link: Note Station

Re:Synology NoteStation...

[Yosho]

Huh, I've had a Synology NAS for over a year now and never knew they had a note app, even though I've spent time before trying to find a decent note-taking applications.

And it's actually pretty nice! And has a todo list and an Android widget!

Jota, Ghost Commander, and my VPS

[Mr. Slippery]

Jota is a free software basic Android text editor. Ghost Commander is a free software file manager that lets me transfer files via sftp. I have my own server. So from my phone and tablets I can download (when connected), create and edit (connected or not) and upload (when connected) notes, writing projects, or whatever. From my full-fledged PCs its even more transparent, I use sshfs to mount the remote directory. (You have your own cheap VPS, right? I mean, I know /.'s standards have declined, but I assume we're still all techies here, and VPSs are cheap. Given that, why would you want to store your stuff on some computer you don't control?)

Killer feature

[Troed]

Users have been asking Evernote for one single feature since its inception: Client side encryption.

It's also the one feature Evernote seems to absolutely make sure will never happen. Probably for a very good, non user friendly, reason.

I've just made the switch to the open source Turtl. Self-hosting possibilities, client side encryption. All the features from Evernote that I ever used. (And none of the features the Evernote team felt were important to add _instead_ of privacy ... )

http://turtl.it/

Re:Killer feature

[1310nm]

Just another free service building a user base to cash in on later.

Re:Killer feature

[Troed]

*shrugs* - if that's your opinion after having read up on the one-man open source development offering you the possibility to self-host, hey, what can anyone say.

Re:Killer feature

[WallyL]

Self-hosting and open-source (GPLv3). Hard to cash in on someone running the stuff themselves, but maybe that's too hard for you.

Re:Killer feature

[Doke]

I find turtl's ideas very interesting. I really love the client side encryption. However, the implementation seems to need work. It seems to only support text notes, with limited formatting. That's almost always ok, but it would be nice to include a photo (for example of a whiteboard diagram). On my linux desktops, it leaks memory, and leaves a background daemon running (until it runs out of memory and crashes). On android, it's very slow to start up, and leaves a background process running that's hard to kill (though nowhere near as bad as facebook).

Re:Killer feature

[Troed]

"Password, File, Image, Bookmark, Text" are the options I get when I want to create a new note. The formatting is Markdown.

Re:Notes

[Mr D from 63]

Queep...(I mean Keep.)

Re:Pen and sticky notes

[ITRambo]

I agree. My original notes are handwritten. Afterward, I organize them, where appropriate, in my computer using old school spreadsheets.

Comparison of notetaking software [Wikipedia]

[2centplain]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Pen and paper used to be good enough for me...

[DavidHumus]

I have pocket-sized notebooks (mostly "neat-bound", not spiral) going back to the '80s but have stopped taking many notes that way for the past couple of years. I use emacs if I'm at a desktop. For my phone, I do have Evernote and have used it a little but mostly I just e-mail myself notes. That way they're automatically "synched" and searchable. The notes in emacs get saved as part of my backups, so are also available and searchable.

Pen and paper are the way to go

[damn_registrars]

Anyone who still prefers taking notes on a notebook with a pen?

Yes, it is the best way for taking the widest variety of notes. OCR with a stylus still isn't that great, especially if you need to incorporate a formula of some sort into your notes while you're going. Typing works if you are taking notes at a history lecture but not for much else. Paper notebooks also never run out of battery and run an OS that never crashes. You might find yourself periodically doodling in your notebook but you'll never find yourself wasting hours on facebook with it.

Re:Pen and paper are the way to go

[thegarbz]

Yes, it is the best way for taking the widest variety of notes.

Disagree but ignore that for a moment.

OCR with a stylus still isn't that great, especially if you need to incorporate a formula of some sort into your notes while you're going.

You've moved the goalpost. OCR works just as horribly if you write it on paper and then scan it in. If you have a stylus just write it down. Forget OCR. If you need OCR then Pen+Paper add an additional scanning step which scores a win for electronic methods.

Typing works if you are taking notes at a history lecture but not for much else.

Or in a meeting, or while you're on a phone, or while doing anything that doesn't require you to draw something. But hey you mentioned stylus right, where's the problem? If you can write faster than you type (most seasoned IT people can't) then by all means you can do that digitally too.

