Starting fresh

Posted by Franz Grieser
Jan 10, 2007 at 06:10 PM

Hi.

>- Zoot: my favorite means of
>gathering random bits of information
>- OneNote 2007 when it comes out: for
>assembling data into projects
>- Brain Storm: for rapid note-taking and brain
>storming
>- The Journal: for daily journal and other writing
>- Idea Mason: for
>research notes and composition

You call that a “fresh start”? *SCR*

Quite a long list, and a number of overlaps.

>What would your “start fresh” list look like?

On Windows:

- Ideamason for keeping everything together, for outlining, storing notes and Web pages
- OpenOffice.org for writing, formatting (if necessary also for creating PDFs), calculating and presenting
- depending on the project: Mind Genius Business for team brainstorming and presentations

It might make sense to add Surfulator for pasting Web pages into Ideamason (also see Daly’s post regarding Surfulator). I’ll wait until Ideamason 3 is released to decide whether I need Surfulator or not.

A separate data base tool such as Infoselect or Zoot will probably not be necessary as Ideamason 3 has an excellent Search feature. However, I still cannot say how well it does when you have a whole lot of notes. Right now I “only” have about 100 notes in an Ideamason 3 project (current beta), search results appear immediately after pressing “Search”.

On a Macintosh:

- Scrivener (http://www.literatureandlatte.com) as writing and organizing tool; it is a great mix of a word processor and a stripped down version of Ideamason (less bibliographic features)
- Devonthink Pro for data storage
- NeoOffice for preparing the manuscript for printing, for presentations and calculations

Bye, Franz