Ask Slashdot: Life Organization With Free Software? 133
BigZee writes "For many years, I've used a page-a-day diary as both a planner and a method for taking notes. While not perfect, it's proven to be an approach that's worked fairly well for me. Conscious of the limitations, I want this to become more electronic. In principle, I want to be able to use my Nexus 7 for this function. There are some limitations: My workplace uses MS Outlook. However, I am not able to use Evernote (or similar) on my workplace machine. This limits possible integration along the lines proposed with GTD. What I want is to be able to take notes that are organized by date as well as being integrated to a calendar (preferably Google). Additionally, I want to be able to prioritize my work along lines similar to GTD. I'm not averse to spending money for the right software but prefer to use free software where possible. Can anyone suggest what could be used?" The above-linked Wikipedia page lists some relevant Free software as well as closed-source options. If you use such organizing software, though, how do you use it, and how well do you find it works?
ActiveInbox (Score:5, Informative)
OneNote (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do you need the source code?
Just slap Microsoft OneNote [google.com] to your Nexus 7 and be done with it. For your work PC, it comes bundled in MS Office.
Re:OneNote (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. If your company already runs Microsoft products, One Note will work, can sync to SkyDrive, has Apple and Android clients, can be viewed and edited on the web (via SkyDrive). There are arguments of Evernote vs OneNote, but both are considered best of breed. Since your company limits you to OneNote, the choice is made for you, but it's a good product.
Re:OneNote (Score:5, Insightful)
Whoever modded you a troll should be chastised for misuse of mod points. OneNote is exactly what he needs, and will work with his office software.
Open Source is great, preferred in many situations, but nothing else will satisfy the poster's compatibility requirements. End of story.
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Whoever modded you and parent insightful has not read the summary, where the asker says "prefer to use free software where possible".
+10 modders, so careless, much summary unread, wow.
Man, if there ever was proof that /. has no anti MS bias (hate caused by actual negative experiences is not bias, it is wisdom) but is instead peppered with pro MS shills, there we have it.
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Of course let's be propositive too. I'd try orgmode.org and scour web for solutions to syncing scenarios.
Re: OneNote (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: OneNote (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, because no FLOSS projects people can come to rely on are [alternativeto.net] ever [eweek.com] abandoned [sourceforge.net].
Open source absolutely has a lot of advantages over proprietary software, but let's not pretend that it's not subject to most of the same software engineering concerns. A five-year-old source dump isn't a whole lot of use when it relies on a long-deprecated version of a library (also open source) that's not backward compatible, and so on.
Yes, with FLOSS, you have the option to become/commission a new maintainer for an entire toolchain, but if you're being practical rather than idealistic, you'd spend so much time and money doing so, you'd never have the opportunity to use it. And gods help you if a second of your beloved applications was abandoned.
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No, I didn't miss anything. Whether the source is open, and whether the data formats are sane are two completely separate issues. There are plenty of closed-source programs which use completely recoverable data formats.
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Or, stay low tech ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know this goes contrary to what a lot of people here will think, because it ignores the technology aspects we're all so obsessed with.
Me, I still use the same black lab-books for persistent note-taking I've been using for 20 years.
I've got a stack of them, numbered and with dated pages. Every time I've looked at an alternative, I've found it cumbersome and less useful, and sooner or later you discover whatever technology du jour you're using has gone away, and you're left finding yet another alternative.
By all means, apply technology as you see fit. But for some things, many of us have found that old fashioned pen and paper is still superior. Everything else is a temporary solution which will eventually fail on you or go away completely.
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By all means, apply technology as you see fit. But for some things, many of us have found that old fashioned pen and paper is still superior. Everything else is a temporary solution which will eventually fail on you or go away completely.
I good middle ground is when the page is full take a picture and put it on evernote which will do OCR (so long as you don't write too bad) and then you have an index of all your notes somewhere.
Re:Or, stay low tech ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've found that over the years I've know people who have tried variations on that.
Eventually it becomes something they deem too cumbersome, or the technology just doesn't work, or any number of things.
Me, I just keep using old-school lab books. Unless I lose them in a fire, I can usually track down something quickly enough to not bother with anything fancier. It also allows me to have my notes be fairly unstructured, include diagrams, and lots of other things I don't always find a good analog for in digital things.
Then again, I'm too damned old and cranky to be too much of a slave to technology when I can avoid it. Eventually, with a lot of technology I find it simply more work than going with pen and paper.