Paper notebooks also never run out of battery

Maybe not battery but the pencils break and the pens run out of ink. This happens to me more frequently than my tablet running flat which has simply never happened in the 2 years I've used it, even one time where I thought it would (international flight, they had a USB charger built into the seat).

and run an OS that never crashes

The OS may not crash but paper quality varies especially when taken with you. A bit of moisture on your hand as you're writing and suddenly the very next line won't put any graphite down to your paper, and god forbid you have a pen but nothing to balance your paper on but the wall. Pen + paper has some horrible failure modes.

You might find yourself periodically doodling in your notebook but you'll never find yourself wasting hours on Facebook with it.

If you lack the self control to not jump on Facebook while taking notes then chances are your notes aren't worth writing down in the first place. Incidentally people are just as scatterbrained when holding a pencil as they are when holding a digital stylus. Forced abstinence is a failure at getting you to pay attention.

Now as for my disagreement at the start. Pen and paper is best for what? What can you do better with a pen and paper than a stylus? Then also consider what additional things you can do on an electronic device that you can't do with pen and paper (purely from a note taking point of view) like quickly adding a keyboard to suddenly type faster than anyone can write, or take a quick screenshot or picture and slide it into your notes. Then add all the value added features, ability to sync notes to multiple devices so you have access to a potentially large number of sorted notes from anywhere, easy to print off, email, change in format, etc.

I used to think like you, now I don't even have post-its at my desk anymore and the only reason I have a pen is for times when someone brings me something on paper and I need to scribble on it, but even then I check to see if they've emailed me the file first and if so I scribble on it in Onenote.

Re:Pen and paper are the way to go

[Overzeetop]

There is nothing in the tablet world which is as accurate or content-dense for graphical information than pencil and paper. I say this as someone who has tried nearly all of the tablet options from the last 3-4 years, and has been sketching engineering details for two decades with pencil and paper but *wants* to switch. It's one thing to say you "can" make the same sketch on a tablet as you can on paper - and it is possible with some re-training in how you write - but it will never be as fast or efficient as pencil on paper. At $200+/hr billing rate, time to capture a thought matters. Heck - you can make a photorealistic "painting" on a capacitive iPad with just your finger - there are videos showing just that. They also take hundreds of hours to complete.

Tablets have certain, very clear advantages, but speed of graphical entry [for engineering technical drawings to be put into a CAD system] is NOT one of them. Heck, even regular, handwritten notes take longer and are sometimes less cohesive. I found I have to write about 20-25% slower and at a magnification of ~175% to get the same quality of handwriting on a modern tablet (SP4 in the case of my primary machine). And that speed is assuming that I disregard L/R scrolling so that my notes end up in a "print" or reading size of about 5" net width - just 2/3 of a normal page. Sometimes that's all I need; other times it's insufficient and the time penalty to use a letter-width page is enormous. And don't even get me started on "to scale" sketches such as floor plans. Nothing out there currently has the instant scale drawing functionality of a quadrille or (my favorite) 1/8" grid non-repro blue engineering paper.

Re:Pen and paper are the way to go

[thegarbz]

There is nothing in the tablet world which is as accurate or content-dense for graphical information than pencil and paper.

I get around that by using the technology. A quick pinch zoom and I'll draw you a picture that will fit inside a typical character written on an A4 page. Best of all it removes the need to be perfectly accurate and excellent at drawing. Suddenly you're much more forgiving. Also let's be clear. We're not talking about fingers here, and the styluses on the Surface Pro, and iPad Pro lines of tablets are phenomenal, after all based on the same thing used by graphic artists.

Tablets have certain, very clear advantages, but speed of graphical entry [for engineering technical drawings to be put into a CAD system] is NOT one of them.

Again as someone who exclusively uses them at work now I disagree. I see no speed benefits for either paper or tablet, but the latter comes with a boatload of extra abilities.

Nothing out there currently has the instant scale drawing functionality...

Scale is an arbitrary function. It can be defined by a person just as well on a screen as on a page. And without even picking anything engineering specific, even onenote has the ability to draw a grid, lock dimensions to a certain paper size, and set a pre-defined zoom. Admittedly this is something I do regularly but it's something I've done without giving thought to it having been any more difficult.

Depends

[BlackHawk-666]

If I've jumped out of bed with some cool ideas still in my head it is the pen and paper sitting at all times on my desk. This is a habit from the days when it was taking 5 mins to boot into a working Windows 7 desktop and the ideas might slip away in that time.

After that I expand the ideas out and write them into markdown or text files and save them to a folder on my Google Drive. That way I know they are permanently backed up offsite immediately. It's free, available on every major platform and easy to copy around.

Finally, when time allows, I write them up properly into markdown and place them into the Git repo which the idea relates to. So now I have permanently offsite backed up thoughts / designs in a Git repo which I can diff at any time to see what changed and when.

