System for taking and organising reading notes

Posted by WSP
Dec 5, 2011 at 03:43 PM

I keep most of my notes in either MyInfo or Evernote.

I use MyInfo for specific writing projects (books and articles) because it is capable of organizing and connecting information in all sorts of interesting ways. It also has a smooth UI and is really just a pleasure to use.

For miscellaneous information not connected with particular projects, I use Evernote. The main advantages of Evernote are that it makes it extremely easy to record data from a variety of sources (I particularly like its ability to find text in images—e.g. photographs of printed pages, usually imported from my smartphone), it is capable of handling huge amounts of material, and of course it synchronizes across devices.

This makes my choices sound sweetly reasonable, but in fact I am constantly dithering between these two pieces of software: I sometimes wish they would marry and have a child. Evernote looks like a good long-term solution, yet I am put off by its relatively primitive organizational features, and I am constantly thinking about ways (tags, note naming conventions, links, etc.) of overcoming its weaknesses. Evernote also seems unusually ugly on the screen to me, but that’s just a subjective view.