Randy Laptop

I’m rather disorganized when it comes to taking notes, primarily because I’m lazy. A recent look at cloudPad (an open source project) got me thinking as to what my perfect notetaking application would do.

My current “notes” folder contains text documents, each named. Taking a random sampling from the last few weeks we have “master kebab” (a hand-typed menu of a local pizza place which fell onto our doormat), “gwenthealth” (the phone number and contact details from a letter that came for the previous occupier of our house I had to deal with), and “skych” (a list of satellite TV channels and their shortcodes). Picking a few more for discussion later on we have “Hd replacement” (a receipt for a hard drive I bought before Christmas and have yet to install), “fPlus” (which contains connection details from our ISP including a hashed password for voip services), “Tredegar Taxis” (with a list of local cab companies and their telephone numbers), “TV License” (which is quite self explanatory) and “lemon sylabub” (which surprisingly for me contains a recipe).

Recent notes are fairly easy to manage - we ordered from the kebab place last week (and regretted it). I dealt with the letter sent to my house but not to myself this morning and the tv channel list is used often because certain audio-described programs require specific channel numbers. Thus far, all works reasonably well.

But the system breaks down when looking for older things, or those where I’m unsure of the arbitrary note name. Suppose, for instance, there was a fault with my recently-bought hard drive. I might need to find our ISP password but not remembered I’d named the note “fPlus” rather than simply “plus” (which already existed), or I might have needed to find the phone number for taxis (but not in Tredegar - I have several other files with locale-specific taxicabs).

The solution to all these problems are tags. Taking the hard drive file as an example, it contains several prices, a phone number, a web page and e-mail address and a postcode. All of the above could be picked up with a regular expression, and the note “auto-tagged” (i.e. so a tag field inside that note consists of all those things). manual tags I might apply to that note are “receipt”, “bill”, maybe “computer” or “purchase”.

Going further, the taxi companies would also be auto-tagged with phone number, I might want to add a “taxi” or “travel” tag to each of the files (of which I have about 6). Regular expressions aren’t just for dynamic content either, I might have travel auto-tagged whenever words like “taxi”, “train”, “bus” or even “ticket” appears. similarly, a “password” tag would easily enable me to find the ISP file I need.

A “license” tag would probably enable me to find the TV license as well as other licenses (such as codes for software I’d registered). “Recipe” would be something not used overly often, but nobody says tags have to be populous to be useful.

So we’ve established tags would be incredibly, undeniably, superbly useful. what else? What is there about a folder in windows explorer and a bunch of text files that makes it a usable system? The answer to that is several things.

First and foremost, the ability to view files sorted in several ways. more often than not I want date modified, so the latest notes I worked on are the quickest to get at. Occasionally I’m sure of my note name, and having them arranged alphabetically means by typing four or five characters of said name gets me to what I want the quickest. rarely I want to access the largest of my notes, so viewing them by size gets me the longer lists, tables etc that I’ve cribbed for various reasons.

The second useful feature is itself the ability to type more than one character of a note name. Standard list views in explorer let you enter multiple characters, and for my needs this is preferable to the single-letter navigation some controls tie you to.

you’ll notice that I haven’t mentioned folders. I don’t tend to structure my notes into folders. I make notes whilst on the phone, talking to people, having bright ideas. I don’t have time to go categorize them into this, that and the other beforehand - and don’t have the will to bother doing it afterward, either. This may be the reason why my note box is such a rampant mess, but the power of categories (namely the fact that they give you a semblance of structure) is taken away by the fact that if you don’t maintain that structure, the whole system falls flat on its face.

But enter the tags. Tagging notes may seem as arduous as splitting them off into directories, but the power comes in when tags are automatically applied. If I’m noting a contact down and the phone number is picked up and the tag appropriately inserted for me, I’m much more likely to add any other tags that aren’t so automatic but equally as relevant. Furthermore tags are not folders - each file, however diverse your directory structure, needs to be in a specific, unique folder - a file can have any number of tags, they aren’t mutually exclusive.

Anything else? encryption, a decent search (in notes as well as their names), both features missing from standard explorer. portability would be good, as well as a quick way to make a “new note” (empty, from clipboard contents, whatever).

So how would my ideal notetaker look? I suppose primarily I’d want a tree/list view, with a number of viewing options. call the 1st “standard”, where you can sort, as in explorer, by name, date created, date modified etc. A pain of notes on one side of the screen with an edit window for the note itself on the other. NO save button, no specifying paths or properties, a note either named by its first line or by the user upon creation. Right-clicking a note in the tree view would allow for renaming, deleting, printing etc.

The second type of view would by its very nature be a tree, a cloud of tags. Each tag would open up to disgorge the notes that are thus tagged. Going back to my collection, expanding “phone numbers” would list the taxi note, the hard drive sale, etc. A cloud would have to be generated based upon all tags in all notes, and there’d certainly need to be a dialog where you could specify auto-tags, which would be applied to each note when it’s moved out of for the first time or amended. In that way the things I’ve already mentioned - e-mail address, URL, phone number - these could all be automatically inserted as tags in any note you may write.

On the issue of tagging, how would I want it handled? Cloudpad has an edit field next to the note content area where you separate your tags with commas, but I feel tags should be unobtrusive (unless you want to worry about them). My ideal would be a pop-up window, a combo box perhaps where you could add any number of your own tags, or remove existing ones on a per-note basis. A toolbar button, menu entry or keyboard shortcut to edit the focused notes tags would be my methods of accessing said dialog. The auto-generated tags should always be present in this box of course, software that forces anything on its user is something I’d discourage.

Searching is also an interesting one, but for a lightweight noting system I suppose you could use a lightweight search. A standard find function could search through note text, titles, tags or all (so if I’d tagged phone numbers but not taxis) I could search for the word “taxi” in a note title or text and “phone number” as a tag and find them that way. A multi-tag search may be useful (so software I’d got a license code for with a phone number for the developer could be found by a tag search for “license” and “phone number”).

The next concern is priorities, many notetakers let you handle this. I wouldn’t bother doing anything more than giving priority tags - they’d be free form and as leveled as the user wished. Do you want stars (i.e. priority 1-5)? Text representations (urgent, important, can wait)? Colours (red, green, blue?) Just stick ‘em in as tags. Even phone numbers could be further segmented (by area code, mobile etc), and you could pick up notes with key words in (”boss”, “immediate”, etc). Why go through the constrictive process of adding priority menus and levels when tags don’t restrict the user to your type of prioritization? Just inform them of the power of a tag with copious examples and let them do it themselves.

my next thoughts - storage. Everybody is using XML, it encrypts as well as any other type of text and is open enough that should you break the software your notes are still in a format vaguely comprehensible to Humans. it allows for attributes (you could set notes to read-only using the attribute method and who knows what other useful things), and is endlessly nested (so a note can contain tags, a title and text without concern).

My creative juices are slowing, so I shall wrap up here. I’ve never really used a Blog as a sketchpad before, but it’s certainly an interesting approach to brainstorming. Does anybody want to write me such an application? Teach me how to do it myself? have any ideas? Know where I can get one that does all this, and more? Keep the comments coming, folks.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.