System for taking and organising reading notes

Posted by Lucas
Dec 6, 2011 at 04:31 PM

@Stephen, thanks very much for your thoughts:

>@Lucas - I’m curious about your set up. Since you use Tinderbox, you have to be using a
>Mac. Do you use OneNote with VMWare Fusion or Parallels, or do you use different
>machines?

I use a MacBook Pro running Parallels. Parallels works brilliantly, but the only issue is that it needs a whole bunch of RAM. I think that’s fair enough given all the work that it does, but I find myself wishing I had more than 4 GB RAM in my machine.

On the other hand, my brother uses two machines (one Windows, one Mac) but just one mouse and keyboard via the free Synergy software. (synergy-foss.org)

> Also, have you taken a look at Curio? It can do a lot of what OneNote can, and
>some things OneNote can’t or doesn’t do as well. Specifically, diagramming is more
>powerful in Curio. The table feature is better and you can create “index cards.” The
>main thing that Curio can’t do that OneNote can is OCR text from scans or photos.
>However, Curio does work very well with Evernote—you can embed an Evernote note
>right in Curio—so there must be a way to leverage Evernote’s OCR capability.

Great point—- I like Curio (still haven’t bought it), but I had forgotten about the Evernote possibilities. The problem is that I’m a stickler for metadata. OneNote barely cuts it in this regard, but at least it records a specific time stamp for every line of text, so that if I go back and edit some fieldnotes, I can keep track of when I wrote what. And the tagging features of OneNote provide further metadata possibilities—- nothing like Tinderbox or InfoQube, but at least some basics. Whereas Curio seems to be too limited in this regard. (The same goes for the otherwise remarkably capable GrowlyNotes.)

(Interesting that you’re using DevonThink and Bookends. They’re both high on my list for further trying out. It seems that getting one’s data from Zotero to Bookends is a bit of a process, but should be possible either via the free Mendeley and/or the free trial of Sente.)