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Aquaminds Notetaker
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Posted by Jeffery Smith
Mar 29, 2018 at 03:00 PM
Thanks much for the feedback, friends. I have an unusual situation in that our college uses Windows, but there is a policy that nothing can be installed on them other than what the college uses (Microsoft Office). Thus, I carted an older Mac into my office for most of my work. Eventually, I stopped using Windows altogether as my workflow doesn’t fit into any of those apps.
My teaching workflow doesn’t really require any apps. But the non-teaching part (student issues and situations) requires a that I keep a record of what is going on with about 150 students, and what is going on with the Faculty Senate (I am VP). These involved a lot of random notes that Notetaker was good at keeping orderly. Each time I review some of Steve Zeoli’s Tinderbox tutorials, I think Tinderbox could be a final solution for these random notes. I also have DevonThink Office, but I’m always flummoxed by the file system on this program. No matter how I try to save files and then work later on them on another computer, I get the message that the file is open on another computer (and it isn’t).
Posted by NickG
Mar 29, 2018 at 03:15 PM
Tinderbox is very good for this kind of things, with (my experience) 2 caveats:
- There’s a significant learning curve. It’s very easy to get notes into TB, but using TB’s excellent facilities for organising and retrieving needs effort. There’s a great user forum, another responsive developer and something very attractive about TB. It’s so seductive that it can turn into a major time-stealer. The other drawback might be that TB doesn’t work well for holding attached documents. It’s possible to have it link to Devonthink (another potential time-sink, as you’ve said) and other document repositories, but that might not work for you
- Back to Curio: it essentially does the same things as Aquaminds/CPN but with a different look and feel. Of the software currently available, it seems like the closest to what you want.
Posted by Jeffery Smith
Mar 29, 2018 at 03:24 PM
I have owned a copy of Tinderbox since about version 3, and its learning curve is primarily what keeps me from using it. I find setting up templates and attributes to be the most vexing part of it…just getting it set up so that I have some defined fields and a typeface that I can read at age 67. I will run Curio and Tinderbox side by side for a few weeks and see which one catches on. I don’t mind having two parallel systems if it will help me with an overall choice soon.
Posted by Paul Korm
Mar 29, 2018 at 03:25 PM
I’m a regular user of Tinderbox, DEVONthink and Curio and get great enjoyment out of working with each of them. And I used CP until its death.
I agree with NickG’s endorsement of Curio—it’s very good for anything that needs graphical organization, notes, etc. But I would be hesitant to suggest Curio for the use case Jeffrey outlined. There’s no way (other than manual) to relate one note to another in Curio. There’s not metadata, as in Tinderbox, or natural hierarchical organization such as in DEVONthink. If Jeffrey needs to relate notes for 150 students, or multiple Senate meetings, to each other, then Curio might not work.
The good thing here is that Curio, DEVONthink and Tinderbox all offer very generous trial periods (including generous extensions), very gregarious and deep forums, and excellent developers who will go above and beyond to help new adopters sort through their startup phase.
Posted by marlowe
Mar 29, 2018 at 04:38 PM
Have you taken a look at EagleFiler?