Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Note Taking on the Mac/IPhone/etc

In another post I commented about Notaional Velocity and SimpleNote. I still use that as my primary note taking combination for simple things that I'll often want to look up quickly - eg Last oil changes, printer cartridge type, size of the AC filter, list of names of people I meet, list of movies to check out, etc Basically I'm using Simplenote (Notaional Velocity on Mac that syncs to Simplenote) for anything I'd want quickly on my iPhone as well.

For work stuff - tasks, project notes, developer code snippets etc. I'm using MacJournal. I toyed around with using Evernote but I didn't like it for work notes. The main reasons I didn't like Evernote is

1) You can't reorganize your notes in a predefined order. They're argument is 'use the search feature.' And I agree for simple notes that's fine. But for work I often keep a list of notes that I have neatly organized with a few things at the top such as "server names" "common commands" etc. With MacJournalI can always keep them at the top. With Evernote you can't.

2) They don't have the nice split vertical pane that MacJournal has. They have it - but it defaults to a view that has icons in it and it's just a waste of space. They do have a flat list view but it splits it horizontally which still isn't what I want.

3) Evernote now does support nested folders, but it's still sort of goofy (if you drag a folder onto another you'd expect it to immediately just become a subfolder - but that's not what happens.) MacJournal makes it intuitive with nested journals.

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