After a few weeks of using OneNote 2003, I’m thoroughly fed-up with having a small space to actually write notes in, since it is so incredibly heavy on GUI that can’t be hidden away. Yes, ON ‘07 will have a minimal UI mode, but ON in general carries a certain clunkiness to it. The majority of the notes I take in ‘03 are either text or ink drawings (I don’t like it trying to recognize the ink as handwriting, since it then tries to put it in a textbox that makes it more difficult to manipulate). Despite having quite a bit of hardware under the hood, there is noticeable lag in switching between note-pages – I would guess because ON is a memory-hog and has a lot of stuff pre-loaded due to it’s “index everything, database searchability” attitude. Until I’ve got the dough for a 1GB stick, which conceivably could improve, but will not fix this problem, I would just have to live with a slow note program that doesn’t do its job well on a very basic level. I spent a lot of money on this machine – so this is completely unacceptable.
On a sidenote, ON still has a lot of features I like – especially the Note-flags feature, which allows you to customize them for to-do/check lists, and vocab definitions, etc. Ultimately though, this is just eye-candy/cherry-on-the-top of what should already be a competent note-taking program. Which ON is not. So I’m switching to something else.
Yesterday, I was poking through my start-menu (as I do once in a while, to maintain order & cleanliness..), and on a whim opened up Windows Journal. I’m in love. It is simple. It has a minimual UI that allows me to use most of the screen for note-taking. And – best of all – it allows me to customize the page size, and works primarily on a page-by-page note-taking paradigm. It isn’t just the continuous scrolling of ON pages. I found the default template to be unacceptable, so I made my own (blank, 7.47 x 11″ with Note title at the top). The M7’s screen is 7.47 x 12″, so this leaves an inch for UI bars at the top and bottom (start bar, drawing tools, etc.), and the full width of a portrait screen for note taking. Yay!
I may be switching to landscape in the future, since it seems that I can get a lot more information crammed in when I use landscape mode and zoom to “Page width”. This sacrifices some ability to see what’s on the rest of the page for reference purposes, but ultimately I’d rather use that page real-estate as efficiently as possible, so when it’s printed out for archival/sharing purposes, I don’t use as much paper.
Windows Journal does have note flags, but they aren’t quite as nice. And it doesn’t have the ability to compile a list from several note files all at once. Oh well. It’s something I can live without. I’ll probably just save each chapter of chem notes in an individual file in order to keep all the vocab for that chapter in one place.
So, I think I’ll be switching to Windows Journal for now. I took notes in it this morning in CHEM111 in portrait mode.. this resulted in several pages of large hand-writing, and a 123kB .jnt file (just text/drawing, no images copied in). I’m definitely switching to landscape note-taking in the future. I tried screen recording my note-taking + audio with BB Flashback, but unfortunately since I changed to portrait mode after starting the recording, it recorded a blank screen once in portrait mode. Changing screen settings in the middle of recording is an unusual circumstance for any screen-recording program, so I don’t fault them for not supporting this. I’ll just have to be more careful about what I do with the screen. Regardless though, I probably won’t have to worry about it if I take notes in landscape mode instead of switching to portrait. At some point I plan to post some examples of my notes on here, though I’ll have to find some web space to host these unusual extensions first, since most free hosting services only support typical media formats (movie/audio/pictures), and my notes would be in *.jnt, and screen recordings in *.swf (roughly doubles the size of the original file though) or *.exe (integrated player w/ BB codec.. results in the smallest file size).
