So many systems promise this. Have you found it to be true? Which software, and can you give an example?

This is an excellent question. I am not a very disciplined note-builder, so I may not be the best example, but I can't really think of any apps that have helped me develop my thinking or ideas in unexpected ways. I have found that they can help clarify my thinking, especially an app like Milanote. I'll be interested to see what other responses you get.



digeratus wrote:

So many systems promise this. Have you found it to be true? Which
software, and can you give an example?

I enjoy the spark of a new idea or insight. It happens a lot. But, not because of any computer or software. It's reading, talking to interesting people, day dreaming, and taking long walks that work, not machines.

I think I need to CRIMP more seriously. Here’s where I’ve gotten actual good:

OneNote - that’s all I can use it work. It doesn’t have the feel of a worthy tool. I have to keep wet wipes at my workstation. Wet clay collects on the sharp stick. I have to clean up at intervals through the day.

Obsidian - On my Linux system and on a local Windows box which I use for logging into company training. Notes in Obsidian have been helpful. I have a bunch of Java notes in Obsidian on my Linux box.

Curio - Outlining, mind mapping, kanban, planning, and brainstorming. It’s fine for knowledge management and I’ve used it for that. Lots of flexibility in linking and replicating notes.

Devonthink - A monster of an app. Yesterday I got some automation via Keyboard Maestro. I plan to start using the Annotation feature like Scrivener’s synopsis.

Via KM, I can hit a hot key on a document of interest. switch back to where I’m building a transcluded list, and hit another hot key. It inserts an HTML comment identifying the parent of the annotation, a link to the annotation to edit it, and transcludes the annotation. Since annotation templates all start with a link to the parent document, you end up with links to open both the annotation and the parent.

Thanks to the magic of regular expressions, it’s smart enough to recognize the difference between a link to a document versus a link to an annotation. The same “insert transclusion” hotkey works for either style link, with some differences in what it pastes.

Happy with that.

It’s not an outliner, although you could use it for one, but I also really like the word processor Mellel. It’s said to have a steep learning curve. I think the curve gets a lot easier once you realize it’s not Word and doesn’t work that way. Styles are particularly cool in Mellel.

Mellel is in Israel. There’s a free trial. It’s not a bad thing to support at the moment.

I am thinking of the good old ADM...

... and today I am using a mix of The Brain, Word and XMind.

Dominik

Dominik - good to see you!

I sometimes think of ADM also, and wish that it had survived. In ways it was before its time. Visually, I especially liked that ADM didn't resemble other Windows programs - it had its own unique look.

Daly

Dominik Holenstein wrote:

I am thinking of the good old ADM...

... and today I am using a mix of The Brain, Word and XMind.

Dominik

Dominik - good to see you!

I sometimes think of ADM also, and wish that it had survived. In ways it was before its time. Visually, I especially liked that ADM didn't resemble other Windows programs - it had its own unique look.

Daly

Dominik Holenstein wrote:

I am thinking of the good old ADM...

... and today I am using a mix of The Brain, Word and XMind.

Dominik

My apologies to the group for inadvertently posting twice.

Not sure if this is what you were looking for, but the first thing that comes to my mind is Evernote. Once my notes reached a critical mass, probably around 10,000, it became really useful.

By then it contained a good part of the important background information related to my work and interests. This meant that most of the times I would ask myself "now what was it that I had read sometime ago on that topic?" a quick search in Evernote would give me something of value to help me further advance my thinking. I would say that it became for me a real-life Memex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex

Previously, I would probably have started a web search, come up with a mutltitude of irrelevant results and, before I realised, gone off on a tangent –to which I am very much prone. So Evernote has indeed helped me grow my thinking in an 'unexpected' way in the sense that, without it, I would have been 'expected' to lose focus or at least a lot of time!

That said, I have now hot a plateau –Evernote has a hard limit of 100,000 notes– so I need to find my next Memex tool...


digeratus wrote:

So many systems promise this. Have you found it to be true? Which
software, and can you give an example?

That said, I have now HIT a plateau

Alexander: Obsidian can now import Evernote, you may want to try that. However, with that many notes you may consider not migrating them all, or migrating the older ones or certain tags that you don't really need any more to one or more separate "archive" vaults.This has worked very well for me. I still can find very old stuff by searching in the archive, but may current vault is not cluttered with it.

