Five Apps: Organize your note taking with these five apps
Five apps for note taking and organization
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When you need to jot down that quick idea, or need to record more elaborate details to a business plan or tackle an agenda, you might want to consider dropping Notepad out of your workflow to incorporate a feature-rich and proper note taking app which can help you better organize your thoughts and words. To that end, here are five apps for Windows that I believe are a nice fit for recording your musings on the fly.
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An avid technology writer and an IT guru, Matthew is here to help bring the best in software, hardware and the web to the collective consciousness of TechRepublic's readership. In addition to writing for TechRepublic, Matthew currently works as a Cus...
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An avid technology writer and an IT guru, Matthew is here to help bring the best in software, hardware and the web to the collective consciousness of TechRepublic's readership. In addition to writing for TechRepublic, Matthew currently works as a Customer Success Professional for Ultimate Software in Santa Ana, California.
The advantage with OneNote is the print functionality. If you have a web page summarising a purchase then you can print it to OneNote saving paper.
Hmm, printing to Microsoft OneNote's proprietary file format? It can cause headaches!
If you wish to "print" a webpage (or anything else) to a digital format, then, rather than using a proprietary format such as OneNote, I would suggest printing directly to an open standard like PDF. Mac OSX and most Linux distributions come with a PDF printer bundled with the OS, and the free software CutePDF can be installed on Windows. The PDF format is cross-platform and now an open format.
I spent two years everyday using Microsoft OneNote on an older Windows XP tablet (with stylus) for notetaking in math and computing classes for my CS graduate degree. It was reasonable, but booting Windows was slow and the software had a habit of freezing or crashing.
When that tablet started to die about a year ago, I shifted completely to Linux on all my computers, primarily Ubuntu and Lubuntu. Now I use an older netbook running Lubuntu, with a Wacom USB graphics pad for when I need to do handwriting. I tried Tomboy notes, but settled on using the open source software KeepNote (for text input) and Xournal (for handwriting input). After two semesters, I wouldn't go back to OneNote. KeepNote saves all its data as .xml files, so is much more portable than a proprietary file format, and the software is very easy to use...plus the Lubuntu netbook runs much faster and is much more stable than that WinXP tablet.
Now I just need to convert all those old proprietary OneNote files to something usable...guess I'll have to print them all to PDFs for archiving!
Sometime I wish I had just learned how to type all those math equations in the LaTeX documentation format!
Just my 2cents from having spend a few years in the front-lines of digital note taking as a graduate student.
Oh, one extra thing. The article says that "KeepNote lacks any proper sync functionality." This issue can be easily addressed by using an online "cloud" based syncing system, such as Dropbox, SpiderOak, or Ubuntu One. Alternatively, the way I synchronize my KeepNote files between my netbook, desktop, and home server, is to use the open source synchronization software Unison (plus I sync it to a USB flash drive for access on other computers). Dedicated synchronization/backup software such as Unison or rsync will likely be much more powerful and customizable than a basic sync option within notetaking software anyway.