RGdot

Tag: notes

  • OneNote Comparisons

    OneNote is and feels different than virtually all note takers

    Broadly speaking note taking includes creating shopping lists, keeping journals, taking class notes, organizing text and anything else a user wishes and can imagine.

    The web features many software review articles. There are also many sites specifically for comparing software with each other and one of the bigger categories is those that review and compare note taking software.

    OneNote, being part of Microsoft’s Office suite of course, is widely used and is therefore mentioned often when note taking is reviewed. However OneNote has one unique characteristics that sets it apart from a very large number of others. This is that text can be placed anywhere as if on a board. This feature alone makes it vastly different than others and makes many comparison articles incomplete and arguably wrong. OneNote does not really belong in a comparison list when for example Evernote is mentioned or Apple Notes, Joplin, CherryTree or Simplenote. In some cases it may be possible to add text (or any media) in columns but even then the free form nature of OneNote is and feels different. Most articles concentrate on text styles, search features, image support, storage method, tagging or filtering, sync or encryption availability and others to compare but fail to mention the board feature as something that sets OneNote apart.

    KDE libraries based BasKet Note Pads is one of few – perhaps only – software that emulates a note board very well and can be a true comparable to OneNote.

  • Taskade: Lists And Notes

    Taskade is an online “lists made easy” tool.

    The interface is a simple themed one, after signing up one can start creating lists right away. The background is set to show random images – the theme option is at the bottom left of the window – but can be changed to a solid colour or one of available images, there is no option to choose one’s own. The interface features folders or collections listed on the left hand side and shown and expanded on the right. One can create checklists, free form notes and outlines. It is of course primarily meant as a place to drop in to do lists and ideas.

    Lists can be starred and adding the # sign in front of any text creates a hashtag, there doesn’t seem to be a search function and finding other notes or lists with the same hashtag requires clicking on one. The keyboard shortcuts illustrate some of the other features of Taskade such as indenting text, highlighting text and changing them to mark as complete (strikeout), bold, underline or italic. A to do list will show a progress bar tracking the completion of items in it. Selecting or clicking on any text brings up a formatting menu as well with options like changing the text to a heading type.

    On sharing and collaboration, it is possible to send any list or note via email, embedding it on a page or sharing its link. It is also possible to invite others to view the note and work on it as a team.

    Taskade can be downloaded for Windows and Mac computers or alternatively be used as a Chrome or Firefox extension or addon.

    It is currently free with a premium version with support for file attachment and others features to come soon. There will be Taskade iOS and Android apps in the near future.

  • Leaf Simple Notes For Chrome

    Leaf: Simple Notes is another small notes or reminder extension for Google Chrome. Installing the extension follows the familiar permissions based method and the extension’s icon is added to the right of the address bar.

    Click on the icon and the interface is shown. Simply type any text and optionally add relevant details. Notes are stacked to the right of the text area. Click on the header or title of an existing note and the few available options become visible.

    Notes can be dragged and re-ordered. Any note can be moved to the top of the stack. Information on the note’s creation date is also available. A note can be edited by clicking the fourth icon (see screenshot) or by double clicking on it. Notes can of course be deleted.

    A needed more recent addition is the search function. It is also helpful that is a find as you type search.

    Leaf: Simple Notes is not the first minimalist notes extension and perhaps it is too simple but it serves its purpose well.

  • Simple Gmail Notes Chrome Extension

    Simple Gmail Notes is a useful Google Chrome extension. It keeps permissions to a minimum and uses the user’s own Google Drive to store all data. For this alone it is a very good choice.

    Although given the ‘notes’ name it is somewhat awkward to use for storing personal or random notes because one has to use a gmail email for the notes. An email that exists in one’s inbox is presumably sent by another person. For the purposes of this review and for using the extension later I sent myself an email.

    Once the extension is added to Chrome reload gmail and click on an email to see the text area for the notes. One must log in to Google Drive and allow Simple Gmail Notes access. This has to be repeated on other computers where the extension is used.

