Ideas, Notes etc. What do you use?

[Paul Watson]

I am getting a bit frustrated with using either Outlook to jot down ideas and notes I have (saving them as messages to no-one in my Drafts folder) or using Notepad and having five billion text files all over my desktop. Does anyone else have this problem? If so can the people who have found a solution (an application of some sorts?) please tell me what it is! :) I am looking for something which lets me jot down quick notes and ideas and categorise them in some way. Also of course a date/time stamp is useful and some formatting control is neccessary (big bold red letters for bad ideas ;) ). My drafts folder is a bit of a mess and the Journal in Outlook is not what I am looking for (damn that Journal is confusing!). thanks in advance. regards, Paul Watson Bluegrass Cape Town, South Africa Do you Sonork? I do! 100.9903 Stormfront "The greatest thing you will ever learn is to love, and be loved in return" - Moulin Rouge

[Michael P Butler]

I have the same kind of problem that you describe. I've been thinking of writing my own little application to try and solve the problem. Sadly I misplaced my design notes for it. :-) I'd certaintly be interesting in hearing what your ideal program would be like, if we are both thinking along the same lines I might be able to write something. It'd be quiet nice to spend my Christmas break coding a useful app rather than writing telephony applications. Michael :-)

[Bruce Duncan]

How about File > New > 'Post in this folder' ? I use that quite often for jotting things down.

Bruce Duncan | The Digital Delirium | Sonork ID 100.10030 Aythos

[Ravi Bhavnani]

Probably not the ideal solution, but you may want to give the Sticky Notes feature of my product FooBar a whirl. /ravi "There is always one more bug..." http://www.ravib.com ravib@ravib.com

[Paul Watson]

Thanks for the idea Bruce but I have already tried that and it just is not flexible enough. It gets cluttered up with emails and other folders. regards, Paul Watson Bluegrass Cape Town, South Africa Do you Sonork? I do! 100.9903 Stormfront "The greatest thing you will ever learn is to love, and be loved in return" - Moulin Rouge

[Steven Hicks n 1]

I use an electronic organizer. I can type the notes in and then when i get to my computer i can sync the notes with Outlook, and outlook syncs the notes with my organizer. I use a Royal Excelsior for it. -Steven Visit Ltpb.8m.com
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[Jamie Hale]

There's a spiffy little program called TreePad. It's a wordprocessor with a tree control down the left hand side - let's you apply a heirarchy to your thoughts. Pretty cool, actually. And they've beefed it up a LOT since I last looked at it. J

[Paul Watson]

Is it free? :-D I should have mentioned that in my original post... The solution needs to be free... open source free love man! like schwaaa! :laugh: Good idea though Steven, I will save up for an organiser one day. They are not cheap here. regards, Paul Watson Bluegrass Cape Town, South Africa Do you Sonork? I do! 100.9903 Stormfront "The greatest thing you will ever learn is to love, and be loved in return" - Moulin Rouge

[Simon Walton]

Paul Watson wrote: I am getting a bit frustrated with using either Outlook to jot down ideas and notes I have (saving them as messages to no-one in my Drafts folder) or using Notepad and having five billion text files all over my desktop. Good god, that's exactly what i do! I've got about 10 text files on my desktop for various things. I have a "stuff" folder in OE which i store things to remember, passwords, etc. Simon Hey, it looks like you're writing a letter! Sonork ID 100.10024

[Erik Westermann]

I use a notebook - the kind with paper :eek: I tried personal organizers (PDAs), notepad, and spreadsheets - I even wrote an MS Access-based application to keep track of my notes :cool:. I find paper to be the most reliable and flexible means of writing ideas, design diagrams, etc. I use the same notebook all the time and date each note, since I tend to write many notes and diagrams on a single page. I keep track of important files by writing down a hint that jogs my memory or simply record the exact location of the file. I use a whiteboard to develop my ideas and copy them to my paper-based notebook when complete. Sometimes I go so far as to take a digital photo of the whiteboard when I'm too lazy to copy everything down. Essam ___________________________________________ Author - JScript .NET Programming ...and a bunch of articles around the Web

[Daniel Ferguson]

I have been trying to think of a solution to that problem for a while now. I just keep all my notes in a text file called note.txt and it works, but it isn't pretty. There is a program called ActionOutline (shareware) that allows you to manage a series of notes with a tree control. Unfortunately, it does not allow formatting, and it only allows things to be categorized in a tree -- so no multiple categories. I did run into a VB app somewhere that allowed searching it's items, but I ditched it pretty fast because I really didn't like the UI. The program was just clumsy. I considered writing my own program that would allow me to create database-like files. A file would contain a header listing different categories, and then a series of records that could be assigned to any number of categories. That way, I could choose one or more categories and view all the 'notes' that belonged. The problem was that I wanted formatted text, and rtf is simple to display and edit, but HTML is more common and can contain hyperlinks -- but where do I get a nice WYSIWYG editor? "das leid schlaft in der maschine" -Einstürzende Neubauten

[Steven Hicks n 1]

It cost $30. Its not bad for what you get. It is a Plam-Pilot clone. It has a calendar on it, it has 6 different languages, memos, to-do, calculator, expense report, conversions, schedule, and phonebook. It also comes with a PC Link cable. They are probaly sold at Royal.com -Steven Visit Ltpb.8m.com
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[Adam Arthur]

I use my own program, Internet Vortex. It has a "word" tab at the end which is a simple word processor.

