cintanotes 1.8 is out

Posted by Foolness
Oct 2, 2012 at 09:42 AM

Andrew Mckay wrote:
>This is the problem with Outlinersoftware.com
> >No sooner have I been introduced to
>the rather wonderful Notetab ( Dr Drandus ) then I get re introduced to
>Cintanotes
>When I first tried it out I was not that impressed but now that I have a
>better appreciation of tagging and simplicity this really is an excellent
>program.
> >I will also interested to see what others use it for. At the moment I cannot
>find a use for it but that will not stop me from playing around with it and enjoy it

It’s not a problem at all because the grand problem of crimping will always be associated technical skills rather than the oft sought/oft stated “all in one” or “very effective” general notetaker that most of these programs are still selling the software as.

For example, Notetab’s challenge would always be more on how it evolves into becoming a html editor/html tutorial helper than it being a notetaker. As notes evolve, it’s one of the few basic subjective philosophies an individual can take especially when usage example is lacking.

That said, my main goal for replying, is to share how I use CintaNotes.

I’m not a fan of the Evernote inspired tissue paper style at all. I not only don’t empathize with it but the tag screens induces tag hell to my eyes. Simplicity this is not but unfortunately that’s the dilemma weighing down on different users. Minimalism can sometimes be interpreted as simplicity. Hacking tags to have meta categories like projects (as seen in the screenshot) is seen as a badge of power towards the software and not a limitation.

What the model does very well though is clippings. Especially paper news clippings because it doesn’t have the web clipper feature weighing down it’s launching and the design makes it very natural to input date tags along side other tags within it without having to think through what tags at all. I don’t mean just minimal thinking, I mean close to zero thinking. (but obviously a little thought needs to be put into it)

That said, being that it is archiving news clips, it can be very tedious typing those out. But that applies to all notetakers and tagging systems when it comes to areas you can’t paste.

It’s just much more intuitive for dated physical clips (excepting those that you really need to scan) because sometimes it’s very hard to gather both the trends of the general newspaper you are reading and the sections you deem worth keeping.

The sidebar showing all the tags (especially pre-drop down arrows sidebar) makes it very quick to see how random tags are naturally flowing.

Evernote actually got some part of the concept right when it introduced those note like subscription mags in the trunk.

Toilet papers (for those who suck at it) are best used on related articles to create one massive roll paper dealing with tags. That’s actually how social bookmarks work but the problem with both bookmarks and clippings is that they are burdened by two view problems.

One is links where instead of seeing a roll of consistent notes, you see plenty of singular links.

The second is web clippings where to get a duplicate of two webpages but zoomed in on a different area, you have to do many manual adjustments.

The reason for this is that Toilet Paper style are some of the fastest at skimming but if you use them for notes, I find your notes tend to be too impassionate in dead. Plus the more important the note, the more you fear you will lose it so you end up tagging them to death.

With news clips you don’t have that pressure. March 2012 doesn’t have to be March 2012/Obama or March 2012/Obama healthcare or March 2012, Obama, Romney, healthcare, bills, etc.

You just need to pick the keywords inside the actual article to use as tags but you don’t even need to maximize every word even if you missed them cause newsclips don’t work that way and the fast-as-you-type feature is already helping you.

The final reason why news clips work best for toilet paper especially with a software as fast as CintaNotes is that the header is not the power in the newsclips.

That’s the double edge sword of the interface.

If you need to put the header, it’s too easy to put too much value in the header and the more you scroll down the more the headers take your attention and the less you pay attention to the relevance of the notes. (Most CRIMPers don’t have these problems but I do. Even a basic 2-pane outline makes me see things less than they should.)

But newspapers have a counter header that’s just as important: the date.

So by putting the headlines in the title section of CintaNotes and the date in the first line of the note box, it actually creates a parallel effect to the brain as you’re skimming the entire toilet paper section.

Especially if you are using it ONLY for newspaper clips, the brain sees the sections like this:

-Obama healthcare-

tags: healthcare, editorial, opinion, author name

-March 2012-

-Obama healthcare-

tags: healthcare, pros, good news, author name

-Sept 2012-

...instead of like the home screenshot where you see something like

Cinta
Cinta
Cinta

in between bodies of text.

That “zig zagging context” scroll skimming is very hard to replicate in any other notetakers except toilet papers and CintaNotes’ basic implementation of it allows it to have the right boot-up speed even if you haven’t kept the program open in the systray. That style of tagging too promotes the “mental pain” from seeing the number 100+ besides any tag as each tag is limited by the Month.

It would be actually comparable to the way certain blogs use dates for new visitors to view old articles but the way websites do it demand waiting for a link to load and reloading the sidebar. Sometimes even needing to expand all the tag sidebar. Design wise the difference is minimal but access and input wise, CintaNotes (esp. the pre-personal license version) is the only one that I found can help me get over the psychological barrier of being apathetic to newspaper news because of that zig zagging context effect. It’s one of those basic exercises where you know you’re not really using the program in any way other than the basic intended way but psychologically you found yourself typing articles and sections you normally wouldn’t give a second thought to and it just builds up and builds up and suddenly all the features aren’t so stressful anymore. I don’t have to use the search box. I don’t have to focus on one section of the tag sidebar and the sidebar tags are just as much toilet papers as the main notes bar. It’s just the only software that works that way for me so long as I don’t put any other notes or data in it.