Every Flavour Beans

Earlier, it used to be sufficient to have a sticky note-taking application hanging around a corner of the screen(or on a different [virtual] desktop) ready to take any text you want to paste in it for future reference. While browsing various technology related websites, I would just copy and paste the important text, along with the URL of the page, in the sticky notes. The data thus collected could then be perused later, organised, blogged about, sent as email to the friends etc. Stickies are easy to create, easy to manage and the data persists even across system reboots. A text editor in contrast has to be started from a menu or a command line, and the user also needs to remember to save the contents every once in a while lest it may be lost due to an unexpected system failure. Every time the system reboots, the text editor needs to be started and the scratch file needs to be re-opened, unless you have the habit of saving your work session before rebooting(I never do it).

Nevertheless, there are some shortcomings of a sticky note-taking application too.They are as follows:

• Its available in only one operating system. I can’t save the notes in Gentoo and later access them from Ubuntu or Windows operating systems. Accessing the notes from another machine is out of question.
• It doesn’t save the formatted text(bold, italic etc), images, hyperlinks and similar stuff – only pure text is supported.

Three applications that I have evaluated in the past few weeks proved to be excellent replacements for the traditional way of taking notes. These modern note taking applications that I grew really fond of are:

1. Google Notebook: This application allows formatted text to be saved including images, and also includes a link to the source of the text in case you want to go back to it to collect some more info. Multiple notebooks can be created for different categories of notes, some of them can be shared with the general public, it has got features like expanding and collapsing the notes etc. Most significant benefit is that it is accessible from any machine, any operating system that has got an Internet connection. It pops up in the bottom left corner of the web browser for easy note taking while surfing the web; a full page view is also available to better organise and share the collected notes.



2. EverNote: You are sure to fall in love with the interface of this application if you give it but one chance. The feature rich, basic version(no time limit) of this product is freely downloadable from the website, and the paid version, EverNote Plus, that boasts of some additional impressive features like handwriting recognition, is currently priced at $35. A one month trial version of it is available for download at their website.
   
   Its the best note-taking application I have ever used; be it the interface of the application, the features that it supports(copy content from anywhere and paste it in the application and it appears just like it was in the original place) or even the help manual that comes with the product, everything leaves a strong impression upon the user. If you are used to taking notes heavily while you surf the web, read the emails, chat with friends, read the documents etc then you must give this application a try. The only limitation of the product is that its available only for Windows users.
3. Tomboy: Its a desktop application created in Mono for the GNU/Linux operating system. So unlike Google Notebook, the data cannot be shared across operating systems or among different machines. It allows the text to be formatted after the text has been copied into it(it does not retain the formatting from the original page as does Google Notebook and EverNote) and also allows links to be created to the other notes created in the same application(sort of cross-linking).
   
   It’s still in early stages of the development, so lets give it some time before it can completely replace our old note-taking applications.