Year end Outliner/PIM review/roll call

Posted by shatteredmindofbob
Jan 2, 2016 at 06:02 AM

I wasn’t working as much as I would have liked over the past year, but I guess this gave me some extra free time to experiment some more leading me to actually putting in the effort to learn Emacs/Org-Mode.

After getting past the initial issue of understanding the horribly outdated keyboard shortcuts, I’ve ended up discovering what might be the best single-pane outliner available for Windows. At least, I’ve figured out how to make it do everything I want an outliner to do and am likely only using 1/10 of what it *can* do.

For notes and “knowledge management” on my PC, I played with a lot of
different apps but ended up coming back around to an old favourite:
Resophnotes.

It hasn’t seen an update since 2013, the interface is well, Java-y and the features are kinda limited but when it comes down to it, it does what I need it to do: allow me to take, store and retrieve notes efficiently.

The search is fast and everything is stored in plain text, making it trivial to use my notes elsewhere. Also, everything can be done from the keyboard.

More and more I’ve found myself wanting to stick to plain text for as much as possible, so after playing with many web-based todo list apps, I think I’ve settled on using Todo.txt through Todotxt.net, though the format isn’t quite as “outline-y” as I would like. I would use Taskpaper but for some reason, in 2016, there’s yet to be an Android client created.

Also, I’m beginning to doubt whether or not TodoPaper 2 (the Windows equivalent) is ever going to be released. (The developer has been saying it’s almost finished for years now.)

Using Todo.txt, however, lets me use Simpletask on my Android phone.

Oh and I’ve been playing with a “minimalist word processor” called WordGrinder. It’s a throw-back to WordStar and WordPerfect 5.1. It doesn’t have any mouse support by design. Though, at this point, I have no idea if it’s actually any good or if I’m just enjoying the novelty factor.

I’ve still got Breevy running for text expansion, synced to TextExpander on my iPad.

For a journal, I’m still using an open source app called Journaley that reads/writes to the Day One format (which I’ve got on my iPad.)

Speaking of open source, I’ve also been using a launcher called Wox since it seems that good old Launchy has been been abandoned. Still not sure if I like it or not though. Right now, it seems mostly useful as a pop-up calculator. Keeping an eye on it to see if it goes anywhere more useful.

For bookmarks, Pinboard is still going strong and still the only web app I’ve been willing to commit to.

Well, there’s also Dropbox, which I’m becoming increasingly concerned about relying on but unfortunately, it’s the online storage app that syncs with *everything*.

On mobile, I’ve been using a beautiful text editor on Android called Monospace Writer.

Still looking for something for taking quick notes along the lines of Drafts on iOS but sadly everything I’ve tried comes up short. Squarespace Notes is the closest I’ve found but it’s
unfortunately a little *too* limited.

Oh, and after getting into the whole Emacs thing, found a nice app for working with Org-Mode files called Orgzly, though for some reason, it requires that you sync manually which is a little annoying, but otherwise pretty nice. It also doesn’t seem all that great for managing Todo lists, which would be a problem if I were using Org-Mode for that purpose.

Over on iOS I am, sadly, starts to hit the limits of my iPad 2. iOS 9 isn’t horribly slow on it, unless I try using third-party keyboards which is unfortunate, since that was my most anticipated new iOS feature.

Day One is still pretty great. I’ve also got a blatant rip-off of Drafts called Quick Drafts which does pretty much the same thing without being $10.

The only other iOS app I’ve felt was notable was Matcha, a simple but pleasant text editor that I’m hoping will fill the void left by Daedalus Touch being abandoned in favour of the full-on Ulysess for iOS.

As for the next year, I’m mostly looking forward to the newest version of WriteMonkey, which looks awesome but is apparently still a few months away.

Also, experimenting with new things as I try to get back into writing: experimenting with version control for documents (though, the comparison has been made before - it feels little like firing an ICBM at a mosquito.) and various static web site generators over full-fledged CMS systems for web content (as well as toying with HTML export in Org-Mode such things.)