Abandoned Software that Works - TakeNote

Posted by DaXiong
Sep 18, 2009 at 06:32 PM

I’ve seen a lot of posts recently concerning older software that simply worked (GV, ECCO, etc). Here’s my favorite, for all the programmers out there to copy.

TakeNote

Using the note card paradigm, you entered information. Sources were an additional notecard. The program is powerful because you link notecards together to make an outline, and you link source cards to note cards for referencing. It automatically generated footnotes/bibliographies (in most common formats). Finally, it included a field called Category, which basically just a free tag.

Might not be clear from the above description, but it worked the way research and writing works. Take some notes, make it easy to include/link the source, then drag around cards until the structure/outline you want is achieved. Only thing like it I’ve seen recently is Scrivener, and I (still!) don’t have a Mac. Please don’t say ndxCards or SuperNoteCards, for all its faults, TakeNote was a more polished program, and more powerful; perhaps the power of ndxCards with the glitter of SuperNoteCards.

Anyways, TakeNote got me through a grad degree, including thesis, and I still use it (just wish the company was still in business, one bug still gets me).