Re:Or, stay low tech ... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is what OneNote on a tablet with a stylus should have been good for. Unfortunately, as soon as tablets quit being impractical because they were too heavy and expensive, they started being impractical because they'd lost their styluses.
Re: Or, stay low tech ... (Score:1)
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I guess I should have been more specific. I was talking about a Wacom-type digitizer, with decent resolution and response (and ideally, pressure sensitivity and an eraser).
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The Surface Pro is great in this regards... But I can definitely agree with scarcity; Microsoft apparently couldn't justify putting the same digitizer into the ARM-based Surface RT tablet. That'd fit my use case even better since I don't do much else with my Surface Pro.
Too bad Linux seems to lack anything comparable to OneNote with pen recognition. (This is typed from Ubuntu on a Surface Pro though!)
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That Livescribe Pen looks really proprietary (and I don't even mean "not Free Software," I mean "compatible with hardly anything but itself"). The Galaxy Note is not only also proprietary, but the screen is way too small.
What is needed is an interoperable built-in standard, like Microsoft's Ink API.
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The Galaxy Note is not only also proprietary, but the screen is way too small.
Alas, most tablets don't come with screens larger than ten inches, so topping out with a 10.1 inch screen, it's pretty standard. Exactly how much larger are you looking for?
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The Galaxy Note has a 5.3" screen, according to the specs [samsung.com]. Unless there's some other one that I don't know about?
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The Galaxy Note has a 5.3" screen, according to the specs [samsung.com]. Unless there's some other one that I don't know about?
Galaxy Note is a series of devices, all of which use stylus input. You linked to the phone, which is the smallest device in the line (barring the Gear watch, which is often marketed as a companion device to the Galaxy line). Devices in the Note line are also available as 8 inch and 10 inch tablets (Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], Samsung [samsung.com]).
I'm interested mostly because I used to use a Palm, and I like stylus devices. Incidentally, the Note 3 phone has a screen almost identical to an index card, which is nice (if you use 3x5 c
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I use A4 refil pads. Pages can be taken out and held together with treasury tags while they are still being worked on, placed in ring binders for long term storage, and -- my personal favourite -- scanned and stored digitally.
Having used touchscreen, graphics tablets, and several stylus variants, I've come to the conclusion that there really is no re
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How about you enter it in evernote or onenote, and then print it out if you want hardcopy?
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One word: Livescribe
Totally awesome analogue meets digital tech.
Re:Or, stay low tech ... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm likewise still using lab notebooks for taking notes at work.
As a bonus, said notebooks are resistant to all known forms of remote NSA eves dropping. For extra security, encrypt it with the 'cursive' algorithm. The kids these days will be completely baffled. :)
Necron69
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Cursive, the original elliptic curve cryptography.
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I use legal pads.
Rare is the meting or conversation that requires more than one page of notes, and very rarely more than two or three. I write the date and a reasonable "title" of whatever is going on at the top of the page.
Works surprisingly well - thoughts and sketches go on there freeform, any way I want them to, in ways that rarely work well on any screen. I can reorganize my notations in a flash too, if the meeting or my thoughts take a different tack.
It's easy enough to find stuff later if I want to
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Me, I still use the same black lab-books for persistent note-taking I've been using for 20 years.
You know, if you've found something great, a bit of specific information would help share that. Brand? Supplier? Buler?
Re:Or, stay low tech ... (Score:5, Informative)
The vast majority of the ones I have are just the standard Blueline hard-cover black lab books you can buy at any Staples or even Wal-Mart.
Occasionally I'm stuck and can't find one of those, and end up using the store brand, there's not a whole lot of difference. You can stick those little Post-It tabs onto pages you need to find quickly.
Just a hard-cover, notebook with ruled pages and a 3/4" or so margin at the top and a ruled margin on the left. Not the ones with the perforated pages to be torn out or the coiled binding, the ones with the fully bound pages which are meant to stay put and a pressboard/cardboard cover. Most of them seem to be around 192 pages or so, and are about 9 1/4"x7 1/4" (23.5cmx18.4cm).
Draw a line from the previous day, write today's date, and get on with it. Always keep a few extra ones on hand for when you reach the end of the one you're working on.
Slap a label on the spine, put 'em up on your shelf. It really is about as low tech as you can get, but it's been how I've kept notes for a very long time.
I've heard them called engineering notebooks, lab books, scientific notebooks. They're pretty common and easy to find, and several different companies make more or less the exact same thing.