Sorry. No particular app.
The game-changer for me was the discovery that notes can be linked (wiki-style).

I would say the app that still inspires me and finds me new ideas is FoxTrot Pro, the Mac search app.

You can index anything (or exclude stuff, too), which happens at very high speed. You can then search by an enormous range of criteria, and view the results in their own pane, with all hits highlighted (in different colours, if you've been searching for multiple terms) and a simple "previous/next hit" arrow system for skipping between them.

The nearest Windows equivalent is dtSearch (very similar, also very powerful).

Because all my main note-taking apps are now file-based, i.e. don't use databases (okay, not entirely true – Bear does use a database, but I export the notes into Obsidian at regular intervals), I can index all my repositories with FoxTrot. This is singularly convenient, because I have no other app that zeroes in on specific info as rapidly. No need for tags, no need for file structures. Just raw indexing power and a complete set of Boolean (or Boolean-equivalent) search options.

I also use FoxTrot for multilingual searches, either using Terminotix AlignFactory to produce HTML bitexts, or a rather nice free app called PDFsam Basic to generate PDF bitexts by interleaving the pages of identical PDF files in two different languages. AlignFactory is one of the very few bitext generators capable of (accurately) analysing PDF files, but complex brochures do defeat it, and in any case, it's often easier to appreciate language in context when you can see all the illustrations as well – hence PDFsam. FoxTrot handles both kinds of bitext with aplomb; its PDF viewer as extremely efficient (probably an Apple module, but I wouldn't know). It also handles MS-Office files and most other popular file formats with ease.

Rapid access to information has always, for me, been at the heart of any creative endeavour. That's why I've spent time getting to know the Google Search engine (and others, including search-result aggregators like DEVONagent) from all angles, so I can drill into the web for references, cross-checks etc. And that's why I like FoxTrot Pro so much.

... although I realise FoxTrot Pro isn't a note-taking app as such! Otherwise it'd have to be Obsidian with the OmniSearch plugin, which is really exceptionally good.

Relevant to this interesting topic is, perhaps, this article in The Sweet Setup about Obsidian's Local Graph feature. The full graph of links in Obsidian isn't, as the author rightly remarks, very useful – there's just too much there. But Obsidian has an extremely powerful, built-in Local Graph feature (accessed from each notes three-dot menu, then by clicking the Open Linked View submenu), which is much more useful. The article is here: https://thesweetsetup.com/the-power-of-obsidians-local-graph/

Another fan of the local graph, here. I've recently hyped the local graph's value by including in my daily note template links to the notes for "this day a year ago" and "this day two years ago". By tweaking the local graph depth settings to include links to those older notes in the display, I can see in the local graph for any given day not only was important to me that day but was important to me in the same time slice up to two years ago. It's both fun and serendipitous.

For serendipity, I've always found the "wander" feature in TheBrain, which randomly (?) flips notes from the database in front of you at a nice leisurely pace. You can stop the wandering at any point and use it as the top level of a personal notes rabbit hole. Fun.

That's an interesting idea! I've only just discovered this Local Graph thing, but I'm looking forward to experimenting with it.

Amusingly, as you probably already know, there are several different random note plugins available for Obsidian!

Paul Korm wrote:

Another fan of the local graph, here. I've recently hyped the local
graph's value by including in my daily note template links to the notes
for "this day a year ago" and "this day two years ago". By tweaking the
local graph depth settings to include links to those older notes in the
display, I can see in the local graph for any given day not only was
important to me that day but was important to me in the same time slice
up to two years ago. It's both fun and serendipitous.

For serendipity, I've always found the "wander" feature in TheBrain,
which randomly (?) flips notes from the database in front of you at a
nice leisurely pace. You can stop the wandering at any point and use
it as the top level of a personal notes rabbit hole. Fun.

Amontillado wrote:

Mellel is in Israel. There’s a free trial. It’s not a bad
thing to support at the moment.

Could we leave politics out of it though ? Cause there are also plenty of people who would say Palestine is not a bad thing to support at the moment…Let us just stick to the hardship of CRIMPING on this forum..

Please accept my apologies. My only dog in the hunt is a general wish for peace. I did not seek to open debate either way and do not have well informed opinions, anyway.

