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Year end Outliner/PIM review/roll call
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Posted by Ian Goldsmid
Jan 2, 2016 at 03:32 PM
Hi Paul
Devonthink 3, that sounds really interesting. What do you know about it? Is there some info on the web? (A quick glance, couldn’t find any)
Posted by Hugh
Jan 2, 2016 at 04:07 PM
Paul Korm wrote:
For 2015, I’m pleased with how Curio and iThoughts (all platforms)
>continue to mature and I anticipate continuing evolution of new features
>for them.
>
>I think Ulysses has plateaued—in a graceful way. It’ll continue to
>be a workhorse even with no major new changes—I’ll be glad to be
>wrong, but it seems The SoulMen are mainly producing tweaks, now.
>
>New discoveries such as MarginNote and Quiver have been delightful,
>niche tools.
>
>I usually divorce OmniFocus a couple times a year, and did so again in
>2015. We’re re-engaged now, as ever, because I just never find a good
>all-round non-cloud alternative that I trust.f
>
>The AppleWatch I bought is fun, but clearly a “never again” moment. The
>latest iterations of iPhones and iPads seem to offer few real-world
>benefits—the Apple fan-bloggers are bending over backwards to flog
>the new products—it’s a bit embarrassing to read some of the claims
>for 3D Touch, e.g., I think Apple maybe has run out of paradigms to
>shift. But, it must be nice to reach a plateau as the richest corporate
>in the world.
>
>Disappointments include NovaMind which began 2015 promising major
>features on all platforms then went into radio silence after collecting
>upgrade fees for these features, and never delivering them. NovaMind
>cloud is a standalone project that has little value as a result, and
>NovaMind iPad is still vaporware. I’m sure I’ll continue to be a
>sucker for pre-paying enthusiastic developers for features that never
>appear (MailMate 2—now about 2 years past due; Butler—now defunct,
>etc.) because I like indie developers.
>
>For 2016 I’m looking forward to DEVONthink 3 (cool advances there),
>Scrivener iPad (I hope I hope), TheBrain 9 (looking good in alpha
>testing). There’s no danger of loss-of-CRIMP.
>
>Happy new year, all!
Pretty much my thoughts too (without any inside knowledge of DT3, but with the hope that it’s useful enough to entice me back from the Finder/file system, and with a loss on NovaMind that leaves iThoughts and MindNode more appealing - the only slight consolation being that as far as I can remember my upgrade fee should last till 2017 or 2018, by which time NM should have decisively either delivered or deceased).
Happy crimping to all in 2016.
Posted by Paul Korm
Jan 2, 2016 at 04:46 PM
Oh, sorry—my comment on DEVONthink 3 was more aspirational than concrete—though enticing hints are dropped here and there in the forum.
Posted by dan7000
Jan 2, 2016 at 07:33 PM
In 2015 I tried lots of task managers and spent a lot of time looking for ways to keep notes securely encrypted in the cloud. I am fairly happy with my current roster:
- Evernote for insecure notes
- Fargo with dropbox and the advanced encryption option for secure outlined notes. Biggest drawback: occasionally and randomly deletes some items and replaces them with HTML tags like
. Also I’m aware that there are potential hacks so am still looking for a better secure option.
- Skedpal for tasks. Had been on the watch list for a long time but as of the past few months the beta has suddenly picked up tons of steam and an ios version was released in October - well worth a look.
- Tresorit for secure file storage/sync.
- MyMonkkee (https://my.monkkee.com/) for secure one-off notes. There are lots of websites that take the same zero knowledge approach to text notes (see below) but this one seems to be the most fast and stable.
- workflowy for insecure outlines
- excel files on tresorit for secure spreadsheets
- google sheets for insecure spreadsheets
- word
- google calendar
—————-
Other apps I’ve used fairly heavily and then abandoned over the past year:
Task managers:
- Gqueues
- nozbe
- timeful
- Todoist
- 2Do
secure notes:
- stackfield
- walnote
- iTamer
- a bunch of others I don’t recall immediately
——-
Best utility I’ve been using: Capture2Text (Windows) - does real OCR on any snapshot from your screen. I use it a ton for grabbing text from 2-column PDF files, because the built-in Acrobat OCR often fails with the 2 columns and also because it’s faster than running OCR on the PDF itself. i can just select the rectangular area of the text I want and the OCR’d text is captured to my clipboard.
Posted by Gorski
Jan 3, 2016 at 12:52 AM
I’m a Windows user.
My history, early 90s to present: Agenda > Zoot > UltraRecall > OneNote/ConnectedText > Emacs orgmode. The transition between them wasn’t nearly as clean as that timeline suggests. Agenda and Zoot were entirely because of the influence of James Fallows. Emacs may follow me to the grave now that I’ve gotten over the learning hump. Zoe will be to blame for that.
For personal use, I now use OneNote mainly to store passwords in an encrypted section and to capture links and short snippets of text while reading on my iPhone or Android tablet. I continue to use OneNote regularly at work (I’ve been in a government job for two years after a lifetime in journalism) because it’s all that’s available to me other than Word. I can’t even run programs off a USB stick for security reasons.
I bounce around between different text editors at home for occasional writing/programming just because I can: Sublime Text, UltraEdit, emEditor, Notetab, Notepad. Notepad only at work. One reason I like ConnectedText and now Emacs is that I can do some basic tagging, etc., in plain text at work then import my notes with some semblance of organization at home.
Recently started using Visual Studio Code for JavaScript programming. Also use RStudio for R programming.
Excel for basic number crunching.
Autohotkey with some personally written code to grab article text from the web and store it in dated files with the URLs. Also for some basic text substitution/expansion.
Foxit Reader for PDFs.
Chrome browser with Save to Pocket extension. No other extensions as I’ve given up on them in general.
xPlorer2 for moving files around, peeking in them.
Nebulous on the iPhone, Jota on the tablet for plain text files.
OneDrive to store most of my files because I’ve got 1 gigabyte for free, Dropbox for just plain text notes mainly because it’s better integrated with the text editors I use on the phone and tablet.
Scanbot on the iPhone to scan to PDF, CamScanner on the tablet.
In addition to those mentioned above I’ve really liked Workflowy, Scrivener, Writemonkey and Brainstorm in the past but don’t use them now.