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Best learning app with integrated task management for Academics?
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Posted by satis
May 17, 2025 at 06:19 PM
Lucine wrote:
> if you suggest Evernote, why not OneNote instead? It’s free,
>unlimited and has more features than Evernote right?
I personally don’t like or use either, and OneNote excels in some areas like free availability of advanced features (OCR, ink-to-text, audio/video recording, dictation), and tight integration with Microsoft Office and OneDrive. However, its search is less powerful, and its organizational structure can be more complex for quick acces.
Evernote I think has better search (including images and PDFs), strong task management with reminders, cross-device sync, and support for text/images/audio/scan/PDF notes. Evernote’s search allows searches across notes, notebooks, and even inside attached documents (Word, PDFs) on paid plans, and its tagging and notebook system is simpler and more intuitive than OneNote’s three-level hierarchy (notebooks, sections, pages), which some users find cumbersome. Evernote supports to-do lists both within notes and on its dashboard, blending note-taking with task management. OneNote has tags but less integrated task tracking.
As for Evernote’s significantly reducing its generous free plan, it found it was too generous and that a significant cost burden to its system was due to freeloaders who could not be induced to pay. Offering 100,000 free notes and 250 free notebooks was a dumb thing to do and it’s no wonder so many people took advantage of it, weighing down the company in the process.
Considering that Evernote has long lost money, and had massive staff reductions to right itself, and then sold itself to another company, its ations seem fairly reasonable. Companies ranging from Dropbox to Mailchimp to Trello scrubbed digital barnacles off their hulls and reduced or eliminated their free plans to keep cruising… or afloat.
Posted by Cyganet
May 18, 2025 at 01:19 PM
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 :-)
Posted by Darren McDonald
May 18, 2025 at 05:10 PM
@Amontillado, I have seen you post several times about how you use Devonthink in your research work.
I am most interested in how you use it for notetaking. (I have a memory of reading how you use Devonthink for notetaking along the lines of Obsidian or other such software. I tried to search where you wrote about this in the forum, but could not find your comment. Apologies if my memory is wrong).
If you use it for notetaking can you point me to some resources in how you do this?
I have a little time to tinker with apps before another large research project commences. After working with Obsidian for some time, Capacities looks very attractive to me. I have to rely on a lot of plugins to make Obsidian work for me, but the plug-ins I need to use are causing me too many problems. Capacities seems to have what I need out of the box, with more features on the roadmap that I think will help me get better work done much easier.
I want to see if Devonthink opens up better ways to take notes, and you seem like the perfect source of guidance. :)
Amontillado wrote:
I believe this might be addressed by the Obsidian option to put
>attachments elsewhere other than in the current folder with the
>document.
>
>Devonthink remains my go-to for organizing information. I think version
>4, which I can’t yet run due to my antiquated coal-fired Mac, has a node
>map function. That’s the only Obsidian feature I wish DT V3 had, and
>it’s not a deal killer for me. The see-also pane in the Inspector does
>what I need, even though not graphically.
>
>My quirky beef with Obsidian is that I need a separate copy of each
>community plugin in each vault. I prefer many vaults/databases over a
>single huge one.
>
>Lucine wrote:
>Hi Satis,
>>
>>photes.io seems intriguing, thanks for the recommendation. I did try
>out
>>Obsidian a couple of times, uninstalling it every time. The last time
>>was almost a year ago, but it had this very annoying problem of putting
>>images in the document as sub-documents in the navigation pane, which
>>became insanely chaotic after just a few docs.
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.
Posted by Amontillado
May 19, 2025 at 02:40 AM
Darren, you do me great honor.
Devonthink support often says they don’t believe DT is a note-taking app but I don’t understand why it isn’t.
For note-taking, I imagine I use it much the way Obsidian users do.
I have a Keyboard Maestro shortcut for creating a new Markdown document, which is my favorite kind of text document. The shortcut doesn’t really do much. It prompts me for a name, creates the document, and opens it in a separate edit window. Devonthink supports Mac keyboard shortcuts, so you can add many functions that way, too.
Or, in the middle of one note add a double-bracket reference to a new note name. That’s called a wikilink in Devonthink.
When you click on it (or right click to open in a new tab), it creates the new file.
The Devonthink see-also Inspector tab is not terribly different in strategic function than Obsidian’s node map. It’s a list of files, not a graphic, although I think DT version 4 has a graphic node map. I’m stuck on V3 until I can run a newer MacOS.
Lately, though, I’ve been using Devonthink to evolve something that serves the function of an outline.
I have a couple of posts on my blog at https://thirdreef.wordpress.com about my new favorite outlining technique. I called it object outlining because for some reason I wanted a fancy name for it.
Basically, create notes of two types. A fact note covers a single isolated fact. A description of the Genii’s lamp, a character description, or a thumbnail description of a McGuffin, for example. It’s about a person, place, or thing without any story narrative.
The other note could be called a story note, a beat, or a narrative note. Here, you get to tell the story but you should reference facts rather than write them.
For instance, Jack and Jill fell down the hill. That’s fine in a narrative note but you need to direct future-you to notes about Jack, Jill, and that fateful hill.
I generally don’t do that with links, I use transclusion. That way, notes for Jack, Jill, and the hill will appear inline and will be in my face. If the hill becomes important to the story again in chapter 20, its note will be transcluded in the chapter 20 narrative note.
Better yet, if chapter 20 requires some new element to Jill’s character, I can edit Jill from chapter 20 and the updates will appear everywhere else Jill is transcluded.
Every narrative note becomes sort of a dossier on what happens at a point in the story. Facts, as they are refined, are consistent across all references to them.
I’ll confess I’m very happy with Devonthink. However, outlining via transclusion can be done just as well in Obsidian.
You can convert a wikilink to a transclusion by replacing the square brackets in the link with curly braces. In Obsidian, add a “!” character in front of the square brackets.
Devonthink will convert name-based wikilinks to UUID links. That’s a little better than linking by name because UUID’s avoid confusion if a second note is created with the same name.
There are only three Obsidian plugins I use, although that might change if I really dove into it. For what I’ve done in Obsidian so far, Tasks, Dataview, and File reorder cover the features I want. That’s about an extra megabyte per vault. Not that much.
Devonthink’s Smart Groups do what I need Dataview for. File reorder is a native feature of DT, and while DT is not a credible task manager on its own, I’ve recently discovered it’s not useless for tasks. The trick is to use it in conjunction with a task utility. Just about anything will link to DT notes through x-devonthink URLs.
But none of that is any more than how I’ve used DT for a specific use case or two. Please update this forum with how you discover the best in any note utility you favor. That’s the important stuff, and I look forward to learning from your experiences.
Darren McDonald wrote:
@Amontillado, I have seen you post several times about how you use
>Devonthink in your research work.
>I am most interested in how you use it for notetaking. (I have a memory
>of reading how you use Devonthink for notetaking along the lines of
>Obsidian or other such software. I tried to search where you wrote about
>this in the forum, but could not find your comment. Apologies if my
>memory is wrong).
>If you use it for notetaking can you point me to some resources in how
>you do this?