

Ask YC: Anything better than Google notebook out there? - TrevorJ

I wanted to use Google notebook to store and sort my "stream of consciousness" and notes online, but I dislike the lack of folder support. Got me thinking, what have you guys found works for you in terms of electronic catch-all note libraries?
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colinplamondon
I have a folder on my desktop called buckets with individual plain text files
called:

Blog Topic Bucket Books to Get Bucket Business Todo Bucket Daily Task Bucket
Domain Bucket Idea Bucket Link Bucket Music bucket Personal Todo Bucket Quote
Bucket Scrap Bucket Travel Bucket

I then add to those buckets with Quicksilver by pressing .[text here] [tab]
Append to... [bucket]/name of bucket

It takes a couple of seconds to put anything I want into them, though it
probably sounds more complicated than it is written out.

~~~
Jesin
The list is a little confused. This site throws away single line breaks,
except in

    
    
      code text, which you
      get by indenting lines by two or more
      spaces, like
      this.
    

Incidentally, why does this site throw away single line breaks?

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hendler
To amplify a key point: I think the core of your issue is "findability". It's
not hard to collect a lot of internet stuff, or even your own ideas using
different software - finding it again is the difficult task.

I'm in the <http://twine.com> beta, and it works pretty well if want
structured notes/data about your research/ideas.

Along those lines, you can also try: <http://diigo.com> <http://clipmarks.com>

I also use a personal wiki or blog with lots of tagging. Wiki's are very
powerful for organically growing ideas, but I find navigation difficult and
tagging with most blogs provides easier content organizations. Drupal's
taxonomy can help. Flickr's concept of machine tagging is pretty useful for
fast organization of thoughts.

For offline there are more options like OmniOutliner for Mac. Here's more mac
software for idea management:
[http://members.optusnet.com.au/charles57/Creative/Software/s...](http://members.optusnet.com.au/charles57/Creative/Software/swindex.htm)

If more specific goals you have, the easier to solve the problem. But the
general problem of note taking in turning it into a valuable collection is the
hard part.

I also use paper. :) Old school.

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Hates_
Evernote is awesome. Although sadly currently only invite only while it's in
beta, but you can easily apply for an invite on their site:

<http://preview.evernote.com/>

It has a great clipping tool so you can easily clip snippets from websites and
has built in OCR capabilities so if you snip a photo/image you can filter your
notes by text actually contained within the photo. It also syncs between your
desktop client and web version so you are _never_ without your notes and
currently supports mac, windows and mobile windows, with an iPhone version
coming soon.

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hooande
Semi-justified self promotion: <http://www.awesomehighlighter.com>

~~~
DenisM
This may be off-topic, but its awesome! I suggest you immediately take people
to preview page after highlighting is done.

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bigtoga
If you are a Windows person, I find OneNote to be indispensable. screen
clippings, random thoughts, notes - whatever, really - are sorted, searchable,
etc. It comes with certain versions of MS Office. <http://www.onenote.com/>

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aschobel
3banana of course! =) I'm releasing it to my friends this weekend, shoot me an
email at beta-feedback@3banana.com if you want to be an early tester.

 _What is 3banana?_

3banana makes your notes useful again. With 3banana you can easily jot
something down from any device and then share that note with your friends or
colleagues to have a discussion. Share your notes to Facebook, Twitter, Email,
Instant Message or to wherever your social graph lives.

<http://3banana.com> your notes are social

My goal is to make it as easy to use as a Google search.

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michael_dorfman
I'll second (or third) the vote for OneNote. I find it to be indispensible for
dealing with unstructured information, and perfect for imposing structure as
you go. It's not a web app, but has good mobility support (easy enough to
share a Notebook, or keep one on a USB stick). And, the browser integration is
great-- one click saves an article, ready to be filed away.

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raju
There is also TiddlyWiki [<http://www.tiddlywiki.com/>]. Its a single HTML
file that you can carry on your flash drive. You create tiddlers, tag them,
search, the whole gambit. I use it for maintaining my work reports, and its
pretty cool.

You can even go as far as customizing the tiddlers (think of them as index
cards). I created one for work that automatically puts the date, and adds
"dailystatus" as a tag, and has two input areas, "Tasks completed" and "Hours
worked".

The file can get large, but if you feel the need to host it so its accessible
from the web, there is tiddlyspot.com that lets you host these files for free.
So you can have a local copy as well as one on the web, and you can
synchronize between them easily.

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mikedouglas
gmail, using self-addressed emails and labels as folders.

