7 Apps for Online Note-Taking
May 28th, 2007 (12:00pm) Mike Gunderloy 88 CommentsTweet This (1)
If you’re like most of us, you deal with piles of unstructured information every day: phone numbers, ideas for later consideration, snippets of information from the web, recipes, phone messages…the list is endless. For the web worker, moving this information into an online notebook can be an attractive proposition. Rather than tie yourself to one computer, or even one operating system, you can get at your notes from anywhere that has a web browser handy. Not surprisingly, there are a fair number of choices in this arena these days.
For this roundup, I stuck to online applications that let you save freeform notes in some sort of organized fashion for later use. I skipped over others that are primarily designed as tools to annotate web pages, such as noteClip, and bookmark managers like del.icio.us, BlueDot, and Chipmark.
Google Notebook provides a relatively simple interface for storing snippets of text. You can have as many notebooks as you like; notebooks have sections; sections have notes. You can rearrange notes and comment on them, open up notebooks for editing by collaborators, and publish them on the web. There’s a FireFox extension that lets you clip text from a web page and store it in one of your notebooks as well. The best thing about Google Notebook is its integration with the rest of Google: you sign in with your Google account, and can export an entire notebook to Google Docs. But all in all, this is a pretty basic offering backed up by a big name.
mynoteIT is aimed at students. It requires you to organize your notes by classes (though you can name your classes anything you like, so there’s no reason that you couldn’t use GTD context names instead of course names), and entering a note is a relatively cumbersome process involving a rich text editor and more mouse clicks than most of the competition. mynoteIT includes a variety of other tools including a calendar for tracking assignments and group discussion functionality, but it’s probably too heavyweight if you just want some place to quickly jot notes.
Notefish, like many another Web 2.0 application, is still in beta. It lets you maintain a series of note pages, each of which can have many sections, each of which can have many color-coded notes. You can drag and drop notes around in 2D to rearrange them, edit them, and change their background color. There’s a browser extension to clip text and images from any page you’re viewing and stuff them in one of your Notefish pages. Notefish also lets you tag pages for easy searching. It’s simple to use and a bit more flexible than Google Notebook.
Notezz! is about as simple as you can possibly get in this space. You pick a username and password, and you get to maintain a list of notes. Each note has a title and text. You can view a list of titles, and you can add, edit, and delete notes. There are no browser extensions, fancy hierarchies, graphics, or any other frills here, just simple management for whatever you want to jot down and a single username and password to remember.
Stikkit is perfect for the developer who wants to tie their notes to other applications. Though you can treat it just as an attractive way to store yellow sticky notes online, there’s a whole sea of complexity lurking beneath that friendly surface. Stikkit understands dates and reminders and tagging and bookmarks and e-mail and sharing; it actually looks at the text of your notes and tries to act intelligently on them. There’s a whole API you can interact with as well. While the learning curve for Stikkit can be steep, if you’re the sort of user who digs applications like QuickSilver it’s worth a look.
Yahoo! Notepad is on the simple side. You get a single note-taking area, which you can organize one level deep with folders. Inside of folders you store notes, which are just plain text entered through an old-fashioned web form. On the plus side, this application should run on just about any browser anywhere; on the minus side, you won’t find any advanced features, not even browser extensions or tagging.
Zoho Notebook is the most visually complex and impressive of the bunch. If you’re familiar with Microsoft OneNote, you’ve seen the basic Zoho Notebook interface: you can have multiple notebooks, each with pages, each with sections, each with notes that you can drag and position on a 2D canvas. Pages can be entire web pages or Zoho’s own online spreadsheets or documents as well as notebook pages. If you’re working on a notebook page, you can add text or HTML or RSS feeds or audio or video clips or images, among other things. You get versioning and sharing and commenting and publishing as well as a Firefox extension that can clip text and images from any page and shoot it over to an open notebook. The service has just left beta, and I’ve seen some reports of pages not being properly saved (though I’ve not experienced any trouble in my own limited testing). For building up a rich notebook of varied content, Zoho Notebook is currently to one to beat.
Overall, which direction you go depends on how highly you weight various factors. My own recommendations: Google Notebook for dependability, Stikkit for integration, Zoho Notebook for flexibility, or Notezz! for simplicity.
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I have had a great experience using Google notebook. It was great for noting all the listings I was finding for my recent apartment search.
Blog – http://www.onwebstartups.com
Nice List! I use Google and Zoho Notebooks and I think I might give Stikkit a try.
I recently discovered , which, although it isn’t strictly a notetaking application, I’m very impressed with.
Google notebook is perfect for me.
Trying out a Moleskin pocketbook for the first time. Really liking it so far, but let’s see if it becomes habit.
TiddlySnip is kind of similar, it works like the Google Notebook firefox extension but saves the content locally in a Tiddlywiki (which, in turn, can be saved quite easily online).
