Nota Bene

Some further comments about notetaking, and tools for the furtherance thereof.

I found an excellent freeware product called AM-Notebook that is very easy to use. Each note gets a title, and the product displays all notes in sequence. Not bad. A cost version has expanded functionality.

I tried it and thought Yeah, this is cool, but wouldn't it be nice if... the tool let me both give the notes a title, or not, AND categorize them? For example, say that I read an article about the costs of housebuilding in the New York Times, and I decide to write a note about it. The product could let me title the note, if I want, and then file it under Houses, Economics, and Newspaper Articles (maybe even Newspaper Articles/New York Times). Later, when I'm scratching my head, wondering what note I wrote about houses, I can call up all the notes under Houses or Costs, or I can just search the notes files, asking for any notes with the words House (and variants) and Costs (and synonyms) written, oh, in the last 72 hours. (Sort of a combination of full-text search, heuristic search, and keyword serch).

And while I'm in Dream Mode Alpha, the product should let me 'stack' the notes like a pile of Post it notes, moving them around on the screen so that I can juggle thoughts together visually. Color-codeable, of course. With the ability to scroll through all of the notes in one stack, tagging some as you go. Linkable to email and the web, and with an alarm function to pop up the note at a given date and time. And perhaps port-able to MySQL or MsAccess.... Would I pay for that? You betcha I would. (And then, after a bit of use, I'd think Yeah, this is cool, but, wouldn't it be nice if.... not to mention where did all this dammed feature bloat come from?)

The killer, of course, is that such a tool might well be out there now. Try and find it.

I recalled reading about software that let you do 'sticky notes' on your screen (one was cool; it could be invoked if the screensaver was on, so that people could leave you messages on your unattended PC). Did a quick search, found about ten right away....but none were quite slick enough.

A few days ago I wrote about an article I'd read about improved tools for note-taking. One that I thought was particularly slick was Net Snippets. It can be found here. While I was trying to remember where I'd seen that, I did a search, using the wrong term -- I remembered it as Web Snippets. Turns out thats a product too, as seen here.

And finally, a comment on the same subject from a nicely done site titled Law4PDA.