    There is no text formatting. The text area itself only features the text background color option but the extension’s settings page includes options for font color and text size. The title of the note can be configured here as well and titles appear much like a gmail label when viewing the email list.

    Notes can be searched and notes history or revisions are enabled by default. These two features use the Google Drive page, when using these a new tab is used to navigate to the user’s Drive page. In a similar fashion there is an Add to Google Calendar option.

    There is also a way to share notes, this requires signing up for a gmail account and all those sharing notes accessing it. Again, as mentioned earlier, this is not the most intuitive way to work with notes but Simple Gmail Notes is an interesting extension that works well inside a popular tool that many use.

  • DocusTree: Freeware Documents And Notes Organizer

    At first look DocusTree (version: 3.2) might look like a notes organizer. The interface and look is of the two pane outliner or organizer where the focus is on writing, jotting down and inserting various media or documents. While this is true of DocusTree it is more geared towards organizing existing documents or websites in a central location.

    As the demo (see screenshot) shows when right clicking on a node DocusTree is mostly about adding. Of course a user can include a new document and start typing – for keeping a list for example – but this freeware is built in a way that is best suited for inserting documents.

    DocusTree supports pdfs, urls, text documents, rich text documents, doc files, XML files and image insertion. It can import individual or a folder of these documents. It can also link to files or folders and therefore not directly show them.

    The additional features are the activity tracker and note calendar. The activity tracker presents a six months calendar view where one can click on days to highlight days where the activity is done. There is no flexibility in individual days’ descriptions. As can be seen in the demo screenshot the “3 fruits per day” is either true (for any given day) or not. The note calendar present a single day view calendar with a text area for general notes and separate area for each hour of the day.

    The built in search, using either the top right text field or the Edit menu did not find expected results. For example searching for jogging while the Jogging node was open did not return any results. The software also became slow to unresponsive after a pdf node was loaded/clicked on. The program interface is not fully bug free either (see right side of screenshot). These are not good signs, especially since this is at version 3.2.

    A password can be set via the program options (Tools —> Options) to prevent access to the program. DocusTree should work on Windows XP and newer but is unfortunately too unpolished.

  • Notes With AnnoPad Google Chrome Extension

    AnnoPad

    AnnoPad (version:1.5.3) or URL Specific Notepad – AnnoPad to mention its full name is a Google Chrome extension that saves notes in a drop down accessible via its icon much the same way as many other extensions.

    The interface is simple, click on the icon and add a new note. The URL of the current page is automatically saved with the note. The note can be formatted in bold or italic and be an unordered or ordered numbered list. Notes are saved automatically and clicking the back button takes the user back to the notes list.

    It is possible to assign a category to a note however the notes list interface does not show the category. The category is therefore only currently useful in the as you type incremental search. The same search of course finds text in the notes’ content as well. When a page or site is open notes can be filtered to those with a matching address. Saved notes can also be displayed by newest, oldest, page ascending and page descending. The latter two refer to the URLs associated with saved notes.

    AnnoPad’s settings are Export to TXT, Export to PDF and Delete.

  • TreeProjects is now free!

    TreeProjects is a notes organizer, a very powerful one, that I became a fan of many years ago. It had started life as the free Smereka and grew to a full featured outliner and organizer. I wrote a brief review of it in 2011. It has many features that made and make it complete like tagging, linking nodes, global search and reminders.

    After years of no development Yaroslav has made the last version, 2.9.4, freely available and paying for a licence becomes optional, if you want to help him.

  • ZenR Notes: Simple Password Protected Notes

    ZenR Notes

    ZenR Notes (version: 0.2) is a recent entry in the note taking category. It presents mostly simple options for taking notes and securing them either individually or with a master password.

    By default ZenR Notes uses what it calls an immersive theme that uses Windows colours. New notes are added, along with other features using big buttons. The minimal formatting options like colours and fonts are available plus a few others like creating simple lists.