Being able to search and "reply" to your own thoughts is really nice.

~~~
aschobel
I used to email myself notes all the time, but that gets really cumbersome.

I want something that is as easy to use as a Google search or notepad.

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JeffJenkins
I'm on OSX and I use VoodooPad + email. Voodoopad is a really good program for
creating "wiki-like" notes. It can also embed, links to files, rich text
copied directly from safari, etc. For online viewing you can either use the
built in web server or export as HTML periodically.

I use email for updates when I'm away from my laptop. It's easy for me to type
things up in a rough form for processing later and I can use it almost
anywhere (I took 6KB of notes during the startup school on my blackberry)

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danohuiginn
Lots of little text files, with markdown-like formatting. pyblosxom
[<http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/>] gives me a web interface when I need one
- generally when I want to lazily read through my notes on a certain topic.
The files are all in an svn repo, with a copy checked out on every machine I
use regularly.

I've been doing something like this for perhaps 5 years, accumulated something
like 400,000 words of notes across hundreds of files, and the system's holding
up well.

It's not pretty - but my data is safe, I'm not relying on a website staying
alive, and if I ever move to something more sophisticated it'll just take a
few scripts to convert everything. And, since I always have vim open, editing
one of my text files is quicker than almost any other interface.

At one point I had the whole lot publicly-available online - I may again in
the future, once I've done a sweep for other people's secrets in there.

I was incredibly pleased to find that Cosma Shalizi (who I admire immensely)
has a similar system: <http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/>

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jeroen
I had the same problem some time ago, so I built this to support my needs:
<http://scribbl.net/>

~~~
hopeless
That's funny cos I did exactly the same thing!

I tried using Google Notebook for a while but I just kept fighting the rich
text editor. I used Backpack for a while to keep Writeboards but that quickly
got tedious.

A quick 2-day stint produced a RoR application which supports Textile, tags
for organisation and some ajax to make it simple. It does what I want but I'm
not sure I'm ready to open it up to a bunch of "hackers" :-)

~~~
jeroen
I worked on it for a bit longer than 2 days and used a fair amount of time to
test and escape user input and to create a set of test data that might break
the app.

Textile is nice; I should add support for that too, if I ever have time.

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ykristiawan
I am using keynote (<http://keynote.prv.pl>), I keep my file (single file) in
a small flash disk and put it in my wallet, so I do not have to worry about
sync the file between my home desktop, laptop, and office desktop. Keynote
allow you to have tabs and folders within tab.

~~~
TrevorJ
Now that's pretty cool and unique! I like that it isn't web-based but you can
still access from anyplace.

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jrockway
I use a plain text file.

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kalid
Ditto. I have a giant "ideas.txt" with unfinished 1 liners, and separate files
(supersecretproject.txt) with more details.

~~~
hendler
"supersecretproject.txt" - can't be all that secret ;)

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johnm
I'm currently experimenting with PersonalBrain (<http://personalbrain.com/>)
-- it's basically a "mindmapping" tool on steroids. Works on: Linux, OS X,
Solaris, and MS Windows. So far, it's definitely better than all of the other
mindmapping tools.

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lunchbox
Are you looking to store web pages along with your annotations, or just your
personal notes? Also, does it necessarily have to be stored online? Firefox's
ScrapBook extension and OneNote are two excellent tools I have used.

~~~
TrevorJ
Online is pretty vital for me. I'll have to check out scrapbook though, I like
firefox mucho.

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sprig
Moving from gmail to my own email hosting, I discovered that horde had really
nice notes/calendar/etc. modules (horde-webmail has them integrated).

The only problem is that it is somewhat of a pain to set up, but if you want a
complete self-hosted solution, it's great.

I also discovered recently that the next version (rc now) has syncml support
so you can sync with your mobile phone.

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witten
Try Luminotes. It's a WYSIWYG personal wiki with a focus on simplicity and
ridiculously quick linking. It doesn't have folder support per se, but it does
have an autogenerated "note tree" and support for distinct wiki notebooks. I
apologize in advance for the lack of Safari support.

Check it out: <http://luminotes.com/>

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andries
Use the extension Foxnotes while online. You get six separate notes, all of
them .txt files. When offline use your text editor to access any of the six.
Use the editor's MRU list for instant access, or a shortcut(s). It's a simple,
superfast online\offline setup. If you're not using PsPad you don't know what
a top class free text editor is.

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mattculbreth
I'm using xPad on the Mac and it does well for me. I do miss OneNote on
Windows (about the only thing I miss).

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wave
If you have mobile phone with full keyboard, it not a bad idea to keep your
notes there. You have your phone with you all the time, whenever you come up
with something to write about, you don't even need a computer.

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neilc
I use Google Docs. It works well for the most part, but the long load time is
mildly irritating, and I don't need most of its features. I've been thinking
of writing something like this from scratch for fun.

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TrevorJ
Lots of very fantastic information and suggestions here! Than you everyone who
contributed. I'm really liking evernote at the moment. Great solution!

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dmoo
If you browse with Opera then it has a nice 'copy to note' feature which is
handy for clipping bits of the web and adding your comments etc.

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paulsb
I find mind maps to be much more useful than a list of notes. You can always
add notes to the map and attach/link to documents.

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greyman
I didn't find GN or similar products useful. I just save the whole URL on
del.icio.us, using the tags I can remember later.

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slackerIII
I'm enough of a fan of TreePad that I paid for a license a few years ago.

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sdurkin
Evernote is pretty good.

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wenbert
lol. me and my friends are working on something similar to this. beta should
be available before august :P

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slim
try also tomboy (part of gnome)

~~~
JesseAldridge
I really like Tomboy. It's super simple and has a lot of great features.

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slim
<http://sharedcopy.com>

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nate
evernote is awesome

