It all depends on what you want Cintanotes
for.
Cintanotes is described on its site as:
A free, lightweight and user-friendly note taking application
(Which confuses me - why the paid licence then?)
If all you need is a note-taking tool, then it is one of many such tools.
I just checked for reference re Cintanotes on the discussion thread(s) at
OutlinerSoftware.com for reference to Cintanotes, and on the crowd-sourced list maintained at
EditGrid.
I updated the EditGrid list to include Cintanotes and that version reference and date (v1.6.1, 2012-04-24).
From what I found after evaluating Cintanotes some time back,
it was a reasonably useful tool for note-taking (what it was designed for), but the current version being unable to incorporate images would seem to be an increasingly severe limitation for such applications in this day and age. The invention of the iPad has probably forced this into the public awareness.
@highend01 makes a similar point in a comparison with Evernote, in his comment mediately above.
For example, the mandatory (must-have) requirements that I currently place on PIMs (Personal Information Management tools) include:
- the ability to flexibly incorporate RTF, HTML and images.
- the ability to treat any text in those images as OCRed and searchable data.
The only
desktop tool that I have so far encountered (and I've looked at all of those in the EditPad list, and some others not on the list) that meets these 2 criteria is Microsoft's OneNote. As regards OCR, OneNote makes
a seriously good job of capturing text from any image with text in it, and immediately and intelligently incorporates that text into searches. You can also select any image in OneNote and copy all text in the image to the Clipboard, to see the OCR'd data (which may have some unavoidable OCR scan errors in it). I now tend to photograph or scan important receipts, and sling them into OneNotes, so I can dispose of the paper. My primary record thus becomes the image, and I
must have the capability to locate them by searching on the text they contain.
I think Evernote is the only
cloud service that does the same (OCR text capture and search) for images. They probably know that this is currently a major competitive differential feature, which is presumably why they have so far carefully avoided enabling that capability in their desktop tool.
I rarely use Evernote though, because it does not meet my requirements. I need a desktop tool, but full Evernote functionality currently necessitates that you remain cloud-dependent to some extent, and I do not want
that. It is lock-in.
(By the way, Qiqqa - which is a superb document and reference management system - provides a free tool that gives excellent OCR text capture and search,
on the desktop, with cloud storage service if you want it. The constraint there is that, currently, the OCRed images have to be contained in .PDF files, but there is presumably no technical reason why they could not extend that to image files in general.)
