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Selecting a Note-Taking Program
Written on Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Information overload can severly limit your creative thinking and problem-solving capacity. As David Allen promotes in Getting Things Done, we must dump that which clutters our brain and causes anxiety, so that we may focus our efforts on the truly important tasks (and, more importantly, refine our next actions for these tasks). How can we free our brain to contemplate the big picture when there are thirty e-mails waiting to be answered? In my personal attempt to find a solution to information overload, I've been evaluating a few software programs for information management, mind mapping, concept mapping, and note-taking. Here are some of my most recent discoveries in the note-taking arena:
Tree-Oriented
Wiki-Oriented
Here are some other note-taking applications that I have tried (and will continue to watch), but did not consider for this review. (Please note that the hyperlinks will take you to the product's Webpage.)
MyNotesKeeper
Price: $29.95
Version: 1.3 (28-Sep-2005)
Website: http://www.mynoteskeeper.com/
Forum: http://www.mynoteskeeper.com/forum/
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Their Description: My Notes Keeper is the premier note/outliner application for Windows 9x/2000/XP/NT. It allows you to store all of your notes and information in an easy-to-use outline, where you can quickly find what you need.
Glen's Description: MNK offers a nice, simple tabbed interface, yet provides enough power and flexibility to do everything you need. There are many products out there that attempt to do too much -- for example, TexNotes from GemX Software (which is a great program if you need another word processor). Personally, I am looking for a lightweight note-taking application that will sit in my InTray, without consuming hoards of resources. MNK provides this elegant interface in a relatively powerful program, with good support for icons, graphics, tables, and other RTF features. All in all, this is a polished program that provides value for the money.
MyInfo
Price: $49.95
Version: 3.06 (09-Jul-2005)
Website: http://www.milenix.com/
Forum: http://www.milenix.com/forums/
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Their Description: Milenix MyInfo 3.0 is a personal-reference information manager (PRIM). MyInfo is a complete solution for collecting, organizing, editing, storing, and retrieving personal-reference information.
Glen's Description: MyInfo was one of the closest matches to meeting my varied needs. It provides a tabbed interface with good RTF capabilities, including graphics, OLE objects, tables, and more. A minor annoyance is that it lacks toolbar buttons for indenting text, especially bothersome when you need to promote/demote bulleted or numbered lists. Among its best features is its ability to display live Web pages (along with an associated notes page) from a single node in the hierarchical tree. Rather than launching a browser window, the web page is rendered within the notes pane. Similarly, you can attach or link files to a node and write an abstract or description for the file (great for categorizing and summarizing PDF articles). I also liked the export features and ability to include additional columns (such as comments) in the tree pane. The reason that I cannot give this product 5 stars, however, is that I did lose some data during my trial period, which is unacceptable. The OLE object handling was also suspect -- sometimes it worked as advertised; other times, I had some issues. Furthermore, When you shut down the program, it attempts to cycle through and close all of the related note tabs. This wouldn't be so irritating if it didn't flash through each of the tabs every time you closed the program. Lastly, this program would be a contender at $30-35, but it's getting too expensive in my opinion at $50. Having said all this, I'm looking forward to seeing version 4.0 of this product!
KeyNote
Price: Free (Open Source)
Version: 1.6.5 (2.0 expected soon)
Website: http://www.tranglos.com/free/keynote.html
Forum: http://www.tranglos.com/forums/phpBB2/
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Their Description: Keynote is a flexible, multi-featured tabbed notebook, based on Windows standard RichEdit control. It's always accessible with a single keypress, even if you work in another application. KeyNote is the only information manager that offers a combination of simple and tree-type notes, rich text editor, ability to mix freely many notes of different types in a single file and secure encryption.
Glen's Description: This is an amazing piece of open-source software. If you are looking for a free solution for your note-taking purposes, look no further. However, there are some limitations to using KeyNote. First of all, there haven't been any significant enhancements to the software for a couple of years and the developer is attempting to take it commercial -- which means you'll have to pay for the next edition. Second, the linking of data in the RTF editor pane to other nodes is very cumbersome. You actually have to specify a target bookmark (of sorts) and then create your link to reference that bookmark. For this reason alone, I shelved this software (but didn't remove it from my system.) I am expecting great things from version 2.0, however -- if we see it anytime soon. Why can't linking to nodes, web pages, and external files be easier?! For capturing and storing information, I can highly recommend KeyNote; for organizing and linking your thoughts, look instead to MyInfo, MyNotesKeeper, or TreePad.
Maple Professional
Price: $27.00
Version: 6.0
Website: http://www.crystaloffice.com/
Forum: http://www.crystaloffice.com/forum/
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Their Description: Maple is a useful document organizer that enables you to create your own hierarchical trees for storing information such as documents, notes, and images. You can create unlimited nodes and assign any document to each node. Furthermore, its powerful export and import features help make building your trees fast and easy. The advanced features of the Professional edition of Maple are: an advanced search utility; backup system; built-in file encryptor; built-in calculator; integration with Microsoft Word, and more...