    Each note can be password protected (AES 256-bit) by clicking the down arrow to the top right of the note. The same menu features a reminder option to turn the note into a single non recurring reminder. The program notes that secured notes can not be reminders.

    Using the same menu, notes, and the program itself, can be turned into a ‘widget’, clicking that option is similar to minimizing the note into a post it note. While in widget mode clicking X reverts the view to the program window, clicking the left arrow shows the notes list and the down arrow provides options to increase the widget size or keep it on top of other windows.

    The hamburger menu present while looking at the notes list includes an option to set a master password, and to add enhanced security. The enhanced security feature acts as a complement to the ZenR Notes’ back up and restore feature also present under the same menu. The program can also be further secured by adding a recovery email. The latter makes the program look like a web app. The recovery email option was not tested for this review.

    The ‘Total words’ number under the notes seems to be a bug (see screenshot). ZenR Notes should work on Windows Vista and newer, including server editions.

  • Journaley: Simple Journaling

    Journaley

    Journaley (version: 2.1) is a simple yet unusual journaling program, it is freeware and hosted on GitHub.

    The unusual nature of the program is two fold, perhaps. The first is somewhat disturbing, the set up did not provide any prompts (tested on a Windows 10 64-bit computer) until the program shortcut was ready on the desktop, whether this is a bug or not is not clear and there is no mention of this behaviour on the developer’s GitHub page. The second unusual aspect of the program is that, at first launch, it suggests the dropbox folder as the location to save its database.

    Add an entry by clicking the blue + sign at the bottom left of the program, change the date, to any other date if necessary, and start typing. A word and character count is displayed as is the number of entries in th journal. Images can be added to an entry as can tags and stars. Starred entries will turn yellow in the left pane view

    The entry, calendar and tag views (above the + sign) provide different glimpses of the journals written. When editing an existing entry the edit button must be clicked before the text becomes editable.

    The program settings include (only three) different sizes for the font and only two, Noto Sans or Noto Serif, as fonts. The included spellcheck can be disabled and a password assigned to protect the entries.

    The target user for such a software may or may not be obvious but it is nevertheless one newer addition in the note keeping category. Journaley requires .NET framework 4.5 and therefore works on Windows 7 and newer.

  • OutWiker: Freeware Outliner

    OutWiker

    OutWiker (current version: 1.8.1) is a cross platform and freeware outliner or notes organizer. It supports plain text, HTML and wiki style notes with various markups.

    Start with File—>New (Ctrl+N) and choose one of the aforementioned page types. Either manually or by using the wiki menu or keyboard shortcuts add formatting to your wiki page. The formatting and markup available include bold, italic, horizontal line, font size, preformatted text, code, bullet list, creation and last modified dates, equations (inside {$$}) and others. Wiki pages can be linked to each other as well using page:// – grab a page link by right clicking a page in the tree.

    Pages can be tagged and all tags are visible and clickable on the lower left of the program Window.

    Files can be attached to a note and an image preview or thumbnail can be inserted inline using Wiki—>Thumbnail (Ctrl+M). The attached files or images can be inserted in a wiki page with a user chosen width. Attached files can be executed or opened from the program using the play icon on the Attachments toolbar.

    Pages can be moved and sorted within the tree. Pages can also be bookmarked for easy access when the tree gets larger. OutWiker supports global search of all text and tags and a search page type can be added to the tree to be used as a permanent place holder instead of using the menu or Ctrl+F every time.

    The program’s preferences include an autosave setting, default text options and many other appearance settings. One can also set or change keyboard shortcuts for virtually all program features.

    OutWiker has a selection of plugins to add features like ‘DataGraph’, ‘Diagrammer’, ‘Table of contents creation for wiki pages’ and ‘Export notes in HTML’. It is portable and available for Windows and Linux systems (ppa:outwiker-team/ppa) with python dependencies.