Ask YC: Anything better than Google notebook out there? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Anything better than Google notebook out there?

20 pointsTrevorJ48 comments

I wanted to use Google notebook to store and sort my "stream of consciousness" and notes online, but I dislike the lack of folder support. Got me thinking, what have you guys found works for you in terms of electronic catch-all note libraries?

View on HN

I have a folder on my desktop called buckets with individual plain text files called:

Blog Topic Bucket Books to Get Bucket Business Todo Bucket Daily Task Bucket Domain Bucket Idea Bucket Link Bucket Music bucket Personal Todo Bucket Quote Bucket Scrap Bucket Travel Bucket

I then add to those buckets with Quicksilver by pressing .[text here] [tab] Append to... [bucket]/name of bucket

It takes a couple of seconds to put anything I want into them, though it probably sounds more complicated than it is written out.

The list is a little confused. This site throws away single line breaks, except in

  code text, which you
  get by indenting lines by two or more
  spaces, like
  this.

Incidentally, why does this site throw away single line breaks?

To amplify a key point: I think the core of your issue is "findability". It's not hard to collect a lot of internet stuff, or even your own ideas using different software - finding it again is the difficult task.

I'm in the http://twine.com beta, and it works pretty well if want structured notes/data about your research/ideas.

Along those lines, you can also try: http://diigo.com http://clipmarks.com

I also use a personal wiki or blog with lots of tagging. Wiki's are very powerful for organically growing ideas, but I find navigation difficult and tagging with most blogs provides easier content organizations. Drupal's taxonomy can help. Flickr's concept of machine tagging is pretty useful for fast organization of thoughts.

For offline there are more options like OmniOutliner for Mac. Here's more mac software for idea management: http://members.optusnet.com.au/charles57/Creative/Software/s...

If more specific goals you have, the easier to solve the problem. But the general problem of note taking in turning it into a valuable collection is the hard part.

I also use paper. :) Old school.

Evernote is awesome. Although sadly currently only invite only while it's in beta, but you can easily apply for an invite on their site:

http://preview.evernote.com/

It has a great clipping tool so you can easily clip snippets from websites and has built in OCR capabilities so if you snip a photo/image you can filter your notes by text actually contained within the photo. It also syncs between your desktop client and web version so you are never without your notes and currently supports mac, windows and mobile windows, with an iPhone version coming soon.

Semi-justified self promotion: http://www.awesomehighlighter.com

This may be off-topic, but its awesome! I suggest you immediately take people to preview page after highlighting is done.

hooande, I love the site, but it doesn't seem to work properly in Opera (everything is fine in Firefox). Also, I tried some pages from the BBC web site, and it loses the 'uk' from the 'original webpage' link.

Oh, very nice idea!

If you are a Windows person, I find OneNote to be indispensable. screen clippings, random thoughts, notes - whatever, really - are sorted, searchable, etc. It comes with certain versions of MS Office. http://www.onenote.com/

3banana of course! =) I'm releasing it to my friends this weekend, shoot me an email at beta-feedback@3banana.com if you want to be an early tester.

What is 3banana?

3banana makes your notes useful again. With 3banana you can easily jot something down from any device and then share that note with your friends or colleagues to have a discussion. Share your notes to Facebook, Twitter, Email, Instant Message or to wherever your social graph lives.

http://3banana.com your notes are social

My goal is to make it as easy to use as a Google search.

I'll second (or third) the vote for OneNote. I find it to be indispensible for dealing with unstructured information, and perfect for imposing structure as you go. It's not a web app, but has good mobility support (easy enough to share a Notebook, or keep one on a USB stick). And, the browser integration is great-- one click saves an article, ready to be filed away.

There is also TiddlyWiki [http://www.tiddlywiki.com/]. Its a single HTML file that you can carry on your flash drive. You create tiddlers, tag them, search, the whole gambit. I use it for maintaining my work reports, and its pretty cool.

You can even go as far as customizing the tiddlers (think of them as index cards). I created one for work that automatically puts the date, and adds "dailystatus" as a tag, and has two input areas, "Tasks completed" and "Hours worked".

The file can get large, but if you feel the need to host it so its accessible from the web, there is tiddlyspot.com that lets you host these files for free. So you can have a local copy as well as one on the web, and you can synchronize between them easily.

gmail, using self-addressed emails and labels as folders.

Being able to search and "reply" to your own thoughts is really nice.

Yeah, I love google for that too, stuff tends to get lost with time though, or I forget about it.

I used to email myself notes all the time, but that gets really cumbersome.

I want something that is as easy to use as a Google search or notepad.

I'm on OSX and I use VoodooPad + email. Voodoopad is a really good program for creating "wiki-like" notes. It can also embed, links to files, rich text copied directly from safari, etc. For online viewing you can either use the built in web server or export as HTML periodically.