Tiddlywikis are exceptionally versatile and expandable single file HTLM “notebooks”. Supported by the friendliest darn community on the interweb.
Thanks for this valuable information.
I will start to use Google Notebook right away. I agree that many of us have piles of unstructured information everyday, these seems to be the right tools for solving that.
Thank you for sharing and looking forward for your future post
Lasse
http://www.pwealthformula.com
Google has been my mainstay, but zoho is really the best of the bunch. Thanks for bringing the other apps to light, i’m sure many people will like to try them out, I’m still sticking with zoho tho so…
http://ThunkDifferent.com
I am actually in the process of developing my own note-taking service. Students will definitely enjoy this once it enters into a further Beta development stage:
http://www.myaccessnotes.com
Thanks for the list. I am exploring Google Notebook now. Being that I am a gmail addict, and love my google homepage I am inclined to stay with GNotebook only too keep everything in one “place.”
Mike, thank you for the overview of Notefish!
I would like to provide a quick illustration of our flexible grid (2D canvas) and color coding. Here is an example of the same notes saved in Notefish and Google Notebook:
- notes for a trip to Vegas:
http://www.notefish.com/notes.php?p=643
http://www.google.com/notebook/public/09571072550247067072/BDR4KSwoQka3ryNAh)
Notefish also comes in very handy with photos, side-by-side comparisons, and generally offers a great way to organize notes.
- shopping for a house: http://notefish.com/notes.php?p=159
- sharing trip photos: http://notefish.com/notes.php?p=2661
We hope Notefish can simplify web research and note-taking for more people, and we would love to hear people’s feedback – write to us at info@notefish.com.
Eugene Mizin
Notefish team
http://www.notefish.com/
for off-line notes I use moleskines. they work well for me but really any pocket-size notebook will do just fine.
Thanks very much for this. I’ve been using Google and needed other features, and had no idea all this was out there, nor time to check it out, so major kudos to you!
@Eugene of Notefish: I’m confused, your response is written as if this is an active project. Yet, under “News” on your website, the last “news” on your product (Notefish) was September of 2006 – EIGHT months ago. I always look at these kinds of things before committing my time and data to a site that seems abandoned by the developers. To me, there’s no excuse to update a “news” page for 8 months! In these days of regularly updated development blogs, that looks pretty lame.
(Just being honest)
Why use another complex app with another username and password?
Try yPen instead, this is what simplicity is. Do you want to figure out how all the stuff works and register for an account, or do you want to just open a page and write down a vital couple of lines?
I like: http://www.backpackit.com/ and use for research for my blog. But if you want some more space (writeboards, only 2 for free) and image or file upload you will have to start paying $5 a month.
Might change to google notebook for free, but first some testing.
Thanks for your post Dr Shock
Hi, i’m french, excuse my bad english
http://www.protonotes.com/ is new and makes it possible to take notes on each visited site. Ideal to work on a project in construction
I talked about it in my blog ( in french )
You want simple ? Try http://deusto.com
Next, the holy grail of notetaking …notes online and on mobile
I use Google Notebook a little, and Gmail a lot for note taking.When I’m out and about I use Twitter and my mobile phone to take notes. Here’s how I do it. SMS to Email Notetaking
I really enjoy Sticky Notes for GNOME Window Manager under GNU/Linux,
It’s really easy to use:
There is one icon on the panel, when clicked, all notes come to front of screen, you can resize, move, change colors, titles…
When you want to make all that information dissapear, just click anywhere outside the notes.
It’s fast, simple, opensource, and all the information is stored on a XML file under your home directory.
This list is very good. Thank for your work.
there is also http://www.notesake.com fairly new startup and based around college students but you can take notes, tag, date, share, and collab.
Google notebook rocks for me. I hate to have a password and username for every page that I visit on the web.
I like Yahoo Notepad especially since you can combine it with the Yahoo Widget Engine.
Stikkit sounds like something I would like to try. I like Google Notebook too and use it with Firefox.
I use everyday:
Wridea: http://www.wridea.com
ubikuo: http://www.ubikuo.net
Helipad: http://pad.helicoid.net/home.html
Netvibes webnotes: http://www.netvibes.com
Hope someone find this useful…
Zoho notebook is promising, but the Firefox clipping extension seems to require you to be logged into your notebook and have it open to work. I may be wrong, but that would require you to have your notebook open in a tab at all time. Not as convenient as others..
Good write up of the different applications. I appreciate that you were able to condense a bunch of overview information very quickly.
I wrote up my first impressions between Google Notebook, OneNote and Zoho Notebook. I just did a quick comparison about usage and functionality.
Why does everyone forget syncnotes? http://www.syncnotes.com/ take a look. No I don’t have any affiliation with them, but I really despair when I see “round-ups” with half the cattle missing…
Edit and organise notes on the web or download a client for the PC and – important to me – PDA.
