I realize that this is a really obscure question, but first a little background. I've been playing around with notebook programs now that I've become slightly obsessed with tagging and internet organization apps and I have to keep a research log for my very last class ever. I'm not the type of person who keeps pages of notes separate from the original text. I write on the text, highlight, draw arrows, and even sometimes reminders about things not related to the text (Sorry B). So for me the idea of researching and then submitting separate paragraphs about the text sounds like the least kind of helpful research log I could ever use. Nearly all of the readings are in PDF form, so the logical idea was to use some sort of web program that would capture the text, clip it, and then allow me to type in the margin.
Zog told me about Evernote, but while I was waiting on approval from Evernote for an account, I discovered OneNote. Now, Evernote will allow me to import the notebook from One Note, but it lost some of it's editability in the process. I would prefer to actuatly use Google Notebook, but at this point it does not offer the interface with PDFs that I currently need. Thoughts on which application is better...more user friendly...more universal.
3 comments:
I could blather on about these tools for hours. I'll try and spare you. :)
Evernote's greatest strengths seems to be tagging, its cross-platform nature, and its ability to quickly snip data from anywhere (including from mobile devices).
OneNote is "universal", though, in the sense that its content can be more freeform and flexible. Frankly I actually consider that a negative (I prefer simplicity and structure over having really precise control over the formatting of my notes), but some people I know swear by OneNote.
I love Google Notebook for what it does, but it's so feature-starved that I end up never using it.
Now that you've mentioned a little more about what kind of notes you're taking, another suggestion I would offer is just plain old Microsoft Word. If you can get the text of the PDF's into Word (either through a direct import, if possible, or copy/pasting the whole document), you could use Word's review tools to add comments that refer to specific passages of text. It would be kind of like writing in the margins, or putting sticky notes into a book. The down sides to this is that the content of your notes (I believe) would be restricted to plain text, and you wouldn't get anything in the way of true tagging support.
My needs are primarily for grabbing stuff on the fly (via my iPhone), snipping things from the web, and tracking tasks and projects. For that, Evernote is great. But for your needs, which sound more like annotation of papers or books, Word may do the trick.
Actually, I think that either are going to work just fine; the issue is more that I simply need to pick one. I would use Word, but the problem is that when the department generally scans things, they don't OCR anything. So I think that the image clipping is going to work better. For the first project, I already have half of the log done it one note, so I'll probably finish it there. From there I may play with doing the next one in Evernote. I like Evernote's web accessibility better. We'll see.
I used OneNote for a while, then slacked off a bit. Now I have rediscovered EverNote and it seems easier to use than I remembered. Plus I REALLY like the super-easy syncronizing between pc and web and other pc. Pushing a button works for me. One blogger complains that EverNote has weaker handwriting recognition than OneNote, and flipped back to OneNote for that reason. But this consideration doesn't matter to me. On computers, I type.
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