What I want in a “notebook” app
February 18th, 2009 Rafael AlvaradoWith the demise of Google Notebook, I’ve been looking for a replacement. There are many suitors, but none fit the bill — not that GN did either. I need something that enables the following workflow:
1. Capture and tag elements of web pages into notes, complete with source metadata.
2. Organize notes into collections (e.g. notebooks) with sections.
3. Move notes around, within and between notebooks and sections.
4. Add more notes, not linked to web pages, during this process.
5. Export notebooks into other media, such as a web page or a Google Doc for publication or further editing.
Basically, the app needs to follow the workflow of doing research on the web and creating documents from the collected notes.
Google Notebook had most of this, but was cluunky. Zoho Notebook doesn’t let you move notes from one notebook to another, or even between sections of a notebook. It also has very limited export options and behaves more like a slide show tool than a note taking app. Diigo doesn’t organize collected notes into notebooks; they are just associated with the source web page. Evernote looks like it is designed to replace sticky notes as memory aids, not index cards as research tools. Zotero behaves too much like a reference manager.
As far as I know, there’s nothing like what I need or want. So I will have to make it at some point.