What a peice of $heet! Zoho Notebook is useless! I signed up, activated the account and went to work. I must admit it has a nice interface. I spent 20-30 mins working in it, setting up pages, adding links, images, etc… I saved everything and it stated that my pages were all successfully saved. Logged out and logged back in. Everything was gone as if I had logged in for the first time. I’m moving to Google Notebooks until they fix this.
if you are a fun of mindmap notes organization, than try
http://www.mindmeister.com/
I am using it with my team to share actions, projects, and note everyday.
also, http://www.flynote.com
nice article :)
I’ve been using Google Notebook for about 2 weeks now and am really enjoying it for composing blog posts in advance, which I had previously been using a standalone text editor for. But the real advantage of Notebook for me is that, like Google Reader, your info travels with you – accessible via any browser anywhere so you can jot down a few notes wherever & whenever you happen to be online checking mail or catching up on feeds. Nice!
However, I’ve found text highlighting in Notebook to be a little twitchy at times… I wish there was a “Select All” option like that which exists in most installed editors.
OK. Here’s my pick. Though it came free with my Wacom a couple years ago, it has been a Godsend. By far, the best IMO would have to be EverNote (I use the Plus vsn, but I think the free basic is probably just fine).
Pluses: No signing in somewhere to use (Ie., Google et al, which would really bother me, I think). Easy to use. Not a lot of unnecessary features but more than I’d ever need.
Minuses: None that I know of.
MY: 2 cents
Simple.
How well do these (any and or all) work with mobile-access (WAP)? (I have Opera Mini)
Guys and Gals,
There is a cool online note taking tool now. Check out http://www.fruitnotes.com
This is a real cool site. You can even record your voice notes here … A very powerful tool… you must see it.
enjoy,
I found http://www.fruitnotes.com very interesting, thought to share it with you guys here.
they have cool ways of storing notes online
1) Call a number and record your notes! – I found this very useful, I can record anything at anytime from my bed, from bus or car whenever anything pops up in my head, I sometime use it to record conferences or meeting minutes, talks with gf ;)
2) Write text notes – this is wonderful, to search my notes later at anytime and share my stories with friends.
3) Attach video, audio and images to your notes. – This is helpful for me to recall those lovely moments.
And its all for FREE!.
As for me I use Wrike.com for my notes, random thoughts and ideas and my to-dos. The best 2 things I like about are 1. I can create tasks anywhere, from any computer or from my PDA; 2. I never forget a single thing, as I get email notifications to my inbox.
Don’t forget notesphere, the simplest of all the note taking apps. :-)
I use a free program for this called sync notes @ http://www.syncnotes.com works super on my computer. It’s both a online note taking site and a desktop app. You can creat note on your desktop or computer and they are uploaded to syncnotes. You can also send notes to othe sync notes users.
If you want to store important stuff in your note such as passwords, account numbers, you need one with security. Try NoteHere Explorer
this is useful.
Take a look at UberNote. http://www.ubernote.com
Been working on it for about a year and now it’s open for registration.
I’ve just released a new version of notezz, just wanted you to know. And hopefully google too. Somehow google wont index my site after I’ve removed the www. But who uses google anyway. :P Thanks for mentioning my app.
Where´s Evernote?
I am very surprised the fact that Springnote is not in the list. As a teacher, I think Springnote is an only service I can actually use in my practice. try http://www.springnote.com
The issue with Zoho Notebook and Google Notebook is these are really high end clipping solutions. If you’re out in the field and you want to jot down pure information: either writing something to yourself or transcribing (like taking notes in class or a meeting) – these tools really don’t solve that. They are great for copy/paste jobs but they don’t help you get information down fast or accurately…
I finally found something that actually helped me transcribe notes online.
If you want a pure text note taking solution that is absurdly quick, barebones, and focuses on data entry check out http://www.ayenotes.com for taking notes online.
AyeNotes was wired for text only notes – sort of the use you describe in your article. Its key feature is that it provides clips for frequently used strings. These can be templates you type, terms you use (action items, research, etc.), or it can be programmer-esque things like HTML and Markdown.
The site also autosaves the work and provides keystroke. If you have the site remember the login, everytime you go to http://www.ayenotes.com to take notes online you are dropped right into the new note screen. To get your data out, you can email or download the note in multimarkdown format.
Thank you for the good List! I’ve developed my own Note-Taking Service. It’s named Artool and you can use it for taking Notes of intresting Webpages(mix between classic Note-Taking(Google Notebook) Services and Bookmarking-Services like del.icio.us).
Here is a cool app if you want to create an online notebook. You buy the code and host it yourself on your own domain: DMXReady Online Notebook Manager.
There is http://www.mayafile.com, with a good search, and can be used over the web or using IM (Google Talk).
Try http://listhings.com – the most elegant and eco-friendly web app for storing notes. It’s optimized for fast, everyday personal use as a replacement for desktop-based note taking applications. Once you sign up, you can access your notes from any computer.