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Tired of note-taking apps

akkshaya.blog

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Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#81

Post by tomduncalf »

Personally I find Apple Notes the most convenient for quick jotting down of ideas etc. It’s not the most advanced in terms of features but it loads instantly, is quick to use and is available on all of my devices. Have tried numerous alternatives but they’ve never stuck e.g. they’re slow to start up or are fussy to use or don’t work well on one platform.

For deeper sketching out of ideas, diagrams etc I really like Concepts on iPad with the Apple Pencil. It has an infinite canvas and is all vector based, which is great for never worrying about whether there’s room to fit your idea on the page or whatever. Previously I used Notability and it was good and a bit more traditionally note based, but I miss the infinite canvas. The text recognition and handwriting features in Apple Notes on iOS 14 are pretty cool though, will be nice to see what third party apps do with them.

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#82

Post by JohnL4 »

JohnL4 wrote: post #49

I've recently started using org-capture and org-agenda (LONG-time org-mode user with a hot-key (Auto HotKey) to bring up emacs). Seems to work pretty well. (I'm always at my keyboard during the work day, and sometimes even when not.) With just my phone, Google Keep. If I was back in school, Live Scribe (but only with a pen with a manual on-switch; the Aegir turns itself on too much and the battery drains fast).

P.S. sometimes Orgzly/Drpbox when mobile.

Evernote being my bookmark tool now that Delicio.us has been nerfed. (If it's even still around.)

(Also this P.S. because Materialistic doesn't seem to allow editing.)

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#84

Post by claudeganon »

intended wrote: post #66
vijucat wrote: post #12

My theory about handwritten note-taking is that the bandwidth difference between thinking (fast) and writing (slow) is somehow extremely beneficial to the process of generating creative and evocative output. There have been so many journaling sessions which I started with the absolute conviction that I had nothing new to say, and after 4 pages of extremely creative and detailed ideas, surprising even to me , I had no…

That’s my issue with the Microsoft surface stylus work- and a lesser extent Apple. They don’t compare to written, and a decent amount is the pen tip friction. Wacom comes close. However the apps themselves ? I’d like to use one note more, but PDFs don’t become copy-able text. Searchable but not copyable. Writing on a surface device is ugh. And I had really high hopes that they would push on the tech. Procreate -iOS-…

They make screen films to recreate this friction on the iPad Pro. A lot of my artists friends use them:

https://paperlike.com/

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#85

Post by sitkack »

tomduncalf wrote: post #81

Personally I find Apple Notes the most convenient for quick jotting down of ideas etc. It’s not the most advanced in terms of features but it loads instantly, is quick to use and is available on all of my devices. Have tried numerous alternatives but they’ve never stuck e.g. they’re slow to start up or are fussy to use or don’t work well on one platform. For deeper sketching out of ideas, diagrams etc I really like C…

How do you backup Apple Notes? The PDF export loses fidelity. I really like AN for the integrated camera, esp the document scanner. Is there another application that allows for writing as well as annotating media, video, photos and sound?

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#86

Post by barrenko »

j0hnml wrote: post #78

The biggest issue I have with note taking is not the medium or app, it’s the fact that I would often write something and never look at the note again. This essentially made the act of note writing, at least for me, futile since I rarely remember my notes as I’m writing them. The best solution for this, I’ve found, is to still take notes on the bigger picture but then to add the smaller details, definitions, concepts…

For me the biggest point of writing is to remember and then safely forget about stuff.

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#87

Post by bachmeier »

This is true for a certain class of apps. (I really like the website too. Clean and readable.)

Having recently moved back to a Chromebook, I'll add one more to the long list, one that you don't really hear about. Gitlab comes with a very nice Web IDE. Create a new markdown file and start typing away. You get all the beauty of version control without having to use version control. Can even set it to automatically build your own private site. All free of charge. I'd argue this does stand out compared with, say, Evernote or OneNote.

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#88

Post by kirubakaran »

"Note Taking" is the wrong approach, imho. You are responsible for putting things in and keeping it up to date, and of course this is prone to fatigue.

An automatic knowledge base that is created from the signals you already generate anyway would serve you the best, I think. This is what I'm building with https://histre.com/

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#90

Post by kaliszad »

j0hnml wrote: post #78

The biggest issue I have with note taking is not the medium or app, it’s the fact that I would often write something and never look at the note again. This essentially made the act of note writing, at least for me, futile since I rarely remember my notes as I’m writing them. The best solution for this, I’ve found, is to still take notes on the bigger picture but then to add the smaller details, definitions, concepts…

For me, if I have some more long-running projects or ideas I might return to and e.g. give a presentation about them at some point, I find using https://orgpad.com an alternative. It tries to be a general tool that helps you connect the dots in a graph and that helps structuring information more like your brain does instead of forcing the linear approach of lists or longer texts. It doesn't force a scheme or anything like that on you and it can quite easily be turned into presentations e.g. like this conference talk on Graph isomorphism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu8P7UwHhAA Btw. Orgpad is also a project, that is completely written in Clojure/ ClojureScript. (Full disclosure I have consulted and still consult the developers on orgpad.com infrastructure.)

I the end, if you have the wrong tool or the wrong method for anything you are going to have a bad time even if the tool or method is useful in a different setting. An analogy: You can hardly unscrew something using a hammer unless you want to have more problems then before.

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