My Quest for the Perfect Note-taking Tool

Posted 2 years, 1 month ago at 10:12 pm. 3 comments

There are definitely times I feel like being one step away from being roadkill on the information super-highway. With so much information to keep track of, for a while I have been looking for a tool that could help me with information overload.

For the longest time, all notes I took would be using Notepad and all notes lived in a folder on my machine. I had a couple of subfolders that organized the notes a little but that system started getting flaky pretty fast. So I started looking around for a tool that could help. Back then I was on a Windows XP machine and Karl, a friend of mine, introduced me to ZuluPad. ZuluPad worked for a while and it did solve my immediate need. But, as a user interface developer, I did not enjoy the barebones look of it. It was ugly.

Around that time I somehow got introduced to Google Notebook. Since most of the information I was trying to organize was coming via the browser anyway, having a browser extension with a highlight and clip functionality was really useful. It was no wiki which meant I couldn’t link between parts of the notebook as well as ZuluPad but it was automatically synced between my machines and that was pretty cool (I just found out ZuluPad also has a sync system, I am not sure if it was there when I was using it. In either case, I never used the sync system there).

Google Notebook and I parted ways on offline capability. Notebook just didnt work if you were offline, which I did not know till a what turned out to be unproductive train ride. I hope Google puts that feature in sometime soon though, I still think Notebook was interesting.

In the meanwhile I moved to a Mac and so started looking for Mac tools. There were a bunch of tools that seemed to be okay but I wasn’t looking for something to buy yet, since I get bored of apps soon and wasnt sure how long I would use something once I bought it. I tried VooDooPad for a while but the free version had a page limit which I hit pretty soon so bailed out.

I use Evernote these days and have been fairly happy with it. The killer feature for me in Evernote is the tag based navigation although the navigation seems a little buggy especially when you set up nested tags. Evernote is supposed to be synced as well which is always good to know though I now use just one machine for development. Searching across documents is great. Evernote’s biggest secret sauce is supposed to be Optical Character Recognition (OCR). They talk about how simple webcam shots of your bills etc can be used to organize them since all text will be indexed but honestly I don’t see myself doing that anytime soon. The icing on the cake is the IPhone client which lets you use the IPhone camera and microphone to append to notes as well. Again I haven’t used that but it does give me warm fuzzies.

Evernote is definitely not the perfect note taking tool. The text editor doesnt support even simple elements like lists, forget any advanced formatting, I really wish the documents were wikis rather than simple text, and the AJAX web client was really buggy the last time I tried it. But, right now I have over 50 notebooks in Evernote and they really help keep me organized.

Thats been the quest so far. If you have any tools that help you, do drop a comment here. Also check out this link which lists out the top notes apps for Macs.

Stay tuned as the quest continues ;).