Outliner/PIM roll call: Fall 2012

Posted by WSP
Sep 25, 2012 at 08:18 PM

My software arsenal hasn’t changed much in the last year.

MyInfo is my workhorse, and I use it every day for note-taking (mainly for books I am writing). It is solid, well thought out, and regularly updated, and it has an exceptionally attractive UI.

Evernote is for me sort of the junk drawer in the spare bedroom. I throw everything into it that doesn’t need a high level of organization. As I explained on another thread, last summer I briefly tried to put all my notes for a big research project into it, but I grew disillusioned when I ran into a serious syncing problem. To be fair to EN, the temporary syncing collapse was a result of a slow Internet service in a remote village, and the problem resolved itself as soon as I returned to a city; but the experience just reinforced my wariness about heavy dependence on Evernote. I’ve gone back to my original view that MyInfo is more suitable and more reliable for highly structured information.

I use Notetab for address lists, non-financial passwords, etc.—anything that I want to pop up quickly on the screen. I also do some occasional writing in it.

For my calendar, I use Pocket Informant (which syncs with Google Calendar).

I still have more old files than I like to think about in ProCite, Treepad, My Notes Keeper, etc. None of that material is active, but I still occasionally go into one of those programs to fish out some information that I need.

Like others on this forum, I continue to fantasize about the perfect program. To my mind, it would mostly resemble MyInfo, but it would add just a few features from Evernote: OCR of images, indexing of attached PDF files, and synchronization with the iPad.