I realized recently that my various lists of bibliographical references (for many projects over the years) are hopeless scattered in Evernote, MyInfo, OneNote, etc., and I am now trying to consolidate them in CintaNotes.

CintaNotes has the best tagging system I've ever encountered, and it's an attractively and intelligently designed app. If I were to adopt it for general note-taking for a big project like a book, I suspect that I would bump up against its limitations very quickly, but for simple lists (in my case, lists of books, articles, and Web bookmarks), it seems to work very well. (I should add that I don't need an app that automatically formats the entries for me; I am just compiling a big collection of citations, easily searchable, that are already formatted.)

Has anyone else here tried to use CintaNotes for something like this?

Nope. But if you're using genuine bibliographic data, wouldn't it make sense to use a specialist bibliographic software like Zotero? Then you could automate the importing and exporting of data, and there are all kinds of other benefits (such as tracking of references in a document and the automatic creation of a reference list at the end of the document). Just a suggestion.

I briefly tried Zotero some years ago and was unimpressed; but I was a heavy user of ProCite (which I still miss) for a very long time. At this point, though, because I'm just bringing together a lot of old material into a single searchable file, I really don't need the automatic downloading and formatting offered by programs like Zotero. (If I were just starting from scratch, I might be more tempted by it.)

I think what I was really asking in my post above is whether CintaNotes has any serious limitations that I should be aware of. It strikes me as an excellent but obscure program, yet I've never known anyone who used it, and I'm just curious if there are any major problems or limitations in CintaNotes itself.

I was also concerned about CintaNotes' limitations. The developer addressed the issue here:

http://cintanotes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16&p=94

Thanks for the reminder. I had a dim memory of some comment by the developer in the CintaNotes forum, but I had forgotten the details. This is reassuring, because my list of bibliographical references certainly won't run to more than a few thousand entries.

Though I'm aware daily of CintaNotes's constraints, I find it refreshing to work with a program that is so lean and efficient. It's a very different experience from dealing with bloated monsters like Evernote and OneNote.

Some further clarification from the CintaNotes developer:

"By the way the information about limitations mentioned there is outdated.

"Recent CN version should have no trouble managing of up to 10,000 notes of reasonable size _per section_,
and up to 100,000 notes in total per notebook, and if you need more you also can divide them into notebooks.

"If you can live with a slight performance degradation, CN easily handles even more notes."

Thanks. That's good to know. Sounds like you could write a novel in a single notebook, if you wanted to do such a thing.

It's an astonishingly good program: its tagging system, for example, is much better than Evernote's. CintaNote's chief weakness, it seems to me, is that the handling of images and attachments is awkward. But if you're trying to organize text-only notes, it performs brilliantly. In other words, you just have to work within its limitations.

I use Cintanotes and find it easy-to-use with solid development/communication from Alex. I'm curious, especially from WSP, how your consolidation plan has gone. I have a bit of the same problem as you (as described in your first post of this topic) of having notes scattered through about four different pieces of software. I'm wondering how people here use Cintanotes. I mostly find myself using it as one big drop-a-note database and then just rely on "search" to find what I need. For me, it's my Gmail for notes. I don't delete much with Gmail or worry about folders even, I just search. This is my main Cintanotes method. I know I am not using it to its fullest, but it works. However, if I decide to consolidate I might change things going forward. General thoughts?

By the way, if you haven't checked it out lately there have been three updates since Christmas with some solid improvements.

CintaNotes 3.5 Released!
Free Simplenote sync, linking to attached files, extended trial and more
Thursday, December 22nd, 2016

CintaNotes 3.6 Released!
Clipping from HTML now retains links and basic formatting, also other fixes and improvements
Thursday, March 23rd, 2017

CintaNotes 3.7 Released!
Drag-and-dropping text from any application into CintaNotes; improved stability; bugfixes.
Tuesday, April 25th, 2017

I'm just being my usual indecisive self. I've spent a lot of time in recent months pasting bibliographical entries from various programs into CintaNotes, but I still have a long way to go. And then I start worrying about CintaNote's obvious limitations: it doesn't handle images at all well (in a few of my notes I have photos of tables of contents and that sort of thing), and there is no iOS app (the syncing through Simplenote is a clever idea but not terribly helpful helpful to me).

At the moment I can't think of a real alternative among the other programs I already have installed on my computer. I'm fond of MyInfo, but a phone app is still shimmering like a hallucination in the distance. Evernote would meet all of my technical requirements, but I find it uncongenial (if only because it is so ugly and cluttered in Windows). So I continue to dither. I seem to recall that we have a word for that kind of behavior on this forum.

P.S. -- I forgot to add that I now have 3,293 notes in CintaNotes, divided into two notebooks: Bibliography and (Web) Bookmarks.

I like CintaNotes. If there were versions for MacOS and iOS, it may very well be my note manager of preference. But its reliance on SimpleNote to keep and view notes on those other platforms is makes it not practical for me. First off, I just am not a fan of SimpleNote and that's bad enough. But CintaNotes can only synchronize one notebook (or datafile) with SimpleNotes, which means you either have to pick which category of notes you want to synchronize, or keep all your notes in one notebook in CN.

So CN is note a viable option for me, though I wish it could be.

Steve Z.

It's discounted 25% at BitsDuJour. I've been intrigued by it, but its importing options are very limited and I haven't been able to figure out a way to get other note taking program's notes into it.

CintaNotes does allow you to drag and drop text from other programs. Unfortunately, it usually still requires a little reformatting after you do that. But if you're not fussy about the appearance of your notes (I am, alas), you can move a lot of material into CintaNotes in a hurry.

I find that the best export format -- for me -- is a single HTML file (which is made to look rather attractive, by the way). I download that to my iPhone and consult it there in an app called Documents, and, if I wish, I can bring it up to date from time to time. One advantage of this system is that it preserves all of the Web links in the notes.

I'm glad you mentioned the HTML export file. It is one of my favorite things about Cintanotes. The HTML output looks very nice, perfectly formatted, and it's easy to backup everything and put it away....or use it as you do with iPhone - that's a great idea!




WSP wrote:

I find that the best export format -- for me -- is a single HTML file
(which is made to look rather attractive, by the way). I download that
to my iPhone and consult it there in an app called Documents, and, if I
wish, I can bring it up to date from time to time. One advantage of this
system is that it preserves all of the Web links in the notes.

My problem is that I can't get anything *into* CintaNotes. None of the other notetaking programs I've used (Evernote, Bear, Tinderbox) export into the limited formats that CintaNotes accepts.