Forum Posts Feed
Software Recommendation (Onenote vs. Others)
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Posted by MadaboutDana
Oct 11, 2012 at 12:27 PM
Another alternative you could consider is SilverNote, which is currently in beta but looking very promising. Nice support for images, tables, drawings etc. And a nice, responsive developer, too! And the very latest version has a hugely improved and very powerful search function. You’ll find a (free) version at http://www.silver-note.com - I’m just about to write and compliment Adam on the lovely integration of general search with intra-note search, and the way search results now allow you to scroll to hits.
Deffo worth a look - in many ways Silvernote is a kind of alternative OneNote, with plenty of options for dropping stuff anywhere in the page. The table function is still a bit basic, but shows promise!
Cheers,
Bill
Posted by PIMUsee
Oct 11, 2012 at 06:44 PM
Sorry if I take long to respond, I’ll be busy till Friday afternoon when I’m finally free from the curse of midterms!
Dr. A
Wow how did I not find that thread? Thank you so much, it’s proving to be an educational read. Your system is actually very similar to yours. I also use PDF Expert and export the notes into an email and then make little corrections (expand upon thoughts, paraphrasing, organizing into sections like methods, result, etc.) after pasting into Onenote. The only difference is that I have a to read folder in my Dropbox that I move PDFs into when I want to read them later and move them back into Mendeley (my current PDF manager of choice) when I’m done. The Dragon dictation thing is very interesting though and I’ll have to try that sometimes and hope my accent doesn’t hinder me. As for the iPad workaround, the unfortunate thing is that it requires internet. The reason this concerns me is that if I ever do something like Doctors without Border or work in rural areas (something I am considering), then I’ll lack internet access the majority of the time (why I rejected Dokuwiki and ConnectedText). So I wanted something that has a native client on the iPad (I’m using Outline+ right now for Onenote usage on iPad).
Quant
Yeah, the majority of my info are in PDF (for web articles/ blogs I use Joliprint to convert them into PDFs, only other file format is MP3/ MP4 for podcast and TED talks I take notes from). I use Nitro PDF instead because I was already use to it and it provides me with most things I need (basic annotation, and can print things to PDF, though web pages are iffy for selectable text, see Joliprint instead for that). Color coding is something I’m considering, I might use the system suggested here for color coding (http://drosophiliac.com/an-academic-notetaking-workflow.html). I haven’t tried Ultra Recall yet, can you give me a run down vs. Onenote?
MadaboutDana
I do use tagging in Onenote, though more for exam studying purpose (tag summary of maybe everything I tagged in my bio notes with the vocab tag). The problem is that unlike tagging in Evernote, you can’t search two tags at once (as far as I know), which is kind of the purpose of tagging in the first place (having things under different categories without having to make a separate “folder” for each of them). The tag summaries does exactly that, which is helpful for exam review, but not for finding things that are related to say prefrontal cortext and perception at the same time.
I’m not sure I would ever need to export my Onenote into PDF (unless I wanted to share just one page instead of a whole notebook through Skydrive). I can do all the things in a PDF editor that I can do in Onenote except for drawing (I just draw on the iPad and then put it into Dropbox and copy and paste it into Onenote). I could export all my stuff into PDF if I ever just wanted to get my data out of Onenote immediately and then copy and paste from PDF into another program. But the reason I wanted to export to txt or rtf was that if I ever move from Onenote to another program later on, it would be easier if I had it in a common file extension that could be imported widely (like txt or rtf). But yes, PDF is a very future-proof option right now and might be what I do if I ever wanted to get my data out of Onenote fast. Since I could still edit the text in my file and just index my files. Though my Wiki-links wouldn’t work which would make me slightly sad (part of the reason why I like ConnectedText so much).
Silvernote seems really interesting. Though to me it just seems like a free version of Onenote which I don’t need since I already have Microsoft Office for free through my school. The drawing part seems interesting (instead of me drawing a concept map outside of Onenote on LucidChart or using Dia and then copying the image in) but the search is what I really like. I’m still not sure why Onenote doesn’t have searching as good as Silvernote. Though I’m not sure if I’ll ever really need the searching since my notes are pretty organized in notebooks (wiki-links help too) and stuff so I can find things rather easy. It’s just the tag summary that doesn’t allow two tags that annoys me.
Everybody,
Thank you for all the suggestion and insight so far, they have been incredibly helpful and gave me some things to check out.
Posted by PIMUsee
Oct 11, 2012 at 06:47 PM
Also forgot to mention that I might check out MyInfo too. But my main concern is that I have something that will work no matter where I go whether it’s on my iPad without internet access or a computer that only works on Ethernet but can’t install desktop software so only a web client I can use. This is why I have settled on Onenote (though Evernote could do the “anytime, anywhere” job too) so far.
Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 11, 2012 at 09:07 PM
Glad you found the thread useful. I would still think that some sort of a desktop wiki that also works on iPad might be a solution. You may want to dig around Manfred’s blog (http://takingnotenow.blogspot.co.uk/) a bit because he’s covered a lot of different wikis and mark-down apps. There are also quite a few websites out there that compare every imaginable wiki under the sun.
Why do I think a wiki would be good? 1) Because text files in the end are still more versatile and more likely to survive than PDFs, and 2) because of the distinction I would make between your “brain” and your “library.”
Your “brain” is the software that contain your notes and your analysis of items in the “library” (or multiple “libraries”). The “library” should be external to your “brain,” otherwise it will clutter it with irrelevant material. A wiki is good for a “brain” because it can create connections like a brain (i.e. not necessarily in a hierarchical tree-like order) and can hold a large number of text notes organised in multiple ways, and can also link to external library items.
So I’d keep notes (such as the ones you take after reading a PDF article) in the wiki (“brain”), however I’d leave the PDF article in the library. Chances are you may never ever need to look at that PDF again, if you had taken good notes or if it turns out to be an unimportant or poor article. You only want to end up with the good stuff in the brain, so you can make sense of it, find it more easily, remember it, do things with it.
Then it just becomes a matter of syncing your brain across your devices (desktop to iPad), and keeping your PDF, image, website clippings etc. libraries synced across your devices. The latter could be in one or multiple apps (there are advantages and disadvantages either way). Basically it’s a good idea to keep your own notes and the stuff they derive from or refer to separately, to avoid duplication and to maintain clarity.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Oct 11, 2012 at 09:41 PM
I do agree with what you say about tagging - and also about cross-platform. There’s a huge opportunity here for somebody to produce a really powerful cross-platform app that combines the strengths of a OneNote/Silvernote, wiki and Curio (I love Curio - it’s just a shame I haven’t got a Mac!).
An app I use a lot (because it’s very flexible and also supports and indexes third-party files) is Alfons Schmid’s Notebooks - originally for iOS but now also available in beta for Mac and Windows (you’ll probably have to ask Alfons if you can join the Windows beta program, which doesn’t currently appear on his website). I’ve actually returned to Notebooks for most of my iPad-based text management needs, simply because it’s so flexible. It synchronises through Dropbox, each “book” is effectively a separate folder, and each “note” is effectively a separate file (HTML-based, as it happens, or else raw text) - hence the plural “Notebooks”. It’s actually very simple at heart, but also very powerful. And Alfons is very nice!
It doesn’t sound as if you’d necessarily find Notebooks any more advantageous than Outline+ (which I also use, and have a great respect for), but you might like to take a look. It’s an app that steadily grows on you (I’m also now using it for task/to-do management, after trying literally hundreds of alternatives!)
Cheers,
Bill