[Ganesh Ramaswamy]

u can have a look at this. its easy quick notes tool http://www.conceptworld.com/qnplus/ Ganesh Ramaswamy

[peterchen]

Michael P Butler wrote: Sadly I misplaced my design notes for it *LOL* I'm not Paul, but I've been thinking about it, too. Here are my "requirements" as I set them myself (order is important): 1) one click on the Icon in the QuickLaunch bar, and I can type my new note. You may be sitting in the system tray, you may have a fancy interface, but when I want to jolt down a note, it's a one-click (or one-hotkey) business. Fast, sleek, small. 2) The prog has some default way to determine a "title" for the Note. The thing MS Word does (taking the first words) is fine for me 3) A Hierarchical (tree) or at least "linear" (list of "folders") way to organize the notes. 4) "New Notes" get into some inbox folder. I can organize them using Drag&Drop or Ctrl-X/Ctrl-V. I want multiple selection! 5) A way to switch repositories. Like "one tree for the design of my new prog, one tree for the website, one tree for lyrics. The wole thing could simply navigate through & display folders and files, as soon as I have a File/Zip this folder and all sub folders to a file (can call WimpZip) 6) links to other notes in the same repository, and hyperlinks to local/intranet/internet files 7) Basic formatting. Headline, Bold, Italic, unnumbered and numbered lists. RTF or basic HTML are fine. 8) Attachments, e.g. adding a .doc I can double-click to launch That's enough for the beginning? I have some more feature ideas if you like... Peter

[rcVu]

The ToDo on your Notes email would do the trick. The reason I like it so much, is because you can type as much as you want and attach anything to it. And the best part is that its on the server (no need to back it up, the network people do it for you). And you can read it from anywhere you can read your notes email. Its got a subject, dates, and you can also email it to people you want. Or even put it on your your calendar and set a reminder. And if you want, and you have the designer client you can design your own forms, and views. Rodrigo.

[Daniel Ferguson]

A feature that I would want is user-defined categories. For example, suppose I wanted to make notes about a program that I was going to write, would I put that under the 'programming' tree, or the 'to-do' tree? Well, it would be best if it belonged to both categories, because then I wouldn't have to remember where I put it later. The way I would envisage this working is to have a user-defined list of categories in the file header and then a list of the linked notes after each category. "das leid schlaft in der maschine" -Einstürzende Neubauten

[Klaus Probst]

I also hate Outlook for this, but it's unfortunately the only thing I have that will sync to my iPaq. I also use this: http://atnotes.kpayne.net/, which is kinda OK (the version I have is older and actually better than the latest one). I also used The Brain for a few months but it was too complicated and took up too much memory. I've been looking around for ages for something that fulfills these requirements: - Flexible logical storage. Hierarchical or flat or whatever suits my needs. Put anything anywhere. - Open physical storage (XML or compound files or text or whatever) - Ability to work almost entirely off the keyboard. Having to do sixteen mouse clicks to create a note defeats the purpose. - No foofy stuff like icons in menus and skins and crap like that. Very simple UI. - Shell integration. Maybe even a shell folder extension to display storage (cool!) - Transparency support in W2K and XP - Plugin system that supports different types of "notes". For example, different types of "note handlers" would support HTML, RTF, plain text, bitmaps, etc. - Ability to link notes to each other easily for cross-reference - Support for URLs, shell links, etc. Definitely web enabled. Ability to, for example, "map" a folder and view its contents and so on. - Programmer-oriented. Ability to define notes that support syntax-highlighted code (again, though plugins). - Maybe script enabled (through the WSH). This is easy to do and it brings a lot of power to an app but is not a complex (or expensive) as using, say VBA (gasp) All this in ~1MB clean working set size (no data), sub-second loading times and hides in my systray :) Maybe CP should sponsor an open-source type project where everybody chimes in and provides code. We can use WTL and host it on SourceForge! :rolleyes: ~ Dreamer ~ ___________ Klaus [www.vbbox.com]

[Ravi Bhavnani]

Simon, You may want to take a look at my product FooBar. I initially wrote it as a little hack but commercialized it when the # downloads per day exceeded my web host's quota. /ravi "There is always one more bug..." http://www.ravib.com ravib@ravib.com

[Jamie Hale]

Now we're talking. Count me in if you folks are actually going to do something about this. If y'all are just pissing in the wind, I'll write it for you. :) J