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General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« on: November 23, 2009, 11:49 PM »

Guys,

The more I use wave for notes, the more I realize one thing:
Collaboration is the future, and it's here already.
Writing notes with more people is superior.
Notes to oneself are ok, but one should design for the more general
case, then n=1 is an special case.

Now, office 2010 offers collaboration in real time. Wave does that too.
My prediction is that from 2010 on, everyone will be used to documents
that can be changed in real time by more than one person.

Right now, a notetaker that offers real-time collaboration, and works
fine offline too is the way to go. I think Microsoft oneNote will get there first -they have it working already in their beta-, or someone doing a desktop client for wave.

If the latter, it could be open source and useful in more platforms.

Anyone using wave for notes here?

-urlwolf (October 26, 2009, 12:08 PM)

After many years of searching for the perfect notetaking application for my GTD system, I've finally found the perfect home in Onenote. Prior to discovering about the only software Microsoft has ever gotten that much right, the most promising applications I tested had come from DC's notetaking apps round-up. But those apps are really showing their age.

Now, let me tell you what exactly makes Onenote a killer application (it's quite specific and personal, actually):

• It is the most robust outliner I have ever seen. That it natively treats EVERYTHING as an outline (including images, tables, etc.) and is able to collapse entire portions of the outline and yet still offer notebook>sections>page hierarchy is exactly the kind of organization I need to manage all my life's information. I could actually keep dozens of scanned books organized in a SINGLE page, all collapsed into TOC's and then into a title listing, only I don't cause there's no need to.
• They have made an amazing, amazing design decision (though I'm pretty sure it wasn't intentional) by making each section a physical file (.one), instead of each notebook. What it means is that I'm able to navigate my GTD project list (where each project is a section) through Launchy, by indexing .one files at my notebook's folder. Do you know what it feels like to try dozens of notetaking apps in the hopes that one will accidentally give you the exotic feature you want, only to suddenly stumble upon it in a program as complete as Onenote? I thanked the heavens and still do.
• Allows me to tag next actions within my notes and then pull them all in one single list, though that implementation is quite lacking.
• It offers fantastic support notetaking tools such as the sidenote, screen clippings and audio recordings. I mean, I have previously owned a Livescribe pen but found myself aching to use it's audio "linker" with typed words as well as inked. Onenote does exactly that. And it includes an awesome OCR engine, just like that (you could pay more for a standalone OCR engine than you pay for Onenote). These features here are just icing on the cake, the kind I didn't know I needed until I had them.

Most important are the first two features. They make GTD project notes management a dream come true. I wonder if anyone else in the world feels the same or if I'm the only one whose inbox is filled with extensive ideas and notes to self on a variety of projects, everyday. I've taken the project notion of GTD deep into my heart and think in terms of projects all the time, and I'm capture-heavy at that.

I don't think I could ever again consider a notetaker that didn't offer the above advanced features. I realize being stuck with a MS product is quite close to selling your soul, but I can't help myself, they've nailed it.

I'm not using Wave for notes yet, but I just thought: what if we create a wave to address these features and needs of collaborative notetaking software? Then we could not only experience collaborative notetaking but take notes about notetaking! Talk about meta. And collaboration really is the future, it's the one thing I find myself missing from Onenote, aside from native html support.