I have Evernote and Google Notes and never use the damn things.

Re:Depends

[dweller_below]

I tailor my note-taking device, depending on how I want to interact with others. I have found that some people are more willing to interact with me if I am taking notes with pen and paper. I have also found that the later work of transcribing paper to electronic form is not really wasted if it helps me to organize my followup.

But, sometimes, a phone is all I have. And sometimes, I just need the speed and organization of taking notes with a laptop.

OneModel / OM

[lcall]

I have tried and thought about many things until finally writing my own tool that is extremely fast, powerful, and flexible. Currently it could be seen as org-mode replacement that addresses some of the key challenges (hard to learn, awkward) while keeping some key benefits (efficient from keyboard, extremely flexible), and adding huge flexibility in what can be done: http://onemodel.org/ (AGPL).
It is a personal organizer, is something like really fast mind maps but (currently) keyboard-driven and handles very large amounts of interlinked data, different topics at once or mixed etc: the beginning of a platform to change how individuals (or mankind) manage knowledge overall. Future features involve much more than note-taking, but exploiting the internals for collaboration, anki-like repetition, to-do reminders, and more.
For current org-mode or evernote users: The app has export (& import) features to convert anything to (or from) an indented plain-text outline. The FAQs have links to a discussion of a more detailed comparison with org-mode that seemed somewhat well-received at the time (link is on this page which discusses evernote: http://onemodel.org/1/e-922337... ).

Feedback would be much appreciated. If one has any interest at all, I suggest signing up for the (~monthly?) announcements list, and participating in discussions on the general list, for suggestions & input on things going forward.

Re:OneModel / OM

[lcall]

I forgot to mention: It also has a more *structured* concept for knowledge, such that in the future I'll be saying: think of it like wikipedia + evernote, but with power of internal code (so your to-do list becomes an to-do object model with full power of code and structured objects), and structured sharing/distributed use/collaboration between instances.

Re:OneModel / OM

[ehack]

You should look at Lotus Agenda.

Ideally you want a program like that to be able to ingest email and web clippings, these days.

Re:OneModel / OM

[lcall]

Thanks much for pointing that out. I knew of some others but not that one. Had I known of it back then I might have bought it and loved it.

OM has a different long-term vision, related to "all mankind's knowledge", and how to enable structuring, integrating, and using it most effectively, beyond what wikis or PIMs can do. The current state is a stepping stone (i like to hope anyway) in that direction.

Re:OneModel / OM

[ehack]

Yes, and you can still download the Agenda disks and play with it - it correlates the information as it is ingested, and displays it in various ways.
The amazing thing is the relationships it points out in your data.

I use

[Cro Magnon]

My favorite is the iPhone Notes app, because it comes with my phone and it's always with me. If I'm sitting at my computer, I'm more likely to use Notepad. Ye olde paper & pen is by far the fastest, but I don't always have paper with me, and I tend to lose paper notes.

Summary should have set requirements

[BenJeremy]

Obviously, syncing across multiple devices is important. "Pen and paper" answers are funny the first time it's posted, but not useful beyond that. Simple note taking or text editing answers also don't really help.

I just discovered EverNote, and I appreciate the ability to encrypt sections of a note. I'm also disappointed in their new restrictive terms, but I understand.

I like Tomboy, but it is horrible at synchronizing with a shared folder, and has no cross-device usage.

I haven't used OneNote but may look into it.

So basically, the summary is asking for a note taking app that can sync over multiple devices, presumably with no limitations on those devices (i.e. PC, Android, Apple, web, etc...). Can we try and post USEFUL answers to this question, for a change... or is that too much to ask of Slashdotters?

Re:Summary should have set requirements

[jbengt]

Obviously, syncing across multiple devices is important.

Not at all obvious to me.

Well, I still like Evernote

[MichaelJ]

I use Evernote extensively across several Macs and iOS devices using native applications, a Pebble watch using Powernoter (awesome for checking off shopping list items while in the store), and my Linux desktop at work using the web interface. I like that I can tag and apply other metadata for organizational purposes, encrypt entire notes or just portions of text, and it's all rich content so I have one entire notebook full of Owner's Manuals in PDF format. They also integrate well into the various platform operating systems, for things like clipping and sharing.

Apple has enhanced their iCloud Notes ecosystem to have rich content, but it does not have the metadata or organizational tools that Evernote has, as well as all the problems with iCloud such as it syncing when it wants not when you want and with no feedback about errors, dumping data if it thinks you're low on space (leaving you screwed when you're on the plane), terrible conflict resolution, and it does start to cost money if you exceed 5GB of iCloud storage (which counts iOS backups and Photo Library if you use those, as well as all other iCloud documents saved there).

