I've been trying Google Notebook. I'm not altogether satisfied, because it feels quite slow and pokey. Specifically, pasting in large snippets of text, and afterwards, collapsing/expanding said clipping is jerky. Compare this to what Flickr does to make their interface pretty smooth.

Another PITA is expanding a note, clicking within it, and trying to select all with Ctrl-A—it often ends up selecting the REST of the page but not the note itself. Ugh! Turns out the key is waiting for the formatting bar to appear.

Call me a lover of transitions but I don't like how binary on/off things switch. I also believe a fuller formatting toolbar like the one in Gmail should be used.

So, for the time being, I'll stick with another free, responsive, notetaking solution: EverNote, which I highly recommend. It's in the ArtRage class of "Why isn't more software made like this?" Fantastic, punchy, possesses a unique yet subtlely streamlined interface, and it integrates with Firefox too!

However, EverNote still falls short in a few areas for me, such as:

  • Not having a stripped-down mode to quickly paste in one big hulk of text, and break it up into individual notes later.
  • Can't change search highlight color—it's yellow and I want it to be pink
  • Formatting toolbar only shows up in full-screen mode… oddly enough, when in windowed mode, keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl-B still work for styling.
I'm still looking for a better information manager geared for my spontaneous style. A lot of the time, I find myself weeding through the forums or websites, bookmarking a lot of things for later perusal. But I don't have a central databank to store those, emails (integrated with Gmail?), clippings, and other stray bits 'n' bobs I come across in my travels. Again, let me reiterate it's too bad DEVONthink's only for Mac, because it looks like I could use it right about now!

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