Glen's Description: Maple is one of those programs that could be wonderful, but for a few quality issues. The RTF editing features (graphics, tables, and document formatting) are some of the strongest of the programs I've evaluated. The user interface is elegant and up-to-date -- menu options are where you would expect them to be. The product doesn't try to do too much, as TexNotes attempts to. However, I did experience some problems with Maple. When I inserted a graphic into an article item/note during testing, any additional typing caused the graphic to flash sporadically. Although I posted a support issue on the forum, I received no response (actually, not even a "we know you're out there" message.) While this graphic flashing may not affect the functionality of the software, I couldn't imagine experiencing this effect day-in day-out.
TreePad Business & Enterprise
Price: $43.95 Bus; $64.95 Ent (12GB Single User)
Version: 7.6.3
Business: http://www.treepad.com/treepadbiz/
Enterprise: http://www.treepad.com/treepadx/index_su.html
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Their Description: TreePad is an award-winning Organizer, PIM Database, Personal Information Manager, Word Processor, Search Engine, Web-site Generator, and Photo Album. TreePad saves you time, allowing you to keep your notes, documents, hyperlinks and images at the brief distance of a click.
Glen's Description: Let me start by saying that I chose to purchase TreePad Business a few years back and recently upgraded to TreePad Enterprise for single users. As a result, you may be wondering why I am reviewing other programs if I already own TreePad. While TreePad is an excellent, full-featured, and stable software product, I've been concerned regarding two areas of its development. First, TreePad is the brainchild and product of a single individual, Henk Hagedoorn. Because of this, support is limited and product enhancements are slow to market. Furthermore, TreePad does not provide a Discussion Forum for feature requests, suggestions, and bugs, which I believe is a necessity for shareware authors and users alike. Second, TreePad is not a leading-edge technology product -- the program's user interface is circa-late 1990s and its feature-set is falling behind other newcomers like Milenix. Lastly, there are far too many offspring (Lite edition, Safe, Business, Enterprise, etc.) for a single developer (let alone confused users) to keep track of. But for all its misgivings, this product excels in its functionality, stability, and speed. I can highly recommend TreePad; otherwise, I wouldn't be using it myself!!!
NoteStudio (DogMelon)
Price: $39.95 ($49.95 with Palm/PPC)
Version: 3.0.0
Website: http://www.dogmelon.com.au/ns/index.shtml
Forum: http://www.dogmelon.com.au/nsforum/index.php
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Their Description: Note Studio provides a simple, powerful way to manage notes. In your life and your organisation, there is so much information to keep on top of. Note Studio allows you to create notebooks for this task. Pages in these notebooks can be linked together, just like web pages on the internet.
Glen's Description: This Wiki-like offering provides free-form, note-taking capabilities. You enter information using a simple markup language (for example, * for bold, - for bullets, and + for headings), which works well if you're used to doing this sort of thing. The real power of NoteStudio, however, comes from your ability to create new notes and hyperlinks by simply typing a word surrounded by brackets ([ ]). You organize these notes into books and collections, which you may search across to find and extract information. Personally, I found the "free-form" nature of this product a wee-bit too free-form. I much prefer to use a hierarchical tree or mindmap for grounding myself into a topic area and then proceed to dig deeper from there. Perhaps, I'm just used to working with the standard tree-based methods for organizing my notes. That said, I will be watching this product as it matures. If only it had the wikidPad-like tree, as well!
WikidPad & WikidPad Compact
Price: Free (Open Source)
Version: 1.15 & 1.10
WikidPad: http://www.jhorman.org/wikidPad/
WikidPadCompact: http://www.jhorman.org/wikidPad/wikidpadCompact/index.html
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Their Description: What makes wikidPad different from other notepad applications is the ease with which you can cross-link your information. Links in a wiki are created by typing in WikiWords. A WikiWord is any mixed case word typed into the editor. The term wiki means "quick" in Hawaiian, and wikis are all about quickly linking your information together. wikidPad is not a web server, or application server, or groupware solution. wikidPad is a standalone notepad like application, albeit notepad on steroids. wikidPad is like an IDE for your thoughts.
Glen's Description: This amazing piece of software is now open source and I'm very interested to see how it develops. If you want to see how a full-featured wiki operates, visit Wikipedia (a free web-based encyclopedia) at http://en.wikipedia.org/. Like NoteStudio, you must enter data into wikidPad using simple markup codes to format data. However, wikidPad (note the "d" between wiki and Pad) also provides a dynamically-generated hierarchical tree pane (one of my criticisms of NoteStudio). If wikidPad could handle graphics and file attachments as easily as it handles text, it would be a "killer application." Unfortunately, I can't see being limited to text-based notes. Furthermore, I'm not sure that I like having to enter data using CamelCase (mixture of uppercase and lowercase) to establish links -- I prefer the brackets [ ] used by NoteStudio. For example, in wikidPad I would enter AnchoredInstruction as a link; in NoteStudio, I could enter [Anchored Instruction]. When it comes to searching and printing information, I can't see having to use and read CamelCase forevermore. This is, however, another program to watch closely. Let's see what the open source gurus can do with it!
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