All this makes me long for the simple days when I used TiddlyWiki on a flash drive I'd carry around and plug into computer or laptop, back before smartphones and other mobile devices.

I'm not jumping ship, but I'm curious to see how this plays out.

Re:Well, I still like Evernote

[plate_o_shrimp]

All this makes me long for the simple days when I used TiddlyWiki on a flash drive I'd carry around and plug into computer or laptop, back before smartphones and other mobile devices.

Tiddlywiki-in-the-sky: https://github.com/Jermolene/T...

Re:Well, I still like Evernote

[MichaelJ]

Oooh, shiny! Thanks, I'll definitely have to give that a try. I want to check out its strategy for attachments, since I have so many map and owners manual PDFs associated with my current notes.

OneNote

[MobyDisk]

Being primarily a Windows user, I use OneNote. Our Office started using it and I got hooked. For quick notes on my phone, I use "Note Everything." I currently do not use any syncing or backup of notes, no encryption, and no sending them to a third-party. It's kinda like how notes were in the old days with pen and paper.

There is a OneNote for Android, so I might try that.

My ideal solution would probably be OwnCloud. It's the best of all worlds: privacy, security, backup, synchronization.

Re:Pen and sticky notes

[Grishnakh]

Pen and paper don't fail me in the middle of a deadline.

I keep reading variations of this theme in this discussion.

Am I the only one here who's able to plug in his phone every night?

I even have a spare battery for my phone in my backpack just in case, but I never need it, even on long rides or hikes where I'm running GPS tracking in the background. It's really simple: I plug in my phone at night when I go to sleep. Then it always lasts for the whole next day, with plenty of reserve.

I must be weird.

Self-owned solutions:

[Orgasmatron]

I use an Android app called Tasks & Notes. One of the main selling points is that it can sync to my Horde server.

I used the built-in Palm notes app for years and years, which highlights the overwhelming inferiority of "modern" notes apps (this is typical of post-Palm apps, which kept me on my Treo until the cellular network it uses was finally pulled).

Tasks & Notes is the least bad replacement I've been able to find, and I installed maybe a couple dozen candidates. Note that I reject without any consideration any apps that involve a third party server. Apps with local-only storage were not rejected unless I was unable to find and copy the file out automatically when it was connected to my home wifi or if the file format was lame.

On desktops, I start a new text file from time to time with a consistent name and location (notes-YYYYMMDD.txt). I use it as a scratchpad with whatever basic text editor is available on that system, and my archiving system grabs them all for versioning and backup.

Lotus Agenda is sorely missed

[ehack]

For tetx-based notes, Lotus Agenda was the best ever made. Like many good things, it died.

OneNote

[ChrisBachmann]

My workplace uses Office365 and I have a SurfaceBook to run around with, so I've been using OneNote. The pen is fairly responsive and although it took some time to get used to writing on the glass, I've been making some decent notes. There was an AWS conference recently that we went to and I was using it there and it was a decent experience, although the surface book was a bit big for that. Should have stuck with a surface or surface pro. Plus, I could still duck out, do some light support tickets then go back into the app. I need to experiment with sharing notes though. It would be neat if two of us were collaborating with the notes taking process. Maybe one takes snaps of the slides and the other makes notes around or on those. Maybe next time.

Tiddlywiki

[plate_o_shrimp]

I use Tiddlywiki (stupid name, great program!) -- "a non-linear personal web notebook". It's a single-file wiki that lives on your local machine. There are ways to push to Dropbox or other services if you want anywhere-access, but whether you want that or not just depends on how you want to use it.

http://tiddlywiki.com/

Apple Pencil

[friedmud]

Being a science/engineering PhD student I still take a LOT of handwritten notes.

Last year, when it was released, I snatched up the 12.9" iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil. It is truly AWESOME for taking notes!

I use a great app called "Notability" which syncs through iCloud (and backs up in PDF form to Dropbox) so my notes instantly show up on my phone and computers.

It's great in class... and maybe even better as a "lab notebook".

A long time ago when I was doing my masters I actually used one of the first Windows "convertible" tablets for all of my notes. It "worked" but wasn't nearly as nice of an experience as the Apple Pencil and iPad Pro. The Apple Pencil is incredibly accurate and the iPad Pro is essentially the same size as a regular sheet of paper. Really nice tools to work with!

ownNote

[ThermalRunaway]

Decent note taking app, with borwser and phone app support.. and you can host yourself in ownCloud, which has server side encryption and runs on your own HW.

