Simplify, simplify

Posted by Manfred
Oct 25, 2007 at 02:29 PM

Cassius wrote: “in fact no software is essential for writing good stuff. Shakespeare did it without…”

How true, but ... software (or paper, or a notebook, or whatever) can amplify whatever ability someone may or may not have. Shakespeare may not have had software, but he had in all probability a commonplace book (or a much better memory than anyone I am acquainted with). A note-taking application is, at least as far as I am concerned, a form of external memory very much like any system that allows you to store information on paper (like a notebook or card file). It’s just more capable than a mere paper-based system.

“Simplicity” is not so simple a notion. We might think that paper, notebook, and pen or pencil or “simple,” for instance, but they are not. They constitute a highly complex system that presupposes all kinds of manufacturing capabilities and social developments. (If you want to see how complex simple things we rely on every day, you may want to read Petroski, Henri (1999) The Pencil. A History of Design and Circumstance. New York: Alfred Knopf, for instance.

The same seems to be true of software, where, to be sure, we are just at the beginning of the process that with paper took hundreds of years to arrive at “simplicity.”

Furthermore, whether a piece of software is “simple,” depends on what you want to do with it. Simplicity in an application for ordering your thoughts on a particular topic without any view to long-term storage is different from the kind of simplicity needed by an application meant to hold the notes for the next twenty years or more.

Thirdly, simplicity also has to do with how and whether you can get the information into an application, and - more importantly - how you get it out again. Text still seems to be the best to me (and therefore HTML and some other markup that is basically text appeals to me.)

Stephen Zeoli’s list is a good starting point for the discussion for a discussion about simplicity in note-taking or outlining applications.

In any case, I also agree that everyone has to make her/his own choice, and in starting a thread on ConnectedText, I only wanted to make people aware of an alternative that they MIGHT find useful. Far be it from me to say that there is only one way towards salvation in note-taking (or that anyone contributing to this forum needs salvation).
Manfred