Friday, November 19, 2004 - Fri, 19 Nov 2004

I have been constantly looking for good research organizing software, partly as a model for certain aspects of Behold, but also for the purpose of organizing all my programming techniques, code snippets, and info about Delphi sites and Delphi components available on the web. Over the last few years I have looked at many programs. There is Note Center, TreePad, MyInfo, WinOrganizer, WhizFolders and KeyNote, which are primarily dual or tri-pane note organizers of similar standard styles each with their own unique features. Microsoft’s OneNote also falls into that category. Then there are specialty research organizers such as EndNote, Biblioscape, Cogitum Co-Citer, Internet Research Scout and Onfolio. And then there are those that are somewhat different and take some getting used to such as: InfoHandler, KnowledgeWorkshop and Brainstorm

But this week Langa List pointed out a new one called EverNote that is currently in Beta Test and to me has great potential. EverNote’s two Killer features for me are:

1. The notes within a category are all strung together in one window, as opposed to the other programs which show one note per window or a tabbed interface for the notes. Notes can then be strung together in different ways for different categories. Example: I will take notes from a Delphi book and put them all together with the category being that book. I’ll be able to see all the notes I took for that book together organized in one window. I can then assign other categories to each note so that I can then view together all the notes for a particular category (e.g. working with calendars) from all my books or internet sites or whatever.

2. It has very good rendering of webpages after they are pasted into a note. Most note programs cannot do a good job on this, but I know my initial impressions of how EverNote does this were quite positive. Its webpaste isn’t perfect, but its close.

There are numerous other features in EverNote that I won’t mention here. The one downside is that the developers have developed it for Windows 2000 and above, meaning that (at least currently) it won’t run on Windows 98. For me that’s too bad. I am developing Behold on a Windows 98 machine because I want to make sure it will run in the lowest common denominator. In the meantime, I can sneak onto my daughter’s Windows XP machine every so often to test EverNote. On their forum, the developer mentioned that a version for Win98/ME is being re-evaluated due to the comments on their forum, and could appear in the first quarter of 2005. But for now, I really can’t use it for the notetaking I want to.