Year end Outliner/PIM review/roll call

Posted by WSP
Jan 2, 2016 at 03:13 PM

Okay, I will rise to the challenge on this cold January morning and try to record what’s happening in my software world.

OneNote continues to be my main note-taking program. I use it on and off throughout most of the day, and I’m also gradually shifting material into it that I once stored in other varieties of software. Nevertheless, I have some misgivings about it. I worry, for example, about storing so much of my information in a proprietary format that I don’t fully understand. (I’m not sure that I even grasp completely how OneDrive functions, as opposed, say, to a more straightforward backup system like Dropbox.) And the one conspicuously lacking feature, from my point of view, is reliable tagging. I’ve devised a makeshift system of tagging using peculiar-looking phrases (“notLC” within brackets at the end of a note, for example, means “not in Library of Congress”), but it is tedious to be forced to invent one’s own tagging tools. Yes, I am aware that OneNote does offer something described as tagging, but I find it cutesy and kindergarten-level.

I haven’t yet completely abandoned Evernote, but I am moving material out of it whenever I can. I find its interface clunky and the syncing occasionally unreliable.

Though I continue to have a love-affair with MyInfo, its developer, Petko Georgiev, moves at a maddeningly slow pace. In a sense, I admire his thoroughness and caution: you’re never likely to encounter any nasty surprises with MyInfo, but on the other hand you have to develop extraordinary patience waiting for new releases. The long-promised version 7 is supposed to be based on a complete rewriting of the code. I’m hedging my bets by still keeping a couple of major collections of notes in MyInfo.

For writing drafts I use MyInfo (it’s surprisingly good at that), Writemonkey (which I learned about on this forum), and (occasionally) NoteTab.

In the last year or two I’ve found myself storing information more and more frequently in PDF format; my main tool there is PDF-Xchange Editor, though I also depend heavily on an app called TurboScan on my iPhone for making quick-and-dirty PDFs when I am reading in a library. (If the passage I want to record is shorter than a couple of pages, I just photograph it directly into OneNote on my phone.)

Of course my taskbar is overflowing with other software — I’m using InDesign and Photoshop very heavily at the moment, for example — but I suppose the list above represents the programs most likely to be of interest to readers of this forum.