Time to ressurect this thread. Found out yesterday that there has been a working Windows version of Tomboy for a couple months now. As far i can see, it only has a tiny bug : if you click on systray icon and then do nothing, the menu doesn’t fade out and stays up till you click on a option.
Installing instructions - http://live.gnome.org/Tomboy/Installing/Windows
Couple of threads mentioning OneNote in here, but this seems to be the more appropriate title for me.
I happened across a link of “Great Windows 8 Apps” yesterday and saw mention of OneNote. I’ve heard of OneNote before, but always dismissed it as something for people doing research. The description of the app made me look deeper and play around a bit with the Office 2010 version. I thought right away this was the answer to my prayers for a note-taking application that can handle all the different things I do in my old spiral notebook 1.0. I’d read about Courier (which would have been perfect for me) and then about Tapose (which I had to dismiss because of being iOS only and having a lot of v1.0 growing pains). What I wanted was something that let me replicate my current note taking method (again, pencil and notebook) and move it into a digital format that could be better organized.
So when I saw that OneNote basically offered the same things, I started looking for a version for tablets. There is an android app version, and also a Windows 8 RT version, but if I’m reading correctly, neither of them allow you to hand write notes or draw, only type. Neither appears to do voice/video recording like the full version as well. I assume I could use something like a Surface Pro and run OneNote in desktop mode, but the battery life isn’t good enough for me (not to mention the cost).
What I’d ideally be able to do is have my digital notebooks sync between my desktop and a tablet (something relatively inexpensive with good battery life), and do typed notes, clippings, searches, etc. on the desktop, while doing hand written notes and voice stuff on the tablet.
Anyone have a solution or work like this?
I’ve also looked into Evernote, which has great app support, but if I understand correctly you can’t draw in it either, and you can’t move bits and pieces around on a page like you can in OneNote.
One other thing that might make OneNote work for me, is there such a thing as a wireless pen that would allow me to draw or write in OneNote on my desktop system, without being something like a Wacom? Sort of like a mouse, but in pen form to make handwriting and sketching more natural? I’ve seen a few in Google, but I’m hoping for a personal recommendation or two.
I love OneNote and use it all the time. I really wish MS would invest the time to make the mobile versions as great but they generally suck. I would pay $10 maybe $15 for a tablet onenote that had all the functionality on a tablet.
The closest I’ve come is notability on the iPad which is like $2 right now. It works great with typing and drawing, lets you record audio and syncs it with your notes as you type, and can export out to a variety of formats and cloud services. The way I use it is take notes and recordings during meetings and then copy everything over to onenote afterwards which isn’t ideal.
I love taking notes with my Livescribe Smartpen. I’ve got the older Echo model, but the new wi-fi version would be even better. The software it comes with is OK, but it does synchronize perfectly with Evernote. I’d say the combination of a Livescribe smartpen and Evernote is the ideal solution for many.
I’ve also looked into Evernote, which has great app support, but if I understand correctly you can’t draw in it either, and you can’t move bits and pieces around on a page like you can in OneNote.
Evernote itself doesn’t have drawing, but there’s another app by the same company which hooks into it (Penultimate). I think it’s iPad only, though. You might want to try out Awesome Note, which has drawing and clipping and such.
I love OneNote and use it all the time. I really wish MS would invest the time to make the mobile versions as great but they generally suck.
I’m not so much surprised that the Android version isn’t that great, but I would think they would invest the time to make the Windows 8 app version full-featured. Maybe it’s just too early in the Windows 8 lifecycle to expect that yet.
I love taking notes with my Livescribe Smartpen. I’ve got the older Echo model, but the new wi-fi version would be even better. The software it comes with is OK, but it does synchronize perfectly with Evernote. I’d say the combination of a Livescribe smartpen and Evernote is the ideal solution for many.
I took a look at the Livescribe Smartpen and it appears to be in the class of pens where you actually write on a page and it transfers over. That’s not really quite what I’m looking for, but it does appear to sync with OneNote, so it is an option.
You might want to try out Awesome Note, which has drawing and clipping and such.
Looks like Awesome Note is iOS only for now as well, although they’re supposedly working on an Android version.
On Android, the latest version of S Memo can do some pretty impressive stuff. It’s only available for Samsung Notes, either the 10" tablet or the 5" phone. Both come with their own stylus.
I took a look at the Livescribe Smartpen and it appears to be in the class of pens where you actually write on a page and it transfers over.
It is. You have to write on special paper as well. It’s great at what it does (namely syncing audio and notes), but I’m not sure it’s what you’re looking for. Especially given the cost.
Arise!