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Thanks. I was hoping you would turn me on to a specific brand to watch out for. I already use them, as does my wife (she's a research chemist). Years ago I used to use composition books, and between the two I have a shelf of them that I've filled over the years. Plus boxes and expanding folders full of index cards for projects where they work as tools.
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For small notebooks, Field Notes (fieldnotesbrand.com) is the nice trendy option these days and offers some options including dot grid layouts as well as lined and graph paper. They also do special editions regularly, and are made in the USA.
For multiple sizes (including small) there are the standard Moleskine products including both their books and their "cahiers" which are basically the same thing Field Notes has. The nice thing there is that they have l
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Heh. I'm one of those notebook enthusiasts. I use fountain pens on notebooks in a customized zippered case, plus an index book. My wife is a research scientist and uses lab notebooks. We both enjoy sniffing around office supply stores and both carry small notebooks on us at all times.
I was looking for a brand name to see if there was something new to poke at. Thanks for the lineup, and I'll agree with pretty much most of what you said (I could get into hyper details, but not in a casual thread like thi
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For small notebooks, Field Notes (fieldnotesbrand.com) is the nice trendy option these days and offers some options including dot grid layouts as well as lined and graph paper. They also do special editions regularly, and are made in the USA.
Very trendy, to the point that after your comment while I went to their website idly thinking that I might pick one up to check it out (but its late here and I don't feel like making a special point of remembering to do this later), I gave up after a minute or two. I really do think that some people lose track of the fact that they actually do create and sell things to people for money.
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Their shop page is perhaps a little wordy, but mostly because they actually do come out with new "editions" several times a year and part of their business is selling subscriptions to those.
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The one and only software solution that ever worked for my work style was Lotus Agenda. I've been waiting for a modern version of it for 20 years.
For now, lab books/notebooks/legal pads work well enough.
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Lab notebooks are great. I love them (and pens, and pencils, and, well... just geeking out at office supply stores).
But I switched to cloud-based documents for a few reasons: full text search, access from any (networked) computer, and I can type a lot faster than I can write. I am also able to keep a semi-useful GTD thing going just by using folders and documents on Google Drive. I recently discovered that drawing inside a Google doc isn't too bad and LucidChart is pretty cool too.
There are downsides f
Re: even lower tech (Score:1)
Steno Pads, Goldfibre, 120 pages, Gregg Ruled. Write your original stuff on the right side of the page, follow ups on the left. Day and date across the full page at the start of each day, highlighted in Yellow.
Been working for me since 1976.
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Me too. I've been using a week-at-a-glance calendar for 40 years.
I started with store-bought calendars, then when I was working in an art department I made up pages customized to my use, copied them, bound them into a book, and made my own calendar.
I've been trying for 40 years to replace it with a paperless system, but I've tried several and so far nothing works. I'm sure it can be done.
That T-square and Rapidograph pen had a long run.
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Note taking on paper has a number of advantages, but one disadvantage is that the information is indexed only one way: by date. I prefer bound, numbered laboratory notebooks, but unless you have a pretty good idea when you wrote it down it is difficult to find the information you want.
Retrieving information is the reason you write it down, isn't it?
Of course, I learned in a lecture by Jack Kilby that the only reason he was granted the patent on the integrated circuit (and, later, his Nobel Prize) was becaus
Re: Or, stay low tech ... (Score:2)
Evernote web client (Score:1)
I'm able to use Evernote through the website without having to do any configuration. Other web clients, such as Spotify's, have choked on my work network's proxy settings, but Evernote does just fine.
Why be more electronic? (Score:5, Informative)
Your planner and notebook dont run out of batteries, work when (mostly) wet, are readable in sunlight, and offer many advantages over electronic forms. Analog is sometimes better than digital.
Rugged (Score:1)
Last week I dropped my notepad on bare concrete. To the surprise of absolutely no one it still works like new. My e-reader didn't fare so well a couple of months ago.
Perhaps this old Paper Technology might still have some advantages over these newfangled devices that are obsolete before the delivery guy drops them off.
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There may be interest in the Bullet paper journal system: http://www.bulletjournal.com/ [bulletjournal.com]
No special paper requirements, too.
Try Google Keep (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Try Google Keep (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about you, but I have no intention of letting google know what I'm doing on a day to day basis. So no, I won't try Google Keep.
Re:Try Google Keep (Score:5, Insightful)
And yes, I know about their export capabilities. It only marginally improves matters.
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I don't know about you, but I have no intention of letting google know what I'm doing on a day to day basis. So no, I won't try Google Keep.
Don't sweat it. Google already knows.
