I’ve taken to using Google Documents for recording notes and the like for my Jackal project. I like using gDocs because my information is available where ever there is a computer with internet access and a web browser, the content is shareable (or not), it can be exported as a .doc, .html, or posted to a blog and the whole thing is more or less searchable.
At lunch, I played around with Microsoft OneNote and wondered if there are any writers out there who use OneNote to help them organize random musings that are scribbled down for future reference. I see the utility of OneNote but I like that gDocs is web-based. I tried out Google Notebook and found that it wasn’t quite as robust as OneNote. I also looked at Zoho Notebook, another web-based app which has more flash and can do a bit more on the presentation side than gNote. A major downside of Zoho- the absence of a search option, or at least, none that I can find. If I wanted to search a single Zoho page, I can use the browser find (ctrl + f) but I can’t search across multiple pages in one notebook- or across multiple notebooks- as I can in gNote. gNote also lets me tag and comment on individual elements within a page.
I’m not sure whether or not these tools will be useful for my projects. I may stick with using gDocs for now, simply because there is a lot of content to move (in the case of Jackal– the Gwyn Chronicles notes exist both in handwritten form and as .txt files). My time is better invested in continuing to work rather than playing with new programs.
If others are interested, I found a list of open-source alternatives to Microsoft OneNote here.
Playing in Puddles 