That said I usually use OneNote for anything that isn't sensitive and use ownNote just for things I dont want unencrypted in the cloud

Re:Pen and sticky notes

[Nunya666]

Pen and paper don't fail me in the middle of a deadline.

I keep reading variations of this theme in this discussion.

Am I the only one here who's able to plug in his phone every night?

I think many of them were posted in jest.

I also use my phone. I like an app called ColorNote because it lets me create both plain text and checklist entries.

My (academic) perspective

[azcoyote]

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.

Re:My (academic) perspective

[Duncan J Murray]

The more I use highly specific solutions tied to a particular bit of software, the more wary I am of them. Sometimes pen and paper, or if electronic, plain text in hierachical folders is the most future-proof way out there (I think also for maintaining bibiliographies). You can tidy up plain text by writing it out in markdown and converting to pdf for printing. Do you linux? I know office is unfortunately engrained in academia - I'm trying to avoid it using latex/pdf instead, but we'll see how long that lasts.

BBEdit

[Daniel_Staal]

BBEdit on Mac (my normal computing platform), in Markdown format. (Usually Pandoc-flavored markdown.) That's if I want the notes to last more than five minutes.

Under five minute notes are often on paper, using either pen or pencil. (Mechanical pencil preferred, but pen's easier to find.)

On other platforms I'll take whatever is the best text editor I can find commonly available - vi or some derivative on most Unix/Linux boxes.

Notepad++

[hackertourist]

My work notes live in a pile of text files. For every current project, I've got a file open in Notepad++. The project file contains a log of things I've done, a list of things to do etc. Currently I've got about 30 open files.

For notetaking during meetings I use pen and paper (writing's still a lower cognitive load than typing), afterwards the results get transcribed.

The only drawback is I can't add drawings. I don't need many of those though.

Desk

[hattable]

I take notes all over my desk. Wherever I am when I need to write, there it goes.

I had a plexiglass cover fitted for my last office-desk allowing me to use grease pencil.

Well it _used_ to be Catch...

[rutabagaman]

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!

Re:Notes

[Hognoxious]

Queef, and I meant that.

Still looking for a real replacement

[wahini]

I haven't found anything suggested so far that has the features important to me in Evernote.
I want to be able to clip partial and entire web pages as well as tag stuff too.
I just tried Turtl and I can't clip an entire web page (including graphics too), I looked at Onenote and it doesn't run on Vista which is what my laptop runs.
So far Evernote is untouchable. I'm on the free version of Evernote and would like to switch. Is there anything close to being as good as Evernote?

Onenote changed my life

[thegarbz]

I used to be firmly in the pen and paper camp, but that's because taking notes was always too inconvenient with a laptop. That all changed with tablets and styluses.

I now use Onenote for everything. The ability to quickly screenshot, import a print, scribble, write, make checkable lists, sync between devices without breaking things, quickly email a copy, easily erase or make corrections, move things around after (god I used to write some illegibly small garbage in margins), sort things logically, make your handwriting or typed text automatically searchable, built in calculations and table tools, directly import excel spredsheets, embed documents, share entire workbooks, all of this has changed the way I work for the better.

It's not that bad...

[1310nm]

I went looking for replacements for Evernote today after receiving their "heads up" email about the 2-device limit. I had old Android phones and my Windows PC as devices, which were unnecessary. I pared down my device list to just the Android phone and iPad, and am going to use the web service for Evernote instead of the Chrome app. All in all, I don't think it's a big deal. Evernote needs to make money to survive, and they're still providing a free service in a reasonable way.

Requirements

[irrational_design]

I'm trying to think of all of my requirements:

1. Easy to add a new note
2. Ability to categorize notes (put into notebooks)
3. There is a app on on all the devices I use (phone, tablet, desktop)
4. Synch happens automagically.
5. Ability to search across all notes and to search within one note.
6. Ability to link notes together like a wiki.
7. Ability to export all the notes in a non-binary format (zipped file containing text or html files).
8. Can work offline and then synch when there is an internet connection again.
9. Option to encrypt notes (either all notes or just certain notes).
10. Ability to use markdown syntax?

