Best learning app with integrated task management for Academics?

Posted by Lucine
May 18, 2025 at 05:50 PM

Cyganet wrote:
What is the critical feature that you need? Is it the PDF annotation?
>Because notetaking, images, tasks, reminders, powerful search, outlines,
>and exports of notes are available in The Journal, same app I
>recommended last time :-)

Outlines and pdf quick-jump are the most critical, other than that, it’d be nice to have side by side views of different docs (which TheJournal has too, you’re right that’s a good one), the doc/information unit to hold formatted text and images including embedded videos would be great. I currently use OneNote whenever I have to take notes under the video while watching a video since in logseq you have (had) to write the iframe code to embed videos, and in OneNote you just paste the link and it auto-embeds the video. Then readjusting the video size is also trivial in OneNote while the iFrame embed in Logseq was static in size.

Other features: the ability to split writing and learning in different docs (any app does that) but also combine/merge any amount of them into a single doc once you’re done processing the topic and want to keep the essence but discard the rest. I think Scrivener has a merge function, but it’s not really useful for interacting with data from web or pdfs.

Right now my study notes are messy and sort of everywhere between Logseq, Scrivener, Onenote, Remnote, Dynalist, etc. Some PDFs are also in Zotero but there they’re isolated from the rest of the notes.

Maybe it’s just a case of software overload and any of the above can be made to work well enough if enough effort is invested in it. It’s just difficult to do so when there are so many options out there.

Good to know TheJournal has tasks and reminders and outlines, maybe that one is the most useful other than for PDFs and webpages after all. It also has topics which is pretty good.

P.S. apparently the more recent versions of RightNote let you navigate by tags as well, aside from by folders.