I have just written a blog post "Your Information in ?The Cloud? ? Safe, Secure, Available or Not?" at http://blog.surfulater.com/2010/12/20/your-information-in-the-cloud-safe-secure-available-or-not/ which I thought may interest some here.

Also for the first time ever we've got a Surfulater 50% Xmas discount offer available. Do tell your friends, family and colleagues. Visit http://www.surfulater.com and click on the Xmas Special image at top right of the page.

Merry Xmas to all,
Neville

Thanks Neville

I haven't used Surfulater for quite a while and will take advantage of your Christmas special to give it another run.

I have been using OneNote reasonably successfully so far as my general capture tool.

If you were pitching for Surfulater, what would you describe as the main benefits of Surfulater over OneNote?

Jack

If you were pitching for Surfulater, what would you describe as the main benefits of Surfulater over OneNote?

I think that I am qualified to say something here, as I use both every day.
I don't use Surfulater as general capture tool. So I can't address it from that angle.

I use Surfulator for web-based research. For that task, it is much more useful to me than OneNote.
Getting web-based info into Surfulator is much slicker than OneNote.
I can grab it in a form that makes sense for the particular piece of information. If it is something that changes a lot, like a forum, I'll just bookmark it. If I find a particular fact that I have been looking for, I can highlight the paragraph of interest and grab that along with the book mark. If it is a page that I do not think will be sticking around, or is so valuable that I don't want to lose it, or is something that I am following over time (i.e. monitoring of a business competitors website), I can grab the whole page onto my hard drive.
And all this is just a right-clock away.

Once the info is in Surfulator, the knowledge-base-> hierarchical-tree-> rolling-tape structure is simply more efficient and useful for me than OneNote's "trapper-keeper" style structure.

Hope that's useful.


I intend to try Surfulator out for organizing pfd's soon.


JasonE

I intend to try Surfulator out for organizing pfd's soon.

Jason,

What do you mean by organising PDFs and how would you use Surfulater for that?

doctorandus

What do you mean by organising PDFs and how would you use Surfulater for that?

Organizing PDFs = Put them some place in a fashion that will allow me to find a particular PDF again, or provide the ability to look over them and see what I have available on a given topic.


I started trying Surfulator out for this today.
This is my work flow:

Open PDF, copy title. Close PDF.
Make a new article (texts and authors version) in a relevant folder in Surfulator.
Paste title into "title" field.
Drag and drop PDF file into "attachments" field.
Surfulator asks if I want to paste or make link.
I tell it to paste.
Move the copy of the PDF in the original folder into the waste basket. (This step would probably not be necessary
if I cut/paste PDF in rather than drag/drop it in)
Add whatever keywords or notes that are appropriate.
Repeat with next PDF...

I think this is going to meet my needs just fine. I can tell already that it is slicker then OneNote for this. I wish that I could post screen captures here. The PDFs fit in Surfulator much tidier than in OneNote.


Final note: I do not mean for my posts on this thread to be hating on OneNote. I like OneNote a lot and use it extensively.


JasonE

Nice post, Neville. I am glad that you are both thinking about access and safety of customer data. I also have an Android OS phone, and it certainly is convenient to have access to data on it, through the web or on my PC at home. One approach that was recommended on the forum here was ResophNotes/SimpleNote/Android Client (several are available). Granted this is only for text notes, but it is the best of all worlds. I have copies on my PC/the web/Android phone and they all sync together. There is no weak link in this arrangement. If you could pull this off for web-based information. I wish you all the best as you move ahead.

--Ken

I started trying Surfulator out for this today.
This
is my work flow:

Open PDF, copy title. Close PDF.
Make a new article (texts and
authors version) in a relevant folder in Surfulator.
Paste title into "title"
field.
Drag and drop PDF file into "attachments" field.
Surfulator asks if I want to
paste or make link.
I tell it to paste.
Move the copy of the PDF in the original folder
into the waste basket. (This step would probably not be necessary
if I cut/paste PDF
in rather than drag/drop it in)
Add whatever keywords or notes that are
appropriate.
Repeat with next PDF...

JasonE

Thanks for clarifying. I also have over a 1000 PDFs, so I'm always on the look-out for new ways of organising them. However, it sound like Surfulater would be rather time-consuming to use to organise hundreds or thousands of PDFs.

Fortunately most of my PDFs are academic articles and so it's easy to download bibliographic metadata as well as to organise with EndNote. Indeed, the latest generation of EndNote, Mendeley and probably other bibliographic software now can automatically extract metadata directly from PDF files. It's not always perfect but involves a lot fewer steps then let's say doing the same with Surfulater. On the other hand in Surfulater you have the benefit of tree hierarchies, while in EndNote all you can do is groups. It would be great if Surfulater could import academic bibliographic data and PDFs with one click... It would become a serious rival to EndNote (with its hierarchies and tags).

Hi Ken,
Thanks for the reply and heads up. We are very much on the same wavelength.


Ken wrote:

Nice post, Neville. I am glad that you are both thinking about access and safety of
customer data. I also have an Android OS phone, and it certainly is convenient to have
access to data on it, through the web or on my PC at home. One approach that was
recommended on the forum here was ResophNotes/SimpleNote/Android Client (several
are available). Granted this is only for text notes, but it is the best of all worlds. I
have copies on my PC/the web/Android phone and they all sync together. There is no weak
link in this arrangement. If you could pull this off for web-based information. I wish
you all the best as you move ahead.

--Ken

Thanks for clarifying. I
also have over a 1000 PDFs, so I'm always on the look-out for new ways of organising
them. However, it sound like Surfulater would be rather time-consuming to use to
organise hundreds or thousands of PDFs.

IMHO there are other programs out there, better suited to organising PDFs. UltraRecall for one, can automatically import all files in a directory and index them on the way; as far as I know it won't extract the metadata though. Another option is Archivarius, mentioned elsewhere by Quant.

For me Surfulater is unrivaled in its integration with the popular browsers (not Opera unfortunately) and it's great for collecting web content that one wants to organise and use further. If some kind of web sync/access is made available, this would be brilliant.