PDFKiran just reminded me the other day of something I heard about some one year ago or something, but which I had sort of shrugged off because of my slow internet connection: Dropbox. Well, with the reminder came with another set of exploration, in particular, beyond backup, sharing, and synchronization–all of which Dropbox does really well–can it really do anything more for me?
Let’s see where the fun takes us….
I wanted to see how much of the Microsoft Office suite I could replace with free programs. OpenOffice.org did a great job with replacing the standard everyday stuff–Microsoft Word and Excel, for example–but it didn’t have anything to replace OneNote, which had quickly become one of my favorite programs to use when I was completing my masters.
I tried a few different “personal wiki” type programs, my favorite of which was TiddlyWiki. If you haven’t tried it out yet, you should–it’s really pretty cool. A one file notebook, with some pretty slick navigation. The thing I didn’t like about TiddlyWiki though was that it required you to know or use at least a little bit of their wiki markup. The payoff was that by doing so, you ended up with a pretty fun interlinked wiki that was, in the developer’s terms, non-linear. This makes sense to a certain level, because we don’t really think linearly, but it can be a little difficult to get the hang of if you have been conditioned to use files and folders in your physical life as well as in your computerized life.
So, I explored some more, and I found CintaNotes–a lightweight portable application that seems to do just enough of what I actually need to have done and without too much extra fluff. (“How lightweight?” you ask. When I start OneNote, it requires some 25MB of RAM–CintaNotes comes in under 4MB.) All I really need, after all, is a quick place to type some notes–like ideas for the Grumpy Writer’s Grumps or drafts of emails and so on–and I don’t want to have to bother about saving my files, where I saved them, what name I used, and so on. CintaNotes does that. It just has a “backup” folder that includes hourly, daily, and weekly backups of my files, it autosaves, saves on close, lets me search… in other words, it just lets me get to work quickly.
These two programs were pretty well-positioned to do everything I typically did with OneNote; but, could it be even better?
It turns out that, yes, it could be a lot better. This is where services like Dropbox or Syncplicity come into play. And, by “piece of cake” I mean a hell of a lot easier than you could ever expect using OneNote’s built in synchronizing options. All you do is download the files to your synchronized folders. Then whether you are using your computer at work or at home, you have the most recent notes that you’ve been working on….
Afterthought #1: One of the advantages of TiddlyWiki here is that you could easily view your notes online. So, what does that mean for you? Well, you could easily create a low-maintenance website with TiddlyWiki for free. First, simply unzip your empty TiddlyWiki html page to your public folder in, say, Dropbox; second, figure out the URL you would need to share your public TiddlyWiki file (which will probably be something awkward to remember); third, go to a site like http://tr.im and “trim” your long URL into something more user-friendly. Some sites let you customize your trimmed URL. Not quite the same as having your own domain name, but then again, this is free!
Afterthought #2: With a little bit of creativity extending from Afterthought #1, you can create a pretty full-fledged website using your 2GB+ of free storage space. For example, you can upload your pictures, music files, and so on to your public folder, copy the relevant links, add them to your TiddlyWiki, and you’re set. Again, since you only have to worry about maintaining one page, that’s pretty nice. (Oh, and make sure that one of the first things you do when you start using TiddlyWiki is that you turn off the creating a file backup feature. When you think about it, since a lot of these online storage and synchronizing tools have a built-in versioning system, keeping multiple backups on top of that is somewhat redundant.)
Afterthought #3: Some people may not like CintaNotes for exactly the reasons I do like it. In essence, all that you get with CintaNotes is like a nice notepad that gives you super fast search, note tagging, and so on. This makes it not quite OneNote because with OneNote it was easy to attach screenclippings, soundclips, and more to anything you were working on. On the other hand, it is not fully developed and lacks some otherwise important features, like linking to files, or even linking to other notes.
Afterthought #4: I know that neither of these are do exactly what OneNote is capable of doing. If you had a tablet PC, for example, OneNote even lets you write on your computer as if it were a notepad. The closest things you can get to that (as far as I’ve found) are Zoho Notebook and Evernote. Still, try everything out and see what works best for you.
Here are the links:
