Minimalist champions

Posted by MadaboutDana
Aug 5, 2013 at 04:51 PM

While I like minimalist interfaces, I miss rich text in many of the most popular note-taking apps. Not least because as a translator, I need to view two documents simultaneously - something that’s simply not possible in the vast majority of mobile apps, and increasingly difficult in many desktop apps.

I have a couple of favorite solutions. One is the vastly improved Microsoft OneNote, which now allows me to view OneNote pages properly on an iPad. This means I can put shorter texts side by side very easily - the iPad app’s new “full-page” view is ideal for viewing them easily on the smaller iPad screen. The other is Apple’s own Numbers, which I previously used as a OneNote equivalent. The import process was a bit trickier - where OneNote syncs smoothly with the desktop via SkyDrive, to get text into Numbers (without a Mac), I had to resort to opening documents in Pages and copying the text, then pasting it into a text box in Numbers. A rather cumbersome process!

I’ve also experimented with Circus Notebooks and Tapose (both capable of dual-pane display). Both are, alas, slightly less than perfectly stable, which can result in some infuriating moments. But I keep going back to Tapose in particular, because it’s such a promising idea…

Alfons Schmid has promised to look into a two-pane version of Notebooks (where you could view two notes side by side; Notebooks is already a two-pane outliner), but he’s got plenty of other things to focus on at the moment (beta releases of Mac and PC versions, for example).

There are, of course, a number of browser-based apps that also have note-taking functions, so are more or less two-pane in layout. But that’s not really the same thing at all.

If anybody knows of other two-pane rich-text editors (or even just text editors; especially cross-platform editors), I’d be interested. Maybe that should be a separate thread. And suggestions for what to call two-pane editors would be appreciated, too. Maybe three-pane outliners (assuming they have some kind of navigation view as well)?