Wanted: The Perfect Notepad
- July 19, 2005
- 4 comments
I’ve been trying to find a decent application to help me keep track of all my different notes and junk I write down all the time. I want something that is quick and easy to use, but stays out of the way when I don’t need it. There are two apps that I’ve narrowed it down to, but what I’d really like to see is a marriage between the two. If that happened, it would become one of my most used applications.
The first app is called VoodooPad. It’s like a cross between Apple’s TextEdit and a Wiki. What I really like about it is how easy it is to link one note to another. It makes finding associated notes very easy. I also like that you can link to a folder, URL, image, etc. just by dragging and dropping it onto the window. The one thing I don’t like about it is that it doesn’t get out of the way when I’m finished with it. I also don’t really like the monotonous toolbar icons. They could use a little more variation to separate them some more.
The second app is called Sidenote. It’s strong point is that it does get out of the way when I’m done with it. It’s a drawer that slides out from the left or right side of the screen when I need it, and automatically slides back out when I’m done. It’s also like TextEdit in how it handles text and formatting. It allows you to have multiple notes, which can be printed or sent as attachments in Mail. The one thing I miss though is linking one note to another, like in VoodooPad.
Now if Sidenote had VoodooPad’s Wiki-like functionality, it would be the king of scrapbook/notepad/sticky apps.
July 21: I ended up buying VoodooPad. I found myself using it more and more over the last couple of days. It just works the way I expect it to.
July 27: I’m actually using another application called DEVONnote a lot lately. I ran up against a limitation of VoodooPad while trying to add a bunch of quotes. Plus, every time I switched back to the default page, it took a couple seconds to load. That got old. DEVONnote has most of the useful features of VoodooPad (like wiki links) and handles various kinds of information better plus it adds more features like highlighting. One thing I miss is I can’t export files to my iPod like I could with VoodooPad.
Moving to the start page. I would add some new pages here and there, not linked to on the start page, and then try to switch back to the start page. It was then I’d get the slowdown. Sometimes it was quick, other times it would take a couple seconds to show.
I like VoodooPad a lot, it’s just got some limitations in what it can store because of the way it handles links. Or maybe I’m misunderstanding how to make links with it?
Here’s some improvements I think VP could use:
1. I like that I can link to Finder directories, but if that directory has the same name as an internal VP link, it won’t work. Maybe a way to differentiate between an internal link and an external file link?
2. Have buttons in the toolbar that link directly to Fonts and Colors
3. Text highlighting
4. If a new page I create includes Tengwar, there will be random linked chunks that are green. I’m not sure why these links are automatically being created and they’re difficult to get rid of.
After reading your VP forums, I discovered a couple neat things I didn’t know about which pushed me back towards VP versus DEVONnote. VP just flows with the way I think and write things down better.
I’d still really like to see the first three feature requests I listed above. The fourth item wasn’t a feature request, but a complaint. I figured it out too though. VP was set to highlight possible links (which can be Wiki-style links) and that’s what it was doing in the Tengwar pages. Once I disabled that, it works fine.
What kind of slowdown are you talking about in VP? Were you opening up the document again, or just moving to the start page?
Even if you still continue to use DEVONnote, I’d like to know what the problem is with VP so I can fix it for other folks.
-thanks.