Note Taking App / Software for The Modern Age

kaleidoscope on 29/07/2024 - 10:29

G'day,

Taking some courses (onsite / online .. ) and it's been about 15 years since I last did any formal studies. So thought of running it by the good folks in ozb on what a good note taking and reference solution in the modern days. (I've used GoodNotes and Notability in the past and of course apple's own Notes App).

The content I want to keep on the notes is a mix bunch of things such as

  • hand written on tablet
  • scanned from worked examples on paper
  • lecture notes and excerpts from moodle or course web page
  • internet references and links (youtube / medium / blog posts etc.. )
  • any helpful links from discussion forums
  • live session screen recordings and some other example files / miro sketches etc…
    (Yup it's kinda all over the place, but I don't make up the rules, just that it happens to be this way … )

The main objective is to have a single place I can return to in future and refer it again if I have to…
Goodnotes and Notability are decent for just taking notes on the tab but not really at any other things and you're limited to apple ecosystem. Offline files such as recordings can be quite large, but I can host them in my cloud drive and keep a link from it in the notes.

I've also looked into some things such as Notion / Obsidian or even markdown files ;) and want to know if there are other good ways.

(I'm willing to put in the time for organisation, if there is a solution that supports it all)

🍻

Education & Work

Comments

  • Jimothy Wongingtons on 29/07/2024 - 10:34
    +1

    take a look at collanote started off as a 1 dev project - now he has a team of people and has an upgrade to premium (though afaik base is still free and useable).

    bought a $20 apple pen rip-off of amazon and the process was great - looks cool when you whip it out in a meeting and can mark up documents or free doodle diagrams etc
    unfortunately i could prob never use it for study as i have zero self control and short af attention span and would end up probably in a 6 hour YouTube rabbit hole.

    i went back to just pen and paper tbh

  • Gdsamp on 29/07/2024 - 10:59
    +5

    Don't ever use OneNote thru an MS Office licence provided by your uni. should you wish you keep your notes it is a bloody impossible task to migrate notebook contents to another (e.g. personal) account when edu licence deactivation is upon you…

    • kaleidoscope on 29/07/2024 - 11:03
      +1

      Don't ever use OneNote thru an MS Office licence provided by your uni

      Thanks for the tip. I wasn't big fan of OneNote tbh, so am just using uni office license for assessments to be done on ms word.

  • sumyungguy on 29/07/2024 - 11:09
    +1

    If you ever watch creator Sara Dietschy, she's settled on Apple Notes https://youtu.be/hoNT-yK0NAM

    • kaleidoscope on 29/07/2024 - 14:04

      Can't say I was aware of her creative content until you mentioned, but seems like an interesting twist from all notion to all apple notes.

  • impoze on 29/07/2024 - 12:15
    +1

    Obsidian
    - excalidraw plugin for handwritten notes

    Notion was slow and requires internet

    • Jimothy Wongingtons on 29/07/2024 - 13:47

      I briefly tried putting my almost encyclopaedic knowledge in my area of expertise relating to my job for any future new hires to use as a quick reference, on boarding and learning resource. Used words/charts/tables etc …and obsidian was actually awesome for this since a lot of the knowledge is actually theory based…. problem is finding someone to actually wade through it and not fall asleep :')

    • kaleidoscope on 29/07/2024 - 13:55

      This is actually good feedback to hear and to say "notion was slow" I get the impression that you've used it until it breaks or hits the limit of things.
      (We've used notion heavily in previous project at work and it just kept getting harder and more complicated as the project grew)

  • 7ekn00 on 29/07/2024 - 13:23
    +3

    Google Keep does all that for free ;)

  • ReaperX22 on 29/07/2024 - 15:05
    +1

    Todoist is another my friend swears by. Limited in its free function but enough for an individual. Kind of has options for boards/sharing, reminders, etc.

    But for me, Google Keep is enough!

  • jace88 on 29/07/2024 - 20:57
    +2

    I just use OneNote because it works between all my devices (macbook, windows desktop, iphone, ipad, galaxy fold) and syncs well with OneDrive. I figured I already paid for Office 365 (which also comes with 1TB cloud storage on OneDrive) so may as well use OneNote too.

    • kaish1986 on 30/07/2024 - 13:39

      Do you pay for Copilot as well? I'm curious on how Copilot performs with Outlook (haven't searched online but keen to hear feedback from others).

      • jace88 on 30/07/2024 - 20:51

        Nope I don’t see value in it. I had access to it at work and didn’t use it.

  • soan papdi on 30/07/2024 - 22:42
    +1

    I have a private repo on GitHub. It’s full of text and markdown files split into topic based directories. Clone to disk if you want to edit locally. That’s it

    • kaleidoscope on 30/07/2024 - 22:47

      Thanks, briefly considered this as well, for my req i realise i have some large binary files such as vid / img/ data sets etc, i can use lfs for it or have them in a cloud drive and refer to it.

      Do you still checkout it for viewing later or just github pages style on the web?

      • soan papdi on 30/07/2024 - 22:51
        +1

        I have a few shell functions to help search and commit+push updated notes automatically. Hardly ever see it on the web. In fact I refer to no more than 10% of the notes I make in the long run. So it’s not worth being too systematic about this.

        • kaleidoscope on 30/07/2024 - 23:27

          In fact I refer to no more than 10% of the notes I make in the long run

          words of a wise man 🖖

Login or Join to leave a comment
Login Join