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Quick capture for Mind Manager
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Posted by Ike Washington
Nov 11, 2006 at 04:41 PM
Derek
I agree with everything you’ve said about capturing ideas on the hoof. I’ve spent far too long trying to figure out how to do this without breaking my stride, stopping the sense of flow I get when work’s going well.
Now, alt+x on my computer immediately opens a QNP note. I’ve set it to open small and on top of all else. Very useful: side notes which float above all else, persist as I switch from window to window. And I have templates for projects, next actions etc which speeds things up, ensure I stay in the flow etc.
Another feature which seems unique to QNP is the ability of its notes to stick to particular windows, only appear when I open certain windows. Very useful: I’ll open, say, a mind manager map and the relevant GTD notes will appear.
My top alternative to QNP: While ShirusuPad - http://hem.bredband.net/danielc/index.html - is another highly configurable, well designed post-its app with the added bonus of being free, judging by the sad state of its forum, it’s early 2005 abandonware. A great pity because it works well - I store notes in a side panel which I activate by moving the mouse to the top of the screen; I drag tabs from the panel on to the desktop as post-its; I can control transparency etc for individual notes; it saves data to text files which means I can find them with DT Search.
Ike
Posted by Francis Morrone
Nov 11, 2006 at 04:53 PM
For quick note-taking I have always found that nothing works better than a good text-editor. Even the best, most feature-rich text editors have small memory footprints. I keep UltraEdit open all day long. I keep most of my random jottings in a single file, though you can have any number of tabbed files open. UltraEdit (and other editors) excels at lightning-fast searches across open files, displaying in a separate pane each line in which a search term appears (which is how I wish *all* PIMs and outliners displayed their search results, with, to my knowledge, only the discontinued KeyNote and Nota Bene’s Orbis module displaying their results that way). One text editor, NoteTab Pro, offers a rundimentary (but useful) two-pane “outlining” mode that some might find useful for note-taking. And of course the resulting plain text can be imported by or cut and pasted to just about any other program.
Posted by Derek Cornish
Nov 11, 2006 at 07:43 PM
Wes -
Thanks for explaining the outlining feature in OneNote. It’s a pity I missed the beta, and good to know it’s there. From the on-line demo I was beginning to wonder…
Derek
Posted by NW
Nov 12, 2006 at 10:25 PM
OneNote is one great way to make small notes. It looks like we in Europe will have to way until Jan 2007 for release on our side of the pond, but a 60-day trial version should be available to download later this month to keep us going.
Of all the ‘quick note/post-it’ style software I’ve tried ShirusuPad is by far the best. Small footprint, stores data in plain text files, has todo lists and alarms, can monitor the clipboard and be invoked via a hotkey combination, tabbed UI, floating notes.
As for the original item on this post, GyroQ, I have have it and have found it great for getting ideas out of my head whilst not disrupting my train of thought on whatever I’m working on at the time. And yes like all things MindManager related the price is ‘towards to upper limit of acceptable’.
A free alternative is the Lifehacker ‘Quicklogger’ VB script which does something roughly similar, but writes the data to a plain text file.
Nigel
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Nov 13, 2006 at 02:27 PM
Another option for quick note taking, which I recently discovered, is Quicknote. It has a few features, which, if not unique, are unusual in a pop-up notes application. First is that it allows you store your notes in a familiar hierarchy. Second is that it sleeps in a small patch along the edge of your screen (top, right or left), and can be accessed by sliding your mouse over top of the patch—you can also access it with a hot-key combination. Third, is a spell-checking function. Fourth, you can also create and store hand-drawn notes. I’m not sure this last feature brings much to the table in terms of usefulness, but it is unusual.
The application is free, although the developer does as for a donation if you like and use the program. Check it out at
Steve Z.