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Tired of note-taking apps

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Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#441

Post by suhlash »

Feolkin wrote: post #377
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…

I'm constantly annoyed that there are no decent stylus apps on Android. The only one with an infinite canvas has more annoyances and issues than I can count (beginning with how scheduled backups can only be pointed at cloud storage, and manual local backups can only be made to a proprietary format) and I just absolutely hate it.

I use Squid on Android. I learned to adjust the options to suit me well. I use my stylus for writing or drawing and use my fingers to lasso objects to move them or resize them. My stylus has an eraser function when I use the back end of the stylus.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.steadfasti...

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#442

Post by faceplanted »

osmarks wrote: post #440
gukov wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Premature optimization also plays a role. Everyone should start with a notepad and a pencil and move up to something more advanced once they outgrow the most basic method of note taking. It's a bit like buying a top of line DSLR when you're just starting to get into photography.

Having to carry some paper and writing tools around would make note-taking significantly more annoying for me than just being able to use my phone/laptop.

I think his suggestion still works in digital form, just switch pen and paper with whatever your built in notepad is and go from there.

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#443

Post by faceplanted »

gukov wrote: post #305
gexla wrote: post #131

Taking notes is a process. If you're tired of the apps, then you haven't put enough thought into the process. The available apps are fine. Picking a tool to solve a problem is the opposite approach to how you solve the problem. You instead need to define the problem and then find the tool which is the best fit. If you're frustrated with the tool, then you might need to put more thought into the problem.

Premature optimization also plays a role. Everyone should start with a notepad and a pencil and move up to something more advanced once they outgrow the most basic method of note taking. It's a bit like buying a top of line DSLR when you're just starting to get into photography.

The other side of that equation though, is if you started photography with something too cheap to the point of say one of those point and shoots that don't even have manual settings you've also just hamstrung yourself in a slightly different way.

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#444

Post by dnorman »

“But my greatest worry is if I’d continue using it.“

The reason people abandon note taking apps is that they are subordinate to the whims of the developer, OR they are an island of personal control with no mindshare / collaborative power.

Annotation and collaboration are what make our civilization. Everyone wants to harness this and profit off of it, but you can’t trap lightning in a bottle. The control dynamics of the channel matter a lot.

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#445

Post by codpiece »

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…

...write something and never look at it again...

I recently started working with a new client. 7 years ago and many companies past, the now-CEO asked me to set up a system for her and I took ample, random meeting notes. I still have those notes as plain text in a folder, organized by year.

When the new client asked for a design proposal and said they're getting resistance from the C-suite, I could pull up those notes and make some seemingly omniscient recommendations quite quickly.

I tried too many of the note taking services, but really, a plain text note with a YYYY-MM-DD title and stored in a backed up directory is near-perfect and ultra-portable.

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#446

Post by torstenvl »

I don't know of any good note-taking software. The best (i.e., least bad) I've found is Apple Notes, but it isn't cross-platform and uses proprietary syncing.

Something like an Evernote/Apple Notes interface on top of a 1Password-style back end would be ideal. Let me store my note vault wherever the heck I want, and if I keep it in Dropbox, I can use it wherever I want.

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#447

Post by criddell »

Lammy wrote: post #221
stu2b50 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not saying they have nothing to hide, they're saying they're not joting down quick notes of anything they have to hide.

I would agree that self-censorship is one of the most insidious effects of surveillance if that's what you mean :)

It's not self-censorship, it's just choosing the appropriate level of security for the note.

Sometimes I send a postcard where anybody that handles the card can read the message. If I want a little more privacy, I'll send the note in an envelope.

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#448

Post by smukherjee19 »

I feel the author's pain. I've been trying to organize all my notes for quite some time, and for now only Onenote seems to tick some of the boxes.

My requirements for notes, alongwith the issues I face in Onenote are:

- I should be able to organize them in some way. Sure, Onenote works okayish. I like the Notebook->Section->Pages structure. However, God forbid if I try to rename a notebook... I need to open Onedrive in my browser, rename from there, wait a day for the changes to sync (no I'm not joking, some notebooks I could only open the next day), open each of the 60 or so notebooks inside Onenote 2016 (NOT Onenote UWP since it couldn't find those new notebooks, or errored out trying to open them with old names), and then open those 60 notebooks again on my two desktops and a laptop. Was an awful experience and I almost quit Onenote.

- It has to be cross-platform. I do have an iPad but my main workstations are Windows and Ubuntu, and I take notes on all of these platforms, so that basically kills almost all the Apple-only apps, which is a shame since many of them seem good.

- It should either support handwriting recognition, or LaTeX in notes. The reason is I need to write down equations and/or diagrams quite often, so if I just type I'd need LaTeX, and if I jotted derivations using Apple Pencil, I should be able to bring those up later. For Onenote, this is a hit or miss. Apple pencil + Onenote works superb for jotting down, especially with the Paperlike screen protector, BUT the delay after which it becomes searchable is totally dependent on Microsoft's servers, since the server-side OCR needs to run on my notes and I have no control on the process...

Sometimes I just give up and use my trusty pencil and paper. But if I do that, I sometimes forget which notebook I had written some random derivation in September last year. Also, there's no way to search and to archive the data unless I manually scan or take photos, and even then the archival would be super clunky in the form of pictures...

All in all, this is a pretty half-assed solution I have right now. I wish there were atleast some app which was cross-platform and supported LaTeX, or some app which magically solved my problems outlined above...

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#449

Post by therealmarv »

madacol wrote: post #376
therealmarv wrote: post #332

I'm also tired. Now it's only a folder of Markdown files and pictures, Google Drive and VScode. Nobody can take it away from me. I'm in control. Btw. I think git is too cumbersome for notes. I don't care about history and git log and I don't want to push things manually for notes.

What extensions for VSCode are you using? I'm fairly new to this, and so far I've been using Markdown Memo as the main one, with this others as Add-Ons: - Markdown All in One - Markdown Paste - Auto Snippet - for configuring templates by auto-applying VSCode snippets to new markdown files BTW: Markdown Memo is fairly new, was just released this month

I use only Markdown Checkbox (GH style checkboxes) and Paste Image for pasting images directly into the same folder.

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#450

Post by chrisbai »

dmje wrote: post #325
criddell wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Evernote: no note linking What about this: https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208313588-How-to...

Yeh, it does that, but when you’re in context writing a note, you don’t really want to jump out, trawl through all your other notes, find the link, go back to original note and apply... Really, you want a context menu, or the double square bracket notation to bring up a list, or similar. See. Said I was fussy :-)

double square bracket notation : this is exactly how Passfindr https://passfindr.com implements linking to other notes. Passfindr has a powerful search and searching can be inlined in notes like [[search term including tags, regexp, etc.]].
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