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General brainstorming for Note-taking software

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thomthowolf:
Seriously, Literary Machine is a program that 90% of the users would have a hard time beginning to do even basic things.  LM is a very abstract thing, I don't think it would fit in at all as far as a general notetaking program.  It's even more difficult to grasp than Zoot.  LM is strictly a poweruser tool.
-superboyac (June 01, 2006, 04:12 PM)
--- End quote ---
I don't know about that.  I have been playing with it a little today.  In fact, I wrote the post you are responding to using it.  At it's heart, I think it is just notecards.  The trouble may be that the author thinks of it as a thinking tool, and is fascinated with the 3 dimensional discovery of new ideas.  If you just want to take notes and then arrange them into a coherent draft document, I think you can learn to do that fairly quickly. 
I will admit that the documentation is fairly ... esoteric.  I just can't decide if the software is really that hard to work with or if its just that the documentation is. 

thomthowolf:
(I'm moving this topic back into the brainstorming thread, since I think it applies)

OK, I just went back and looked at Taonotes again.  It's very interesting for sure. 

--I like how there's several ways to organize data. 

--The filter-as-you-type feature is awesome! 

-superboyac (June 01, 2006, 05:58 PM)
--- End quote ---
I tried this a couple of months ago, but got frightened  away by the interface.  I will also try to give this an honest chance

superboyac:
thombthowolf, let me rephrase what I said.  I know that LM can be used to collect information in the form of text, and can do it in a unique way that may prove to be useful.  But from the general perspective of notetaking applications, there's no way it would catch on beyond a poweruser base.  I say that, not strictly because the program is too difficult to use (I'm sure a competant computer user could eventually figure it out), but more so because there's a certain level of familiarity that users (in general!) will want with a notetaking application.  Namely, some kind of outline or tree or something, and some kind of visual organization of the notes.  LM is just too different.  I guarantee you most people will give up on the software in the first 10 minutes, if their intention is to find a notetaking application.  I mean, just imagine, a user downloads several programs to try, say, Surfulater, Evernote, Mybase, Keynote, Onenote, Myinfo.  And then he comes across LM...how long do you think he will stick to it?

rjbull:
superboyac,

Personally, as far as working with web content, EverNote does it the best of all the programs I've tried, by far.
-superboyac (May 31, 2006, 04:10 PM)
--- End quote ---

I belatedly remembered NetSnippets.  Have you compared with Evernote for Web capture, which is its focus?  It found favour with the formidable CarolHaynes

I saw your comment about this thread being primarily about notekeeping; should it be forked for Web capture?  I'd also be interested in what software you use to summarise all the posts  :)

edit:
Hmph.  No need to fork, just add to the IDEA - Web page archiving thread

superboyac:
rjbull, when I'm talking about web-capturing in this thread, I mean web-capturing capabilities of notetaking programs, not dedicated web-capturing programs.  In this context, I think Evernote does it the best.

I'm quite certain that dedicated web-capturing programs in general are going to be better than something you'll find in these notetaking apps.

That's what makes this topic and genre of software so difficult.  It's so easy for the overall featureset to include anything and everything, and pretty soon, you end up with a program like InfoSelect.  But, I do feel web-capturing is somewhat essential to a notetaker, so it has to be incorporated to some degree.  But it doesn't necessarily have to be as powerful as Net-Snippets or something like that.


As far as what I used to summarize this thread, all I did was use the print button on this page and print the entire thread to a pdf (78 pages!).  Then I'm just going to print it out and read through it and come up with a summary.  Nothing special.  I'm not sticking this thread into a notetaking app or something like that, if that was what you meant.

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