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Not a good idea; it'll probably be taken down by Google sometime in the near future. I've never heard of Keep, and I've noticed that Google frequently discontinues products I haven't heard of, so I expect to see an announcement any day now, now that I've heard of it thanks to you, that Google Keep is being shut down as it wasn't popular enough.
Relying on any Google product for long-term use is a bad idea for this reason alone, unless it's one of their extremely core products (search, mail, maps).
Does it have to be free software? (Score:1)
Is evernote's website blocked? (Score:2)
Citrix Receiver? (Score:2)
I wonder about using XenDesktop and Citrix Receiver on the Nexus 7. This isn't as good as a dedicated application, but it is good enough to allow one to use work related stuff, but still have some data separation between the company machines and a BYOD tablet.
Org-Mode in Emacs (Score:4, Informative)
It's really a "geek only" tool but emacs org-mode [orgmode.org] is great for me for organizing my work. The big plus is that the format is plain text so you can use version control to manage it. I use drop box and leave the files on there. I usually use one per project and then a master file.
Here's a specific guide to using it with GTD: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-gtd-etc.html [orgmode.org]
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LMGTFY (Score:1)
http://igtfy.com/?q=using+gtd+with+google [igtfy.com]
GetOnTracks (Score:2)
Outlook + Onenote (Score:2)
If you're using Outlook I assume you've got Onenote too. Create a daily meeting in outlook titled diary or whatever, and when you want to take notes open the meeting for today and use the meeting notes feature to take notes. The only issue I see with this is that it might not organize the daily notes by date in Onenote, but there are decent features for moving pages around and reorganizing them. Plus everything is searchable and if you want you can save the whole notebook in skydrive and open them from yo
SimpleNote (Score:2)
- Windows PC at work, using the Resoph Notes [resoph.com] client
- iPhone in my pocket with the official SimpleNote app.
- Mac at home with the client [brettterpstra.com]
All these tools and the service are free for basic usage. nvAlt is open source; the other clients are probably not, but as long as my data is in a format which is not application-dependant, that's enough for me.
Try Zim (Score:1)
Tiddlywiki (Score:4, Interesting)
TiddlyWiki [tiddlywiki.com] is a self-contained app stored in an HTML file that you can store on a USB, Dropbox, or elsewhere. People have written GTD add-ons for it and it is easy to write your own customizations. There is an Android app to help run it on Android systems and the new version uses HTML 5 with option to use node.js to make it even more powerful.
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TiddlyWiki is useful in all sorts of ways! But, there may be some difficulty editing it from his Android tablet. Unless things have changed since I tried it last, there weren't any great solutions to that. (However, if I'm wrong, please, school me! I LOVE TiddlyWiki and would be happy to be wrong about editing it via an Android device!)
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The TiddlyFox plug-in for FireFox is supposed to work on Android, I have used the AndTidWiki app on Android with the older version. The main problem is getting it to save the file as browsers work to prevent that for security reasons.
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Last time I checked, TiddlyWiki was the best out of three "single-file-based" I found. The other two were Lively, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lively_Kernel#Lively_Wiki [wikipedia.org] and Stick Wiki (from "you'll have it on an USB stick"), http://stickwiki.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
I think only Tiddly has an efficient search function, for instance.
Then if you want "serious notetaking that scales up", I fear you'll have to abandon the single-filers.
But then there are many other wikis still -search in the related "lists" on Wikipedia
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A plug for DokuWiki, which was easy to set up on my personal server. No database, everything is in a collection of text files. The markup is simple and readable. Plugins exist for export to things like PDF, or I can dump the entire thing as plain HTML. This all adds up to a clean exit strategy when required. Mobile editing is an issue (UI usability), but my use case doesn't call for much of that. There is a theme available for mobile viewing. I pair my setup with HTTP auth and HTTPS, so I'm fairly confident
I use Zim plus Dropbox (Score:5, Interesting)
I use the Zim Desktop Wiki http://zim-wiki.org/ [zim-wiki.org] plus Dropbox.
Zim is a graphical text editor used to maintain a collection of wiki pages. Each page can contain links to other pages, simple formatting and images. Pages are stored in a folder structure, like in an outliner, and can have attachments. Creating a new page is as easy as linking to a nonexistent page. All data is stored in plain text files with wiki formatting. Various plugins provide additional functionality, like a task list manager, an equation editor, a tray icon, and support for version control.
If you need version control, Zim supports Bazaar, Git, and Mercurial as backends.
Zim is not network aware, so I just keep its ~/Notes files in my Dropbox folder, install that and the desktop Linux/Windows/OSX Zim client as needed and I'm good to go.
