article - simplenote alternatives

Posted by MadaboutDana
Oct 29, 2013 at 05:44 PM

My favorite note-taking solution used to be AsNoted, which works as a Chrome extension that talks to Dropbox. This means you can sync with the iOS version of the app. Unfortunately I’ve run into certain problems with the Chrome extension, which has a nasty habit of failing to synchronize properly with Dropbox (despite asserting that it has!). This is a real shame. The amiable German programming team are currently working on this issue (apparently rather rare), so I have high hopes of being able to return to it.

In the meantime, I find myself using OneNote more and more. I’ve rationalized my plethora of OneNote notebooks and created some carefully labelled sections, and I’m starting (somewhat reluctantly) to find it a very pleasant working environment. I maintain a profound suspicion of Microsoft - not least out of concern that at some point or other, they will make it impossible to run OneNote anywhere other than through their Cloud services - but the quality of the iOS (and even the Android) clients has eroded some of my doubts.

OneNote also has an astonishingly powerful OCR facility; when combined with the extension discussed elsewhere in this forum, it can read more or less any language with remarkable accuracy. I regularly use this feature to OCR copy from scanned newspaper articles/whitepapers sent to me by clients who want me to translate them. Combined with the simple “Window Key+S” shortcut for taking screenshots, it’s a great solution for all sorts of things (I also use it for tracking online orders, for example). But OneNote also handles text copied out of web pages fairly well; another nice (and amazingly convenient) feature is the automatic inclusion of the originating URL. CintaNotes does that too, of course, but doesn’t handle formatting as well as OneNote.

I much prefer OneNote to Evernote, I have to say!