Re:Requirements

[kbrannen]

Then you probably want Onenote. It can do 1-8 no problem. I'm not aware of encryption (#9) for it, but you can password lock pages/notes. It doesn't do Markdown, but there's really no need. If you want bold, just do ^Bsomething bold^B (like any other MS-Windows program) and you're good ... all the MS-office shortcuts work. For #3, you didn't say what devices, but I do use it on phone (android), tablet (win8.1), and desktop (win7 & winxp in a VM on Linux). It also has a browser interface if required. Onenote is the best thing MS sells, IMO, and perhaps the only thing from them that I like. It also works on Macs if you swing that way. :) ... HTH

Re:Requirements

[cupcakewalk]

After NoteStudio folded, I was lost until I found Evernote. Being able to link notes together, wiki-style, is a signifiant feature that's lost in many note-taking apps, at least the ones I was looking at when we lost NoteStudio. Maybe I'll look at OneNote again. It was a dog when I last used it: Too complicated and slow.

Re:Requirements

[Xenna]

I'm afaraid that's pretty much Evernote you're describing. Feature 6 you can somewhat do. Option 9: not all notes. Option 10 would be a nice one.

Keep it simple, stupid

[fnj]

I see a lot of hipster angst going on here. Me? I use what is convenient and falls ready to hand. I scribble on 3x5 cards which I have stacks of on my desk, but mostly I use plain text in emacs. Some 30 years ago I used pmate, and every one of those files, just like all my emacs files, remains perfectly readable using the "less" command or cat to stdout. I do maintain my own dokuwiki on a VPS. The VPS costs me only $3 a month and is accessible from anywhere with an internet connection. It is searchable and can never get lost. All the content is stored in plain text files. That VPS is the best investment I ever made.

Those mentioning emacs org-mode are on to something. I haven't picked up much fluency with it, but it has the huge advantage of leveraging plain text with some very clever presentation tricks.

$ ln -s /dev/null brain ; cat - brain

[hAckz0r]

Those little reel-to-reel tape recorders that auto destruct are hard to find these days, and this way I don't even have to eat the little piece of paper afterwards.

Re:$ ln -s /dev/null brain ; cat - brain

[hAckz0r]

oops, the html ate my redirection symbol. Please ignore the syntax error, because the command still works just as well without it.

Re:Workflowy

[smithmc]

I second Workflowy - extremely easy to use, Web interface works well on smartphones and tablets as well as PC, and it's free. Not as feature-rich as Keep or OneNote (which are also nice), but sometimes that's a plus, really.

Email client (Outlook or Gmail) for searching

[jmcbain]

I used to take notes with paper and pencil, but you can't search through old notes unless you scan and OCR your content.

I instead have been using E-mail clients for the last several years (whether it's company Outlook or personal Gmail). This has several advantages:

1. You can search through your notes.
2. If on corporate Outlook, there is security thanks to the IT department.
3. You can have rich markup if you need it.
4. You can immediately email out meeting notes.

Re:Email client (Outlook or Gmail) for searching

[borjonx]

I don't press the send button, so my drafts folder is basically my notes folder(I also use gmail for notes). I have access to them from my cell ph, laptop, tablet, etc. and i can easily drag files onto the note so they're attached to the note. If I'm at a friends place & don't have my device w/me, I can get to all my notes from their pc.

I also use GoogleSheets when I need a little more power (formulas, cell formatting, etc.).

When i'm offline i use vi or notepad, depending what OS i'm on.

Re:why does that need a special app?

[Overzeetop]

Here's something that, I believe, both emacs and vi users can agree on: both editors royally suck at rapid notation of graphical content and searching of jpg (and image-based pdfs) for text content within.

And nobody pays $70 for a "note taking app". Evernote, up until recently, was free to upload and sync lots of content over multiple devices (with offline caching control for limited memory devices) and worked with lots of different content types - including OCR of both typed and handwritten information. When someone hands you a legal pad with 4 pages of handwritten notes it takes about 15 seconds to take a picture of all of them and they are then text searchable as part of the database with no effort on your part. Find a web page which has a lot of useful information? A two click plug in captures all/part of the page, including images, diagrams, figures, and text and can even keep the formatting intact.

That's the whole point of the article - EN is forcing people into a paid status (or a higher price) due to feature reduction. The question is if there is something which is a feature rich without the price, or feature enhanced at the same price point.

Appropriate quote from The Kingman

[Elvenbane]

Valentine: Know what I love about pen and paper? Nobody can hack into this shit.

Growly Notes and iCloud Notes

[movdqa]

Growly Notes is an OSX-only products and is a knock-off of Microsoft Notes. The older version is free though the newer version is pretty cheap. There is no mobile connectivity. I use this for professional work: projects, notes, status reports and documenting what I'm thinking when I make decisions on how I do things. It allows me to quickly answer management when they ask me about something I did five years ago. I use iCloud Notes for diary items, directions, procedures, workout logs and things where I want access from my Mac and iOS devices. I tried out Google Keep several years ago and used it but they don't have a native iOS App so I eventually ditched it. I could use it with a third-party browser for a while but it needed an internet connection to work.

