A search for a notes/todo organiser...

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Posted by Stilez
Oct 5, 2012 at 02:15 PM

I’m searching for a personal notes/todo/clippings organiser. My needs are conceptually simple but I’ll be a heavy duty user so good quality is a must. I’d assumed it would be easy but apparently not. The very few programs with the needed functionality are often weak elsewhere (search, UI, up to date). So I’m posting for 2 things:

1 - to summarise my needs, what I’ve found so far, and ask people here for input / suggestions.

2 - to post what I’ve found (when finished) in case it helps other people, though this will inevitably target my own needs which will differ from other peoples. So far I’ve trialled 147 packages, I’ll probably get closer to 180+ when done.

What I need:

I give talks, and organise tasks and notes - anything that I might need, or reference, in years to come. My primary need is a hierarchical interface which supports multiparenting (or a category/context hierarchy which allows items to appear in multiple places in the tree).

For example “buy books for son’s college” would need to be visible under “Stuff to buy->Online purchasing” and also “College planning->August 2013”. An appeal court ruling on patent law might be relevant in a talk on appeal court cases, 2012 surprise rulings, or current patent law. (case law->appeal rulings, and also patent law->surprise rulings->2012 and also patent law->current position rulings) That’s how I work and think so I want an organizer that fits it.

Beyond that it gets simple. (1) handle rich text/images/unicode, (2) good quality search/filtering (ideally with regex or complex boolean capability for when I have thousands of notes and can’t think how I filed something!), (3) view/search item properties such as created/modified/last viewed times/“Next action due” time, (4) can handle thousands of items, including files or notes >64K, competently ie not slowing down too badly or “breaking”, and (5) UI and show/hide/customize must be advanced enough to make serious use practical. Not scared of complex UI as long as I can customize it myself.

In terms of platform, desktop Windows is essential and desktop Linux very desirable, as I might switch OS to linux, and will be working offline rather than web or cloud-based.

What I’ve found:

InfoQube, Ultra Recall, MyBase, Zoot XT *might* handle it, all will take time to figure out as they are all fairly “heavyweight”.

Of the rest: - Surfulater next generation and Task Unifier are still beta. LeaderTask has poor search, WebResearch only supports time settings with Outlook, Smart Outline developer understands value of multi-parenting so some day that might have it, Omea Pro, KnowledgeWorkShop and Keynote NF development are all slow or not greatly being developed and all have issues when tried (Omea line-spaces RTF horribly, KW has poor search, KNF doesn’t clearly show parents of a given item). Knobjex is not well enough documented yet to work out if it can help or not. Many others would be good if they had multi-parenting/multi-cat in a tree but lack this.

There’s also a few dozen I haven’t looked at yet, and probably some I haven’t come across.

So that’s where I’m at - any input, “heads-up”/warnings/advice, or recommendations would be very welcome!

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