Skywatcher wrote:

Amontillado wrote:
>Mellel is in Israel. There’s a free trial. It’s not a bad
>thing to support at the moment.
>

Could we leave politics out of it though ? Cause there are also plenty
of people who would say Palestine is not a bad thing to support at the
moment…Let us just stick to the hardship of CRIMPING on this
forum..

Paul Korm wrote:

I enjoy the spark of a new idea or insight. It happens a lot. But,
not because of any computer or software. It's reading, talking to
interesting people, day dreaming, and taking long walks that work, not
machines.

That is exactly what worked for me as well. I get ideas when I read and listen other people's ideas (or my own former notes).
Once a have small pieces of ideas, I tend to easily extend and elaborate using visual tools.

For me, it is always Scapple.
Just double clicking on the blank page: drop the idea there; then, branch it to another directions without any restrictions from the software. I often don't put them to maps and connections.
Scapple provides absolute freedom.

The most impactfull discovery was almost 25 of 30 years ago when I learned about wiki's.
Specific the https://wiki.c2.com/?WikiEngines page I spend a lot of time on trying new wiki engines.

Linking between pages (on your local machine) was a great discovery and all the PKM tools that came after that are just more of the same (currently using Obsidian).

The second tool that had a big impact was PersonalBrain (currently The Brain). Specially the plex that shows only a small related part of the of youre complete graph (like a small part of a round ball) was impressing together with the fixed layout. The parents on top and childs at the bottom made it usefull.
I find most current tool graphs (including Obsidians) rather useless. I want to see my currrent note and all relations till a decent depth. Local note graph in Obsidian is rather good but the layout is every time different.

For me it was KAMAS, my first true outline processor. The simple ability to collapse and expand headings, to hoist, was transformational, teaching me to think of writing as a scaffold, allowing me to climb up a little faster and further. The book that came with KAMAS was also eye-opening. It taught me to look at the larger structure of longform writing, to seek to articulate balance and consistency of ideas.

For a while I really lived in that program, applying it to everything. These days, I mostly use Dynalist, but perhaps no longer have the rush of discovery from using something new. But it made writing my new book (On Censorship: A Public Librarian Examines Cancel Culture in the US) a real pleasure, letting me seamlessly flip from open to close focus on my various sections. Outliners, rather than note-takers, had a truly defining influence on all of my thinking.

YouMinds Composer. Right now I've barely scratched the surface of its functions but it already helps a lot. One of the many amazing things about it is that you can change the representation of your page anytime. E.g. from mindmap to outline, or to/from an org chart, scribble board, ontology, notebook, and many others. I use it in the Sequential Pinbook representation where it shows each item in card format next to each other in an ordered way- kind of like XTiles but in the sequential pinbook representation specifically you cannot resize the tiles (you can with other representations though).
It helps to organize my thoughts and to quickly jot down ideas, which can then be easily grouped, broken down, connected etc later.

I never got around to using it until recently because it felt clunky, but if you put function over aesthetic, and don't need an online version, it's simply unbeatable in many aspects.

Jaslar, I also appreciate Dynalist a lot. It is a great outliner.

Thanks for mentioning your book, which looks interesting and timely. I will get a copy.

- Daly

jaslar wrote:

For me it was KAMAS, my first true outline processor. The simple ability
to collapse and expand headings, to hoist, was transformational,
teaching me to think of writing as a scaffold, allowing me to climb up a
little faster and further. The book that came with KAMAS was also
eye-opening. It taught me to look at the larger structure of longform
writing, to seek to articulate balance and consistency of ideas.

For a while I really lived in that program, applying it to everything.
These days, I mostly use Dynalist, but perhaps no longer have the rush
of discovery from using something new. But it made writing my new book
(On Censorship: A Public Librarian Examines Cancel Culture in the US) a
real pleasure, letting me seamlessly flip from open to close focus on my
various sections. Outliners, rather than note-takers, had a truly
defining influence on all of my thinking.

For me, I have to travel back in time to the days of DOS and the fantastic outliner Grandview. I don't believe any application developed since then matches Grandview feature for feature, although the new note-apps have other great features. But Grandview introduced me to the power of outlines, and how each node in an outline could be a full-blown word-processing document.

If you're unfamiliar with Grandview, I wrote about it many years ago; in fact, this was my first writing about information management apps:

https://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/grandview/

Steve