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What note-taking app has *actually* helped you grow your thinking in unexpected ways?
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Posted by jaroet
Nov 11, 2023 at 01:09 PM
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.
Posted by jaslar
Nov 13, 2023 at 05:50 PM
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.
Posted by Lucine
Nov 15, 2023 at 11:08 AM
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.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Nov 15, 2023 at 02:06 PM
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.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Nov 15, 2023 at 06:21 PM
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