Unfortunately, there is no smartphone version of Zim, but I have little need for a smartpone app of this sort. I do email myself info as needed to integrate into Zim later.
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Unfortunately, there is no smartphone version of Zim, but I have little need for a smartpone app of this sort. I do email myself info as needed to integrate into Zim later.
Actually, Zim exists for the N900 [maemo.org] -- in fact, I first heard about it that way. Or is it not considered a smartphone if it doesn't run Android or iOS? :P
org-mode in emacs (Score:1)
I have tried several solutions and find org-mode to be the most useful one. I have it set up in essentially a GTD structure, with TODO items in one big list, a separate list of active projects, and a third list of potential future projects.
org-mode is extremely configurable, which is a definite plus for software you intend to organize your life. I recommend the following add-ons as well:
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I have been using owncloud for about a year now. I must say I am not as enthusiastic as you are about it. I went through two change of major and only exporting the data to a different format and reimporting them kept my calendar safe. The application is overall fairly slow. Still it gets the job done for me.
KDE Kolab (Score:3)
I'm currently in the process of setting up something like this.
Kolab [kolab.org] is a FOSS groupware server that can synchronize emails, to do lists, calenders, notes, etc. across multiple devices. You can access it from the included web interface (roundcube [mykolab.com]), the recommended client (Kontact), or via Outlook with the connector installed. Android support is available via ActiveSync, and I believe Kontact Touch will be ported to Android now that Qt 5 supports it.)
If you're not interested in running your own server, there're also sites like this [mykolab.com] which sell accounts.
Here are some notes on my experiences setting it up, for anyone interested:
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Instructions for doing these increases are available online, there are several locations that need to be modified.
I haven't dug into whether I have so
notebooks rule (Score:1)
250 page, college ruled, spiral bound notebook. $5.00 per year.
MyPhoneExplorer (Score:2)
This freebie is an absolute gem. It can synchronize your Android device (calendar, notes, to do list, contacts/calls/texts if applicable) with its own built-in PIM software, Outlook or Thunderbird/Lightning via USB/ADB, wifi or Bluetooth. It includes a notes and to do list app.
I've only used it with phones, but I can't see any reason it shouldn't work on a tablet.
http://www.fjsoft.at/ [fjsoft.at]
Wiki (Score:3)
I use a wiki. Specifically, I use OpenWikiNG, http://sourceforge.net/projects/openwiki-ng/ [sourceforge.net] , however, any wiki software would work. My reason for using OpenWikiNG is that I largely use windows and the software is ASP based and can work with a simple Access database. The way I have it setup, and in hindsight, I would do this differently now, is that I use the personal web server that comes with Windows on my personal home desktop. With the access database, I don't have to worry about some heavy database engine. Since I'm the only user, this has been a very stable setup and trivially easy to migrate to a new machine when needed. Another reason I use OpenWikiNG is that it's open source, very simple, and somewhat easy to hack. It works for me, and that's all I care about.
With wake on LAN capability, I can VPN into my home network and wake my machine if I need remote access. And since this is a wiki, I don't have to install any software on any other device. All I need is a web browser.
In terms of usage, I have my wiki start page as my browser's home page. I have links to site I visit often, some RSS feeds, my daily schedule, even some emails and phone numbers. I use the wiki as sort of a second brain. I have pages where I put my ideas, pages where I put things that are important, things I might need, and all sorts of other resources from computers to food. My personal wiki is a much better bookmarking system than what any browser could ever come up with. I can easily annotate information that I add, and most importantly, I can search.
To give the benefit of my hindsight, I would probably want to use a dedicated LAMP server on my home network. And I would consider something with better file and image management, as OpenWikiNG really sucks at that. To really find something that would suit one's personal taste, I suggest looking at http://www.wikimatrix.org/ [wikimatrix.org] to compare them. I have a lot of stuff in my personal wiki, and converting it to some other format really seems like a hassle. So, if you do this, pick a wiki you're comfortable with. The more time you spend using it, the more you lock yourself in.
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onenote... is a ripoff of 1990's lotus organizer (Score:3)
It's funny to see comments praising OneNote as the best thing since sliced bread...
