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RightNote vs. NoteCase Pro
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Posted by Jon Polish
Nov 2, 2012 at 01:08 PM
I have purchased licenses for both and have formed opinions about which suits me better. NoteCase Pro is deceptive in appearance because it is surprisingly feature-rich. It works on multiple platforms (I do not need this) and imports and exports many legacy formats (I may use this, but not likely). It has cloning which is very useful. While it can do almost everything you could expect, you have to take the LONG way around to accomplish what you can in other programs in one or two clicks. An example is simple tagging. Tagging should be simple. Too many steps are involved. The tree and list views are useful (RightNote has one view) and can display columns. However, the column data is not editable in these views and setting up and using custom columns is horrendous.
RightNote is heavily influenced by KeyNote and that is generally a good thing. It lacks the ability to clone, but other functions are more streamlined. So many programs of this genre lack the ability to select more than one node at a time, and this is true of both RightNote and NoteCase Pro. Yes, I know both programs offer ways to do this, but they are extremely clumsy and not intuitive. RightNote also has the ability to capture url information from Opera which NoteCase currently cannot do (I asked the developer about incorporating this in NoteCase Pro and he was very receptive). However, I discovered that RightNote MUST be opened before the browser in order to capture correctly. Tagging is easy.
The intended use is for writing and research.
Are there other people experienced enough with both of these to provide me with an informed opinion?
Thanks.
Jon
Posted by Jon Polish
Nov 2, 2012 at 02:35 PM
I should also point out that while tagging is extremely cumbersome in NoteCase, filtering the tagged items is a breeze. There are multiple ways of doing this, and there is a tag cloud which can be disabled. The likelihood of me using tags in NoteCase is diminished by the chore of actually tagging the items, so I guess the benefits of filtering and the tag cloud are diminished.
Jon
Posted by Dr Andus
Nov 2, 2012 at 03:17 PM
Jon Polish wrote:
>The intended use
>is for writing and research.
Does that mean you have given up on WhizFolders then? http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/3413/15
Obviously “writing and research” is a huge category and there might be dozens if not hundreds of tools targeting that area. Could you perhaps spell out how you settled on RightNote vs. NoteCase Pro in the end (what your selection criteria are)?
Posted by WSP
Nov 2, 2012 at 03:34 PM
MyInfo is my main note-taker, but I bought a license for RightNote recently because it looks promising. So far I’ve used it mainly for its virtual notes feature. I have a lot of miscellaneous files in various formats (mostly pdf, txt, and rtf) scattered around my hard disk, and it’s nice to link them to a RightNote file and then be able to search them easily. The RightNote searches are extremely fast and show words/phrases in context. It’s also possible to edit the txt and rtf files from within RightNote. Bear in mind that these files are not swallowed up by RightNote; any editing you do will alter the original files in their original directories. RightNote simply provides a means of viewing, organizing, and editing scattered, miscellaneous files from within one centralized piece of software.
Evernote lets you do something approximately like this, but it actually absorbs the various files into the EN file, which will eventually become spectacularly large if you try to do it very often, whereas the RightNote file remains modest in size, because it’s not bringing in these external files, merely indexing them and making them accessible through a virtual link.
As for more general note-taking, MyInfo seems to me to offer greater advantages.
Bill
Posted by Jon Polish
Nov 2, 2012 at 04:29 PM
Dr. Andus:
No, I continue to use WhizFolders for writing chunks of text to be refined (re-organized) in WhizFolders later. I continue to rely extensively on UR and InfoQube for storing, organizing and retrieving information. But like all of us, I like to explore what else is out there that might be valuable. I really like the way I can clip stuff from the web into RightNote.
Will:
I use a similar approach. It is flexible and effective. I can do the same thing in UR but RightNote is simpler, and sometimes that is better for me. Like you, I bought a license to explore the program more extensively. I liked KeyNote, and this is very similar. I’m not committed to it as I am with UR, IQ and WF Just kicking the tires and bothering others for their opinions.
Jon