Synology DS Note + Galaxy Note 4

[I_have_a_life]

I use Synology DS Note on a Samsung Galaxy Note 4.

Synology DiskStation (https://www.synology.com) is a feature-rich NAS solution. In addition to the usual file sharing and backup services you would expect from any decent NAS, it provides a some really great SaaS solutions that you can access from either a browser, Android app, or iPhone app. E.g. they have pretty good apps for managing photos, videos, spreadsheets, and notes stored on your NAS. They also have a free subscription service similar to DynDNS that allows you to access these services from outside your local network.

While DS Note, the note-taking app for Synology DiskStation, is not as feature rich as OneNote or Evernote, it has a decent feature set and allows you to access your notes across all your android and iOS devices as well as from a browser. What I like best about this solution is that I have way more control over the data and services, no need to worry about services being shut down or third party snooping. You can even configure your DiskStation to periodically store encrypted backups to Amazon Glacier. Furthermore, it's easy enough to setup that I don't have to be an IT expert to get cloud-like capabilities from a NAS sitting on my home network.

For the actual note-taking I have found the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 to be the perfect device. For a minimalist who hates having to carry multiple things, the Note 4 is a killer device. I specifically opted for the Note 4 for it's expandable storage and replaceable battery. The Wacom technology stylus + MyScript handwriting recognition perfectly complement each other to provide the best note-taking experience for cursive writing second only to pen and paper. While I understand the appeal of pen and paper, the ability to centralize, enrich, and easily share notes is worth the extra trouble for me.

Lastly, I want to put in a good mention for DrawExpress. Absolutely the best way to quickly create graphs during meetings that you can actually read, modify, and share later on.
For the record, I don't have any affiliation with the companies mentioned in this post.

Email

[flyingfsck]

Am I the only one that sends email to myself? It works cross platform, at home, at work and even on the road and can handle attachments and forwarding to others.

Re:Pen and sticky notes

[jon3k]

Am I the only one here who's able to plug in his phone every night?

Or who is able to use his laptop if his phone is dead?

Or has spilled a cup of coffee on a notepad and lost it forever.

It's kind of funny watching all the luddites on slashdot dismissing technology used by millions of people (Evernote, OneNote, etc) every day as some horrible failure.

Photograph PostIt notes with 3M's app, then edit

[ehack]

http://www.post-it.com/3M/en_U...

Paper, SideKick... etc

[ka9dgx]

For non-computer situations, good old mechanical pencil and paper, with a good supply of fresh lead and erasers.
For the MS-DOS days, good old SideKick by Borland
For later MS-DOS days, Edwin (the macros were very helpful)
For Windows, Notepad++
For Lots of notes, WikidPad
For quick notes on a windows machine I don't own.... Notepad
For notes on a linux machine - gedit / WikiPad
For notes on RSTS/E - VTedit, or Teco

Text editor

[Archfeld]

I use the lowest common denominator electronic wise, a standard text editor. It is cross platform generic, no format issues, small foot print. I used to use a notebook but I lost one with critical notes once and that convinced me to go electronic so I could make backups.

Yojimbo (and also pen + paper notebook)

[omission9]

For fast note taking I still rely on a pen and a paper notebook. Anything worth really keeping gets rewritten in Yojimbo. I also use Yojimbo if I am taking notes in a slower paced setting.
http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/

What sort of notes?

[supercrisp]

For most meetings, I write on the agenda, then scan it, and almost never look at it again. For meetings I chair, I have an outline of the agenda on my laptop (omnioutliner) and add children bullets as needed. For research, I use Moonreader or Acrobat to capture/export highlights & comments.

Depends: Apple notes or paper

[Camembert]

For my personal use, I like the Apple Notes app, it is basic but sufficient and most importantly thanks to icloud it syncs my iphone, ipad and mac. Perfect for my personal scribbles.

But professionally i prefer a little paper notebook. Some of my colleagues prefer a note app with pen on an ipad pro though.

OneNote is Microsoft's Best Product

[Thumper_SVX]

Seriously, there's really no competing products beyond OneNote.

I was an Evernote subscriber up until recently; I simply found that the functionality was too easily duplicated in OneNote; Evernote literally provided me zero advantages.

