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43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Note Taking Tips?

I'm in my first year of university and trying desperately to come up with the best way to take notes on my mac...

I've been looking into notae and yojimbo (I like the tagging features alot, but dislike that I can't put in pictures and such) but have heard good things about journler and devonthink.

The problem with Notae (which I used today) is everything is in SQL databases which is going to make it difficult. Plus most of these apps REQUIRE you to make a new database file rather than a bunch of text files which it will database and collect, etc. I've also heard wiki's are a great way to take notes but have no clue how to do so on my mac.

So please, if you have any suggestions I'd love to hear them. I'm sure there are many like me who also would love to know any suggestions for great apps for us Univeristy kids.

TommyW's picture

Information managers/note taking/outliners....

I have all of them... Pretty well, I seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time working on 'what the heck do I need here?'

First I didn't see this referenced above, there's a guy called Ted Goranson who's done a lot of work on this subject area. He has a great series of articles reviewing and comparing each of the applications over on APTM. Find the first and work your way through them, you'll learn a lot...

http://www.atpm.com/search?q=outliner

Second. This is a hot topic in our house. My kid's just started university and I'm setting him up with a couple of things.

1. A big ole bucket to catch stuff in.

Yojimbo, KIT, EagleFiler, Journler are all typical.

They all work, they're all good. I like Journlers on the fly tagging while you import a file or text, that permits automatic inclusion in a smart folder. The others are simpler (and cost more) but are nice and simple, if you follow...

2. A good coursework organiser.

For me Notebook is the standout here. I love the interface, a table of contents, tabbed dividers, it really helps you organise, it does feel like it's been designed for students...

But the killer feature for me is multiple clipping pages per document combined with multiple documents... This alone makes gathering online research a breeze.

The clipping pages are system wide available via a contextual menu... a simple right click on anything and you can put it where you want. Shove that article into this section of that course notebook, shove this web clip into that one. Not to mention that it remembers where you got each clip from, so you can click back to the original source. A pleasure to use.

And yep, I'd take my notes right here. Cornell pages... audio recording...and text input syncing with the audio recording. Great stuff.

3. A brainstorming device you can use to communicate with.

OmniOutlinerPro is the best outliner, qua outliner, out there. Yes, you can use Notebook and Journler to outline. but for clean clear charts, outlines, presentable documents you can format and configure, OOP is unbeatable.

 
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