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General brainstorming for Note-taking software

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nevf:
Folks I'm a bit late to the party here. I'm afraid I've got my head down working on the next important chunk of Surfulater functionality, and haven't visited DC as often as I need to.

I've never really considered Surfulater to be a Note Taking program, however folks are certainly using it for that. I consider it a tool to collect, organize and locate lots of information. This includes information from the Web, other Windows applications, Files on your PC as well as information you create by hand. I certainly have no intention of going head to head with MyBase or the like.

MyBase has been around for quite some time. Whether it is successful or not I wouldn't know.

There is lots happening with Surfulater and lots to do. If you want to see it cater better for your needs, then please stop by our Forums or shoot me an e-mail. I try to keep an eye on various forums, web sites etc. but there is only so many hours in the day, and lots of code to write.

FYI the next release will have specific support for Bookmarks with the ability to Import from various Browsers and other Bookmark applications. It is looking good so far.

superboyac:
Hi nevf, I hope I didn't offend you with any of my comments...

Let me ask a couple of questions:
1)  Could you provide a more detailed description of what Surfulator is specifically designed for?  It would help us sort out it's role among all these information collection programs.

2)  Just like you didn't intend Surfulater to be a note-taking program, I don't think Mybase intended to be a web collection program, until their web capture plugin came out.  So, even though it was not intended, now it's there, and we (as users) are in a place where we see two programs with a similar featureset.  So we need to know what distinguishes one from the other.  This will help users pick the right program for themselves.

Rover:
Just adding to the confusion discussion here.
Freemind is a mind mapping/note taking application. http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/
I think the concept deserves consideration if only for understanding how to think about designing UI's.  What we really want is an application that works the way we think.  I'm not saying these guys have nailed it, but I think they started with a good perspective.  ;)

brotherS:
Wow, AWESOME find! I immediately installed and tested it, and while it's not perfect (but hey, it's freeware!) I was able to create my first digital mind map without reading any instructions!

I really don't like mind maps on paper, there it's way harder to fit in something later ;)

If anyone here never heard of mind mapping before, check the video on http://www.mindjet.com/de/products/mindmanager_pro6/quicktour.php (several languages available) or read about it on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_Mapping

Rover:
:D BortherS, Glad you liked it.

The whole mind mapping/note taking started me thinking about what I really want out of this type of software.
I think I want topic association vs. categories.  The difference is subtle. 

To me categories are centered around database thinking and the need to make binary (true/false) relationships between an item and a category.  While I understand this need, my brain tends to assocate items with a topic (category) on a graduated scale.  I'm not sure how you develop an interface that let's you do that easily.

Some of the super searchers may do that based on content.  Google does it to some degree with it's engine.  Google for complete failure and several articles about Pres. G. W. Bush show up.  (No comments please)  The reason is that there are a lot of articles written about Pres. Bush and some of them call him and or his efforts a complete failure. (Again, please do not comment on this; not a political discussion forum) Once these articles are indexed by Google and start getting hits, they go up in rank on the results page.

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