So it seems to me that the "ultimate" note taking software either can't exist, or would have to be some kind of super-morphing application, with the user taking a hand in the construction (or selection) of the UI. Perhaps this would look like some kind of free-text database back-end coupled with a dead-simple GUI builder front end that shipped with a number of common GUI configurations out of the box. Maybe you'd start out with pages or tabs (a la KeyNote or OneNote) but you could choose a default UI for each one - the "tree on the left" UI, the "sticky notes" UI, the "scrolling column" UI, the "cloud of tags" (del.icio.us) UI, etc. Then you could tweak the templates, mix and match, or construct your own from scratch. ...
Let me talk briefly about the design of Surfulater. Surfulater is primarily an engine that knows little about what it is doing. What you see displayed in the content window comes from HTML template definitions which are stored in the XML database
(knowledge base). There are no database schema's, no complex or proprietary database, nothing hard coded into the application, zip. If you want to add a new template
(or form in a more conventional database sense) you can, as I showed earlier in this thread by adding a "Note" template for superboac. And CSS gives you control over the look and feel.
Down the track you'll be able to create new templates from within Surfulater itself, instead if hand editing the XML file. In my mind this comes pretty close to a free form database.
Surfulater also uses a tree, witch gives you a variety of different views of the database. This includes folders and articles, just folders, folders with certain articles and a chronological view. More powerful tree views will come when we implement Filters.
The tree is in a dockable/floating/auto-hide window aka Visual Studio. When Tags (keywords) are implemented this window will show a tag cloud, which will provide yet another way of locating content.
Surfulater has a concept of 'See Also' links which enable records
(articles) to be linked together to create a web of related information. Simply drag an article from the tree and drop it on another articles 'See Also' field and links are created between the two articles.
Next Surfulater allows you to have a single instance of a record in as many folders as you want, so their is no deciding which folder is the "right" folder for a record. Important stuff.
And as superboyac mentioned you can view all of the records in a folder at once, or just a record at a time, the choice is yours. Again another important capability.
Surfulater lets you embed any files in its database. For example Word Documents, ZIP or PDF files. Alternatively you can add links to external files, so they are instantly accessible, but remain on your hard disk, instead of in Surfulater. The choice is yours.
You can easily push content into Surfulater from other applications. I've recently written about this
here and
here.
The extensible and flexible design of Surfulater was there from day one, as I wanted to ensure it could be adapted to other uses, besides capturing Web content. I've gone to great lengths to ensure Surfulater is straightforward and simple to use, which belies the power of its core capabilities.
For those interested in more background material on the inner workings of Surfulater I encourage you to read
"Surfulater, Under the Hood and Down the Road".
It is great to see this thread spring back to life.