NOTA BENE

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 218  06/09/2012

It sometimes feels as though I've been taking notes all my life. Certainly I was already doing it in school, and in university lectures, when in combination with my photographic memory it was a great advantage in exams: I could just conjure up the page of my notebook where an answer lay. (That memory is now fading, but luckily for me computers are improving at more or less the same rate). Right from the start personal computing for me meant trying to find some practical way to take notes on the damned things. Of course for a writer finding a decent writing tool was the first priority, but that proved nowhere near so hard to fullfil. For each successive OS since CP/M 2.2, I quickly discovered a word-processor or editor that would serve me well for years - Wordstar, PC-Write, TextPad, Microsoft Word - but for each OS I also wasted hours trying and rejecting inadequate candidates for the role of note-taker. The top drawer of my grey filing cabinet testifies to my failure, because it's half full of spiral-bound reporter's pads containing 20-years-worth of pencil scribblings.

It wasn't until the first Palm Pilot came out in 1996 that things looked up a bit. A crucial attribute of any note-taking system is portability, because ideas pop into my head at all times and places, even in bed at night, and having to plod to a desktop computer to record them is a total no-no. Palm got me to a point where I could be sitting anywhere, perhaps reading a book, with a Pilot at my elbow to scribble notes using Graffiti handwriting, and have them transfer to my desktop PC whenever I synced. Soon I discovered Natara's Bonsai, a neat outliner that ran on both PC and Palm, and no less than 125 of these Idealog columns were planned in that program. That Bonsai lasted me ten-years proves it was workable, but it still wasn't ideal: it couldn't handle pictures or diagrams, and folding editors actually aren't, contrary to what you might expect, that much help on a tiny handheld screen. And Palm's syncing worked, but only so long as you remembered to do it...

After Palm went under I moved over to an Android phone, which opened up whole new cloudy vistas. Bonsai never made the leap and stuck with Windows Mobile, but there are dozens of Android outliner apps and I've tried most of them. Many of the free ones work well but have neither a Windows sync client nor cloud storage. Then there are big beasts like Zotero, Evernote and SimpleNote that offer both cloud service and PC sync. I decided to try the free version of Evernote and was very excited for a while. It's a whole ecosystem, with add-ons for drawing sketches and clipping web pages, and it has an attractive user interface. Notes handwritten on my phone (using the marvellous Graffiti Pro app) just appear on my laptop without effort. Until one day the Evernote Windows client just vanished from my PC, without a trace. I hasten to add that no notes were lost - they're all still there in my account on Evernote's website - but it  disconcerted me when the same happened again weeks after I reinstalled it. The cloud is mighty powerful, and this ability to remove things from my PC without asking has quite blunted my enthusiasm for the product.

It was around then PC Pro adopted DropBox to deliver Real World Computing copy, and the penny dropped that I can now roll my own cloudy note-taking solution using the excellent DropBox client for Android. Just create a directory tree called Notes in the Dropbox folder and bung all text, pictures, spreadsheets, whatever, relating to a project into the same subdirectory. Stick to a few file formats like text, JPG, docx and xlsx (I have Documents To Go on my phone). And TextPad lets me drag web URLs straight from Firefox into a note and access them by right-clicking. Sorted.

And what, I hear you mutter, about Microsoft's OneNote? Well, whenever Simon Jones has demonstrated it to me on his rarer-than-hens-teeth Samsung Slate PC I've been bowled over by its unique, industry-beating capabilities. But there's the rub: like almost everyone else I never bought a Windows Tablet or Slate PC, and Microsoft never provided me a copy with any version of Office I've had. In fact, so effectively have they've kept this killer app away from the public that they ought to be put in charge of Hantavirus quarantine. Now Redmond is betting the farm on Windows 8 and my advice would be, make your Surfaces (or whatever they're called this week) into dynamite OnceNote engines, and let them communicate easily with your competitors' devices: the iPad currently has nothing to touch it for note-taking.