Ahem. This seemed to be a perfectly suitable thread to necro, rather than creating a new one. I want to pick the brains of any in the Qt3 crowd who do academic-style research. Specifically, research along the lines of reading a billion articles and books, often in PDF format, and taking notes that will eventually become footnotes or other citations. Back in the days of yore, I did this on index cards. Create a card with the bibliographic info for a source, then a bunch of child cards, each with a page number and the relevant info (quotation, data, whatever) that would be cited. This worked, though it was of course somewhat awkward at times. It was also really hard for me because my handwriting is terrible, and then, long before I had carpal tunnel surgery, writing a lot made my hands cramp.
Now, I use Zotero to store the bibliographic stuff these days, and of course it is great for spitting out bibliographies. And it can insert citations in whatever format into a Word document quite well. My challenge is the process of getting from “reading the text” through “extracting the note” to “storing thee note in a retrievable format” to “accessing and citing the note” in a way is less annoying and flow-stopping than the traditional take notes by hand (or keyboard) while reading. In particular, I want to use my existing Surface 4 Pro as a tablet (or, if it takes that, I’d get an iPad if necessary) to read PDFs and easily use the pen to jot down quick observations as notes, and to easily target blocks of text to quote, and have those notes or quotations saved into something like Zotero or another app without me having to retype stuff, re-enter bibliographic info, or jump through too many hoops.
What I would love would be the following scenario: I open a PDF of an article or chapter on my machine. A would highlight something that I wanted to note, using the pen, and easily save that chunk of text wither with the article/chapter’s bibliographic info or into something like Zotero tagged with that info, without juggling several apps and going back and forth. I want to maximize throughput really, as when I read I often find myself stopping to take notes and then losing my train of thought or otherwise getting bogged down. I want a way to turn my tablet into something that makes it easier for me not to just read stuff (that is easy) but to extract the notes I need, faster and more seamlessly than if I stopped every minute or two to laboriously copy and paste stuff into Zotero or whatever. Which I could certainly do, and may end up doing, because it may be the simplest way.
Tons of apps out there for storing notes, etc. but it’s the generation of these virtual notecards that is bedeviling me.
Ideas?
EDIT: I found this at the Zotero site; seems they are about to roll out PDF viewer/note capability that may well be what I want.
It’s been awhile since I was big into this when I was working on my thesis, but at the time I used Papers, which I believe can do a lot of what you’re asking on the marking up PDFs and extracting is those annotations when you’re actually writing. It had a free trial so you can check it and find out!
Thanks! It’s been a while since my grad school days, too, but I have some projects I want to work on. It has been really good to be at a teaching institution, because I like the classroom, but I sort of miss research and writing. I’ve done some stuff here and there but a 4/4 load doesn’t leave much time.
If you are still at a university, most have free Endnote licenses. I can look in a bit, but I think you can add notes to the citation (along with the PDF, etc.).
Edit: According to the Endnote website “Research Better
Use tools that find PDFs for you throughout your search process. Then, easily read, review, annotate and search PDFs in your library.”
Not my library, but this…
I spent a long time looking for the same thing as you. Eventually I settled on a combination of Zotero, Zotfile, and a separate pdf annotator. I still need to alt-tab between Zotero and the pdf app, but Zotfile takes care of scanning pdfs for highlights and importing them into Zotero. It also has more options for renaming pdfs than vanilla Zotero.
That said, the new internal pdf reader sure looks interesting, I’ll have to check it out!
Thanks for all the advice. I think what @magnet says is true–right now there is no one-stop shopping here, more like a couple three apps to juggle. I’ve used Endnote in the past, though I find Zotero to be pretty much as useful and it’s been what I’ve used for a while now. Annotating PDFs is easy. It’s taking your notes and converting them into the equivalent of notecards, each of which then becomes a specific bit of info you use and cite. The swapping between apps seems to be a necessary step at this point still.
There is a one-stop solution that I tried a few years ago: Qiqqa. At the time, I decided against it because of the difficulty in migrating the database out combined with the uncertainty of long-term support. The monetization model was also annoying.
I just checked in on them and sure enough they ended official support. But they also moved the code to open source, so maybe it’s worth another look:
I am assuming that Endnote sticky notes is not what you are looking for?
Edit: Never mind - appears you can’t export these as you describe.
I’m not sure if it can meet your needs, but take a look at roamresearch.com . It’s helped kick off a renaissance of knowledge processing tools and has become popular with academic researchers. Other options include logseq and remnote. Roam is very extensible and there is a rich ecosystem of integrations including various pdf tools and zotero. It’s become my primary note taking tool at work, but my needs are very different from yours. Oh, it’s also not cheap - some of the others are though they’re playing catch-up on the integration/extensibility front.
Again, thank you to all who have offered suggestions! I get a fair number of apps through the college, if I want them, and can use professional development money for those we don’t have in our stable, so I’m not adverse to paying for software if necessary.