Information conveniently captured in Evernote; now what?

Posted by MadaboutDana
Mar 26, 2013 at 11:28 AM

I’ve enjoyed this convo, I must say. I have Evernote on all my various machines (iPad, Android mobile, Windows laptop, Linux netbook etc. etc.), but very rarely use it (although I do back up various apps to it, e.g. Awesome Note, for some reason - probably because it’s so accessible).

I’ve looked at it again, recently. It’s very nice. Lots of useful features. But nothing truly compelling. And behind it all, an uneasy sense that once they’ve got you by the short and curlies, you’re scuppered - totally dependent on Evernote for ever and ever and ever…

I prefer to keep my notes, especially project-related ones, on my own machines. Yes, they may sync with various Cloud services, but at the end of the day, I always have access to a local copy. My preferred way of storing large and variable items (web pages, excerpts from interesting articles, miscellaneous files etc.) remains Notebooks (by Alfons Schmid), which is now very stable on iPad and very pleasant to use on Windows. Above all, Notebooks deals with web material really, really well - you can copy and paste stuff in from more or less any page, and Notebooks will keep a remarkably faithful copy. For later reading, searching, comparisons etc., this is invaluable, especially since Notebooks (on iOS) has an excellent search function. The Windows desktop version doesn’t, unfortunately, but since the files are stored on disk in HTML format, there are plenty of other options, including simple Windows Search or, in my case, Copernic Desktop.

I’m interested, too, by what people say about assembling stuff - the preparatory phase, as it were. I’ve always used a wide variety of tools, depending on what I feel like, what the project is, whether it’s long or short/big or little etc. But TreeProjects has become one of my favourite platforms for assembling and drafting large documents, not least because of its excellent search function, excellent tagging, and MDI interface. I’ve tried TheBrain - more recently, excited by the enthusiasm of the revered Dr. Andus, I’ve even tried ConnectedText - but they just don’t speak to me in the same way TreeProjects does.

Which just goes to show what an amusing bunch of individualists we all are, I suppose…