A while back I asked around on twitter about the best way to take notes digitally. I was curious whether people use digital pens, iphone apps, netbooks or anything else. There was a reason I was asking….

For the last 5 years I have kept hardback notebooks at work to take notes in meetings - a common system amongst developers. I’ve never felt it suited me - realistically its about the only writing that I actually do with a pen. My particular concerns were that I didn’t have access to my notebook at home or around campus, I couldn’t easily search for anything in it, and I had no real reason to refer to it. In short, it was non-digital. Everything else I interact with is, which means I am used to being able to search through text, access things from anywhere, and integrate across tasks to increase usefulness. My notebook was effectively useless - I constantly took notes that never became useful to me, and that I didn’t tend to read once I’d written them. It makes sense to me that I rid myself of the final bit of paper and become a paperless person.

Anyway, most people that left me comments said that netbooks were good (and didn’t take as long to boot as I’d thought), that digital pens sounded cool but no-one had one, and that mobiles provide good spur of the moment note taking.

I thought I’d share with you the solution that I came up with, and am currently trialling at work. After much searching, I found an online service called Evernote that lets you create an account, take notes online, save them and search them. You can tag them, group them, add URLS, clip webpages and include snippets. Poifect.  But here is the cool bit…

  • They have a Mac app that you can use as a client, and sync online
  • They have a Windows app for the same purpose
  • They have an iPhone app that also syncs with the online service, lets you take images, and can tag notes with your geo-location

Awesome. I have digital notes on my work mac, my home PC, my iPhone and on an Asus eeePC for meetings. I take the eeePC when I think I’m likely to need to take notes and the rest of the time I have my iPhone. If needed I can use any web-enabled PC to access my notes. I think I’m paperless…