Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
General brainstorming for Note-taking software
superboyac:
There's something wrong with Mybase's advertising. I'm surprised at how few people even know about it, and it's one of the better programs out there. I think a lot the Keynote aficianados should gravitate towards Mybase more so than other programs. The reason why I stumbled across it was because I was looking at webpage capturing programs at the time. After I came across it, I realized that a good notetaking program should have a robust web-capturing capability, since there are a lot of little bits of information on the web you'll want to save. Now, there are several programs doing this, including Surfulator and Evernote. But I think in addition to the webpage capturing, Mybase's notetaking features are the most advanced and powerful. (By the way, Mybase has just released a 5.0 test version, available on their yahoo group; they seem to have added several features that people like me have been asking for). Surfulater, as far as I'm concerned, seems to be simply Mybase with fewer features.
Now, Evernote is similar to these two in that it can take notes and capture webpages, but that's where the similarity ends. Evernote is a completely different animal than anything available, and it's very subjective as far as if it's good or bad. The bottom line for me is...it's very interesting. Evernote has completely done away with the tree structure of keeping notes. Instead, you can lump notes into categories and subcategories (sort of like a tree structure). The interesting part is that besides being able to place notes in categories manually, there are ways to do it autmotically. For example, if your note contains the word "donationcoder", you can set up a category in such a way that it will automatically be included in that category. Now, the automatic category feature has very limited detection parameters right now, but you can see how promising this can be as they add more powerful parameters to it. The other extremely useful feature of Evernote is the fast filter-as-you-type search. It sits at the top of the program and all you have to do is start typing in it, and it will filter the massive list of notes in real-time until you are left with the few notes that include the word that is being typed. Not only will it actively shorten the list of notes, but it will also highlight the search word (or characters). The other quirky feature of Evernote is that it chronological "tape" navigation. There's a pane at the left side of the window which. The program keeps track of the date and time the note was entered, and if left unfiltered, the notes are displayed in chronological order. In fact, there is no other way to really organize notes. Even once they are organized in categories, the notes displayed will be in chronological order. So it is a little "inflexible" with respect to that. But then again, Evernote is approaching this notetaking software with a different philosophy, so it's simply not meant to be used in the traditional manner.
nudone:
i'll admit i've not spent a lot of time with mybase, just a quick click through it, and i'm wondering does it allow editing of captured web content?
i thought the features in surfulater that allowed editing and amending extra notes to captured webpages was/is very handy.
superboyac:
i'll admit i've not spent a lot of time with mybase, just a quick click through it, and i'm wondering does it allow editing of captured web content?
i thought the features in surfulater that allowed editing and amending extra notes to captured webpages was/is very handy.
-nudone (February 22, 2006, 02:36 PM)
--- End quote ---
Interesting...I don't think Mybase can do that, but I'm not sure. I know this, though. For each note, Mybase has a text part of the note and a webpage part, so even when the webpage is added, some text notes can be added to the same note, although it's not integrated in the webpage itself. I would say this is one feature where Surfulater gets the nod, but, again, I'm not sure yet.
vegas:
my my my, how did I not try this program before now?
1. is there a way to dock the search results window on the right like in Keynote? I found that to be much more useful. (a can't seem to move this winodw
2. also what about having tabs within each document file? is this available or planned?
3. what about import/export functions?
where is this yahoo group you spoke of superboyac?
superboyac:
my my my, how did I not try this program before now?
1. is there a way to dock the search results window on the right like in Keynote? I found that to be much more useful. (a can't seem to move this winodw
2. also what about having tabs within each document file? is this available or planned?
3. what about import/export functions?
where is this yahoo group you spoke of superboyac?
--- End quote ---
Like I said, for some reason, no one knows about Mybase. The word hasn't spread, I guess. But to answer your questions:
1) No, I don't think there's a way right now to dock the search results like Keynote (which is cool). However, I just tried out the "test" version 5, and it seems like the author has completely redone the search method. ALthough it's really buggy right now, here's what I can tell: He's implementing the search-as-you-type filter feature (YES!) so that be able to override the feature you are asking for. This new search feature autmotically generates a list of search results as you type, and I can't tell for sure, but this window may or may not be dockable.
2) A lot of users have asked for this feature, and the author has decided not to do multiple tabs. His reason for it is this (and it makes sense): In version 5, he is going to allow having multiple database files open at once, and each file will have it's own tab. So, funcionally speaking, you will be able to use it exactly the same way as Keynote's multiple tabs, only in this case, each tab is a separate file. He said that being able to do multiple files AND multiple tabs are not only redundant, but would also be an organizational nightmare (and I agree with that).
3) Mybase has pretty good import/export cabability, I know there is a special add-in for it. I was able to bring in my AZZ information into it, using some kind of rtf export feature. Can you import/export from Keynote? I think so...but I don't think it's a direct method, I think a few steps might be involved.
The yahoo group for it is this:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MybaseForum/
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version