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Do not listen to the naysayers! The problem with this kind of endeavour is how to convince people their genuine need for it. I call this the, "green eggs and h

Do not listen to the naysayers! The problem with this kind of endeavour is how to convince people their genuine need for it. I call this the, "green eggs and ham" paradox. People will say they make lists on paper, or in a pocket book. They say; Oh it's just a notepad, or Why not use Google Keep? Or, why are you taking on Evernote? But the truth is, they lose those bits of paper, Google Keep gets overcrowded after a few dozen things and Evernote is clunky and _really quite expensive_. For years, i've been putting my information into digital form, but i've yet to find the ideal app for it. So much so that i've begun to develop my own. Unfortunately, yours doesn't work for me either (eg major requirement, offline access). But the principle still stands that there's a growing need for a digital means to accommodate personal information, because there's simply too much junk for the human brain to remember it all. I've looked at a number of other online note-taking systems. none seem to be gaining much traction, but i don't know why.

Ardax 10y ago
Because taking notes sucks, most people aren't very good at taking them, every interface has serious drawbacks in a number of situations, and organizing information (regardless of quality) is HARD. * Pulling out your phone/phablet/tablet & navigating to your note-taking app takes too long. (Heaven forbid you want to try this with a laptop, if you happen to want to tote one of those around all the time.) * Once you clear that hurdle, then you've got to type something you'll be able to make heads or tails of. * Or you can talk at your phone and take a voice note. This assumes that the environment is both quiet enough for it to work well and appropriate enough for you to be dictating without annoying a bunch of people. The fact that you're likely to look like a crazy person talking to yourself (or worse, your phone with nobody on the other end) doesn't help either. * Pen & Paper is quick, but easily lost as you said. You can take a picture of it, but context needs extracted somehow then. * Now you've got to organize it all. Or you can just toss them into some sort of bin (digital or otherwise) and tell yourself you'll do it later. As if! If you front-load the organizing effort then it's too time consuming and cumbersome to do /really quickly/, so you don't bother taking enough notes. And not nearly enough people come back to their things later to organize, so you end up with an explosion of a million unorganized scraps (digital or paper). What I'd love is an app that I could slam all kinds of things into quickly (like Keep) and that could weave through my life and try to stitch the scraps together, using things like my location, calendar, text extraction/transcription (from pictures/recordings) to build context and try to organize the scraps. If I happened to have the time to take the effort, make it easy to organize the thing I just added into the right place. Preferably one that could learn from the prior organization, so that as I put more into it it gets better and sorting things out correctly. If I'm taking notes or pictures or recording things during (or very close to) a time I've got blocked out for a meeting, then start associating those things together. ...and a pony. I want a pony!
- steaminghacker 10y ago
  yes, i largely agree with this. When i look at my note taking activity it works out as follows; (1) desktop use, when I'm sitting at my desk, I'll either type a note or cut from the Internet. (2) mobile use is mostly access, but creation here is usually by sharing something from another app. (3) dictation from Android Wear accounts for around 1/3 of all new notes. (3) is quite important to me so that i can make new notes on the go. for example, today i met a friend for lunch. i dictated one note walking on the way and 3 on the way back from our chat - while these things were fresh in my mind. Dictation from Wear works remarkably well. providing. you. say. each. word. clearly. it really helps to get around 99% correct. Regarding organisation, you're right about this too. basically as the number of notes grows, the problem of organising them increases. People don't want to do the organising, so there needs to be a self-organising system. It's easy to see how this might be done with pictures, but for text notes, it's not so clear. Of course, search needs to work really well too!

Ardax 10y ago

Because taking notes sucks, most people aren't very good at taking them, every interface has serious drawbacks in a number of situations, and organizing information (regardless of quality) is HARD. * Pulling out your phone/phablet/tablet & navigating to your note-taking app takes too long. (Heaven forbid you want to try this with a laptop, if you happen to want to tote one of those around all the time.) * Once you clear that hurdle, then you've got to type something you'll be able to make heads or tails of. * Or you can talk at your phone and take a voice note. This assumes that the environment is both quiet enough for it to work well and appropriate enough for you to be dictating without annoying a bunch of people. The fact that you're likely to look like a crazy person talking to yourself (or worse, your phone with nobody on the other end) doesn't help either. * Pen & Paper is quick, but easily lost as you said. You can take a picture of it, but context needs extracted somehow then. * Now you've got to organize it all. Or you can just toss them into some sort of bin (digital or otherwise) and tell yourself you'll do it later. As if! If you front-load the organizing effort then it's too time consuming and cumbersome to do /really quickly/, so you don't bother taking enough notes. And not nearly enough people come back to their things later to organize, so you end up with an explosion of a million unorganized scraps (digital or paper). What I'd love is an app that I could slam all kinds of things into quickly (like Keep) and that could weave through my life and try to stitch the scraps together, using things like my location, calendar, text extraction/transcription (from pictures/recordings) to build context and try to organize the scraps. If I happened to have the time to take the effort, make it easy to organize the thing I just added into the right place. Preferably one that could learn from the prior organization, so that as I put more into it it gets better and sorting things out correctly. If I'm taking notes or pictures or recording things during (or very close to) a time I've got blocked out for a meeting, then start associating those things together. ...and a pony. I want a pony!

steaminghacker 10y ago
yes, i largely agree with this. When i look at my note taking activity it works out as follows; (1) desktop use, when I'm sitting at my desk, I'll either type a note or cut from the Internet. (2) mobile use is mostly access, but creation here is usually by sharing something from another app. (3) dictation from Android Wear accounts for around 1/3 of all new notes. (3) is quite important to me so that i can make new notes on the go. for example, today i met a friend for lunch. i dictated one note walking on the way and 3 on the way back from our chat - while these things were fresh in my mind. Dictation from Wear works remarkably well. providing. you. say. each. word. clearly. it really helps to get around 99% correct. Regarding organisation, you're right about this too. basically as the number of notes grows, the problem of organising them increases. People don't want to do the organising, so there needs to be a self-organising system. It's easy to see how this might be done with pictures, but for text notes, it's not so clear. Of course, search needs to work really well too!