Don't get me wrong, I like OneNote, and use it at work. But in a moment of snark I dug up a copy of Lotus Organizer 6 (from 1999) and installed it on my Win8 work machine. Lo and behold, I can keep notes in a multi-tabbed interface. I can format them all kinds of ways, add pictures, embed doc and ppt files, share the org file with other users, and generally do anything OneNote can do. I can keep a full calendar, manage contacts, track tasks, and keep linked notes. .. And then there are the things Organizer does that OneNote couldn't do... until v2013. In OneNote 2010, if you pasted in a table, you couldn't even select a column to format it -- OneNote mishandles it as line text. Track changes (which Organizer doesn't have at all) broke all the time in 2010 and doesn't survive more than a couple users in 2013; OneNote still totally trashes style data from other Office products, so you can't roundtrip text from a mildly complex word doc back into that doc without hosing the final. Embedding a ppt or xls table into OneNote would consistently get corrupted from editing collisions on a shared .one file. But Organizer would defer to the linked file and survive multi-user editing. Hah, funny.
Everything old is new again, with Redmond's fresh coat of pastels and waaaaay too much whitespace in the UI. Then again, these products are sinkholes for data -- from the latest .ONE file format back to the decade-plus-old .ORG-.OR6 file formats -- it's difficult to extract your stuff in usable ways when the format dies. Not that Microsoft, Google, IBM/Lotus, or other big companies would do that. Repeatedly. Predictably. Dependably. (E.g. Microsoft Office has trouble importing ... Microsoft Office files from 15 years ago, produced while working *at* Microsoft, FFS.) Tho it's much more limited to notes, Zim is really attractive in that regard: everything is saved in an open/documented non-binary format that'll be readable/recoverable when there's time to dig thru this crap when I'm old/near death.
Meanwhile in the real world, for just making notes and getting crap done quickly and effectively, the ubiquitous lab/moleskine/black notebook is the way to go.
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Can Organizer run under WIne?
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Yes.
Iirc running Org 97 thru 6.1 (on Wine on Mint 14-15) there were a few artifacts -- maybe once every 15 minutes a border would render a pixel off, or something like that -- but no functional or data handling problems. Because it's so small, it'll also run ok under some iffy win32 emulators -- just for giggles I once got it running on my N900 phone. Let me know if you try it on Android.
todotxt (Score:1)
http://todotxt.com/
has client for any device/software I use
is a text file
has a syntax I like
Personal Kanban (Score:1)
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KanbanFlow is nice but it requires you to entrust your data to a "cloud" solution and many people reject that idea on principle.
There is a good Personal KanBan app out there that's 100% free and shows promise:
http://dmitryivanov.net/personal-kanban-app/ [dmitryivanov.net]
Text files (Score:2)
I recommend any of the impressive tools that round-trips text nicely (Sublime, Notepad2, gedit). Just plain text with minor format annotations.
It's easy to lay out simple graphs which I use for financial summaries that I will be able to access for years.
Text is a massively-entrenched standard format with universal comprehension rules (unlike other standards like HTML). Just be sure your editor makes sense of either line ending. You can use many tools including those that can write directly to a RAID0 device
Conspicuously absent (Score:4, Interesting)
The first time I got an Android, I was utterly appalled that there was no note editing app in the base install.
I went looking for combined note/voice-note/picture/calander organizing apps. Most had too many strings attached (specific cloud-service sync options, or whatnot.) All of them lacked the ability to quickly procrastinate a task. You'd think that would be an obvious feature, but no. I went back to just remembering stuff with wetware. By the time my wetware starts to wear out, hopefully there will be something suitable.
NoteTaker: electronic lab book (not free) (Score:1)
If you're willing to consider alternatives to freeware, I recommend taking a look at NoteTaker [aquaminds.com] ($24.99). I've been using it for about five years and I find it meets my note keeping needs. NoteTaker's design is essentially a lab book, but being electronic, it permits a wider range of media in addition to text, including jpegs, pdfs, audio, and video. And of course it's searchable.
Each 'book' can be organized into sections and subsections, and there are tabs for easy access to each section. You enter notes a
Practical FOSS Options (Score:1)
OrgMode for emacs (Score:1)
Emacs Org Mode FTW (Score:2)
If you like GTD, the best organizer ever is Emacs Org Mode. Because Org Mode uses plain text files for storage, you can use git for storage and have very meaningful history tracking and sync across devices. There are even tools for syncing to third party calendars (i.e. Google) and devices.
Trello organizer (Score:1)
Side project . . . (Score:2)
Hiveminder (Score:2)
Hiveminder.com is a freemium task tracking service with an IMAP interface available.
It's pretty nifty, and means many criteria, although I no longer use it because I found
myself spending too much time managing task relationships. That's more a manner
of how I was using it though, I think...