Now, my history is I have always been an open-source fan, run Linux since the early pre-1.0 kernel days, and ran Apple Macs for years before finally migrating back to Windows about 2 years ago. Mostly I did that because of work, but I had gotten a Surface Pro about 4 years ago or thereabouts that I absolutely fell in love with for a portable, simple computer with which I could also do some awesome note-taking with the stylus. This includes drawings on the screen when I need to (which in my job these days is often).

When my Surface Pro got long in the tooth I moved to a Dell Venue 11 Pro, which is what I'm typing this response on. As well as being a really good tablet, it also has an extremely good keyboard if you get the accessory keyboard with the integrated battery. It also has the advantage of giving me runtimes on battery that are just insane and I have never come close to killing both batteries (though I have drained the battery once or twice in tablet-only mode). At this point I have dozens of OneNote notebooks, many of which are archive/reference... but the new active ones are synced to all my devices at once. That means that when I get home to my nice big desktop machine, I can bring up those notes without even thinking about it; no saving to a Dropbox-alike solution, the notes are just there. And I can slide them off to a second screen I'm using for reference material while I work on the action items from those notes on my nice comfortable desktop. Meanwhile my Venue sits quietly on its charger waiting to be taken out again.

Now, there definitely are times OneNote is not ideal. I don't use it for very personal notes... the stuff I don't want synced to a Microsoft-owned cloud (or anyone's cloud come to think of it). For that I have my OwnCloud server with OwnNote. While it doesn't do the hand-written notes, I do have an OwnNote client on my phone so I can tap in quick notes or reference notes I have stored there. I can also hit it up easily at my private URL to quickly get some notes entered... but even I admit it's not as slick as OneNote. Now, having said that since I also have the OwnCloud client on my laptop, I can create text notes in the "Notes" folder in my OwnCloud on my local machine and they also become notes... so there are multiple ways to skin that cat.

So one-size-fits-all? No... but OneNote is good enough for almost everything, and for those few corner cases I find OneNote doesn't work, OwnNote works perfectly. These two tools have become the things I use every day and mean I'm not constantly losing paper notes (my old method).

Having said all that, I DO carry an old paper notebook around as well just in case I'm ever in a place I have no power or access to a computer/phone (VERY rarely, but it happens). If that happens, I whip out the paper notebook and write a quick note... and if I want to digitize it I can either transcribe it later, usually into OneNote so I can translate over diagrams as well.

Plain Text Editor or Pen and Paper

[herbierobinson]

I used to use Pen and Paper the most, but I have been getting greener. I use plaintext a lot more, now. If I have to be mobile, I send e-mails to myself from the cell phone.

Notetaking app: cherrytree

[jim_deane]

I found cherrytree on the Ubuntu repository, and have been using it to good effect for quite some time. It is hierarchical and very flexible.

I see it is cross-platform, so you could keep your note document on a cloud platform like Google Drive and access it from any computer you're logged into. It doesn't have a web version or Android/iOS/Chrome App version, so no mobile device use.

On my Android phone, I use ColorNote. Regular notes and checklists work nicely there.

Circus Ponies Notebook

[Link33sc]

It's Mac only but I love the design and system. Dropbox made it easy to use on multiple desktop computers. I've used it since 2005 and version 4 is the last release. The company closed its doors but if I had a million dollars I'd reopen it. I hope it works with the new macOS. MS OneNote is a clone in a lot of ways.

Libreoffice Impress

[ajyand]

You can embed images and videos. And if you don't have enough time to prepare a presentation, just use the notes. Who will figure out the difference?

Taking notes yourself?

[Toshito]

How savage.

Can't you hire a secretary?

Let's party like it's 1995.

[westlake]

For now. It's still M$, meaning it likely won't end well.

Still spelling Microsoft with the Dollar sign? How retro can you get?

Other tech sites have grown out of this kind of adolescent nonsense. Slashdot never. Which is one of the reasons why the site it is fading into irrelevance.

Re:Let's party like it's 1995.

[RelaxedTension]

Still spelling Microsoft with the Dollar sign? How retro can you get?

I saved myself from typing 7 extra letters there, making it totally worth it. Besides, I thought it was appropriate, given that I am implying that after doing their best to ruin the competition, they will eventually start charging for all the pieces of it, like they always do. Then drop it without warning because it isn't as profitable as they want.

Other tech sites have grown out of this kind of adolescent nonsense. Slashdot never. Which is one of the reasons why the site it is fading into irrelevance.

Ya, umm, calling something adolescent doesn't make it so. Especially when the subtlety of the comment went over your head to begin with.