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General brainstorming for Note-taking software

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nevf:
Superboyac,
Re. Text only notes. I'm afraid I can't agree on this one and doubt whether many of my Surfulater users would, especially when it comes to capturing Web content. As they say a picture is worth 1,000 words. For example screen shots in program reviews, diagrams that clearly explain something, photographs etc. all add great value to captured information. Can you imagine a "text only" WWW. :down:

Having said that, of course it is totally up the user whether they use text alone or include "some" images. It doesn't make any sense to me to use a program that only allows text. And with Surfulater all of your text is stored in XML, so it is easy to access.

I've recently written two blog (1 & 2) posts that explain how you can add content to Surfulater from other applications. And Perry Mowbray has just released a cool program that makes use of this by tying into the Windows Explorer "Send To" menu.

Can you e-mail me re. Surfulater not grabbing images. I had been meaning to ask you to do this earlier. FYI I am not aware of any issues capturing images. Please send me the SurfulaterLog.txt file located in the folder SUL is installed in. Thanks.

nudone:
nevf, thanks for mentioning Perry Mowbray's 'SendToSurfulater'.

will download right away.

rjbull:
Mybase uses IE as it's web-viewing engine, so take that for what it's worth.
-superboyac (May 31, 2006, 04:10 PM)
--- End quote ---

Ugh.  I don't like that at all...  for somewhat "religious" reasons.  It's a pity MyBase doesn't have its own built-in rendering engine, like say Pegasus Mail and The Bat! have, at least for bitmaps if not for whole HTML pages.

Someone mentioned before that for notetaking, it is wise to stick to text as much as possible, instead of embedding webpages and pictures, etc.

--- End quote ---

I agree, and almost all of the data I keep that matters is plain text, both at home and at work.  That's why I'm particularly keen on good Boolean searching and preferably indexed databases.  Yet nevf does have a point; I was looking at some "how to" tutorials yesterday that had screenshots, and sometimes it would be useful to keep them.  Maybe I should follow your advice and look at EverNote for that sort of occasional use.

Thanks!

Jimdoria:
Hear, hear, nevf!

Pictures are definitely worth their weight, IMHO. Even more important though, is text formatting. I need to be able to bold and italicize key words and concepts, create bulleted or numbered lists, indent things like quotations, sometimes even color-code text. And don't get me started about the usefulness of tables. I'd have a VERY hard time organizing my thoughts without these tools, even if I could forego pictures. Plain text is never going to cut it for me. If it did, I'd use notepad and leave it at that.

I've been using OneNote as a trial, and I wound up setting up a basic 2-column layout on most of my note pages. In some cases I'd simply put the main list on the left and a secondary list or two on the right. Sometimes I'd have a list of things to do on the left, with my annotations and progress reminders for each list item called out on the right.

Unfortunately, my trial expired yesterday, and I found out that not only does the application switch to read-only mode (which I had been warned about and had expected) but it disables the ability to copy anything to the clipboard! :'( I knew I'd lose the ability to update my notebook once the trial expired, but I never expected MS would hold all my info hostage! No wonder everyone thinks they're so evil.

superboyac:
Yes, nevf, don't get me wrong about the content, I agree that it's a purely personal thing.  I definitely feel that a good notetaking application must have the ability to capture content, especially from the web.  The reason why I try not to is because I know that once I start doing a lot of capturing, I become less selective about what I am getting and pretty soon, my database becomes chaos because I have loads of information and pictures in my database.  And, even though the ability is there, I'm usually not really going to edit the content all that much, especially if it's a particularly large amount of editing.  Call it laziness or whatever, but it's something I've noticed about myself with these notetaking applications.

On the other hand, I also totally agree with jimdoria about the ability to format text and add tables (tables are a whole other discussion!).  I use this much more than capturing webpages because instead of leading to chaos, it allows me to be more structured (at least visually).  But the pros and cons of text and web content are many, and there are a lot of gray areas.  But before I forget, remember that this is a notetaking thread and while capturing information is an integral part of this, let's do it one step at a time and figure out our issues with text before moving on to the supporting issues.

Ideally, I'd like to make an outline about what we should expect from the ultimate notetaking app, and obviously, dealing with text will be the main issue, and there will be several secondary issues supporting that goal, including capturing information, ability to plugin to Google Desktop, etc.

Nevf, I will get around to emailing you about the capturing issue I'm having with pictures. 

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