I use email for updates when I'm away from my laptop. It's easy for me to type things up in a rough form for processing later and I can use it almost anywhere (I took 6KB of notes during the startup school on my blackberry)

Lots of little text files, with markdown-like formatting. pyblosxom [http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/] gives me a web interface when I need one - generally when I want to lazily read through my notes on a certain topic. The files are all in an svn repo, with a copy checked out on every machine I use regularly.

I've been doing something like this for perhaps 5 years, accumulated something like 400,000 words of notes across hundreds of files, and the system's holding up well.

It's not pretty - but my data is safe, I'm not relying on a website staying alive, and if I ever move to something more sophisticated it'll just take a few scripts to convert everything. And, since I always have vim open, editing one of my text files is quicker than almost any other interface.

At one point I had the whole lot publicly-available online - I may again in the future, once I've done a sweep for other people's secrets in there.

I was incredibly pleased to find that Cosma Shalizi (who I admire immensely) has a similar system: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/

I had the same problem some time ago, so I built this to support my needs: http://scribbl.net/

That's funny cos I did exactly the same thing!

I tried using Google Notebook for a while but I just kept fighting the rich text editor. I used Backpack for a while to keep Writeboards but that quickly got tedious.

A quick 2-day stint produced a RoR application which supports Textile, tags for organisation and some ajax to make it simple. It does what I want but I'm not sure I'm ready to open it up to a bunch of "hackers" :-)

I worked on it for a bit longer than 2 days and used a fair amount of time to test and escape user input and to create a set of test data that might break the app.

Textile is nice; I should add support for that too, if I ever have time.

Hey nice job with that by the way :-)

I am using keynote (http://keynote.prv.pl), I keep my file (single file) in a small flash disk and put it in my wallet, so I do not have to worry about sync the file between my home desktop, laptop, and office desktop. Keynote allow you to have tabs and folders within tab.

Now that's pretty cool and unique! I like that it isn't web-based but you can still access from anyplace.

Windows only...

I use a plain text file.

Ditto. I have a giant "ideas.txt" with unfinished 1 liners, and separate files (supersecretproject.txt) with more details.

"supersecretproject.txt" - can't be all that secret ;)

Same here. notes.txt and ideas.txt. These files travel with me whereever I go :) And Gmail draft mails with some quick thoughts, that I later merge with the text files. It works!

I'm currently experimenting with PersonalBrain (http://personalbrain.com/) -- it's basically a "mindmapping" tool on steroids. Works on: Linux, OS X, Solaris, and MS Windows. So far, it's definitely better than all of the other mindmapping tools.

Are you looking to store web pages along with your annotations, or just your personal notes? Also, does it necessarily have to be stored online? Firefox's ScrapBook extension and OneNote are two excellent tools I have used.

Online is pretty vital for me. I'll have to check out scrapbook though, I like firefox mucho.

Moving from gmail to my own email hosting, I discovered that horde had really nice notes/calendar/etc. modules (horde-webmail has them integrated).

The only problem is that it is somewhat of a pain to set up, but if you want a complete self-hosted solution, it's great.

I also discovered recently that the next version (rc now) has syncml support so you can sync with your mobile phone.

Try Luminotes. It's a WYSIWYG personal wiki with a focus on simplicity and ridiculously quick linking. It doesn't have folder support per se, but it does have an autogenerated "note tree" and support for distinct wiki notebooks. I apologize in advance for the lack of Safari support.

Check it out: http://luminotes.com/

Use the extension Foxnotes while online. You get six separate notes, all of them .txt files. When offline use your text editor to access any of the six. Use the editor's MRU list for instant access, or a shortcut(s). It's a simple, superfast online\offline setup. If you're not using PsPad you don't know what a top class free text editor is.

I'm using xPad on the Mac and it does well for me. I do miss OneNote on Windows (about the only thing I miss).

If you have mobile phone with full keyboard, it not a bad idea to keep your notes there. You have your phone with you all the time, whenever you come up with something to write about, you don't even need a computer.

I use Google Docs. It works well for the most part, but the long load time is mildly irritating, and I don't need most of its features. I've been thinking of writing something like this from scratch for fun.

Lots of very fantastic information and suggestions here! Than you everyone who contributed. I'm really liking evernote at the moment. Great solution!

If you browse with Opera then it has a nice 'copy to note' feature which is handy for clipping bits of the web and adding your comments etc.

I find mind maps to be much more useful than a list of notes. You can always add notes to the map and attach/link to documents.

I didn't find GN or similar products useful. I just save the whole URL on del.icio.us, using the tags I can remember later.

I'm enough of a fan of TreePad that I paid for a license a few years ago.

Evernote is pretty good.

lol. me and my friends are working on something similar to this. beta should be available before august :P

try also tomboy (part of gnome)

I really like Tomboy. It's super simple and has a lot of great features.

http://sharedcopy.com

evernote is awesome

Reply on news.ycombinator.com