Rand Wacker

Recently I was looking for a good note-taking solution that was a little more flexible than the venerable pen-and-paper solution for work, home, and school. My goal was to find a lightweight system that I could use to keep all manner of random little scribblings and clippings. I am constantly pruning my notes and moving them out to more fleshed out documents so I wasn’t worried about creating a massive tome of data, but I knew that the organization would need to be rather flexible to match my chaotic thought processes. Robust searching was paramount.

I checked out a raft of the usual suspects:

• VoodooPad - Almost too unstructured. I would have to maintain my own hierarchy index. In general I find this to be a problem with most/all Wiki systems.
• MacJournal - Single level of hierarchy for the index, and limited search capabilities. Seemed more suited to creating content to publish elsewhere.
• Hog Bay Notepad - Nice cross between a journal and an outlining system, but again it had a limited hierarchy.

Then I realized that I really was looking for some type of glorified outlining system. For the past couple of years I have really liked using OmniOutliner for organizing small projects and notes. Its navigation was limited for really large documents though. Most of the stuff I’ve tried out of OmniGroup has been really high quality, its cousin OmniGraffle Professional totally rocks for diagraming.

I guess its been a few weeks now that they’ve released OmniOutliner 3.0 (as well as a Professional version). This thing is fantastic. I can define exactly how many levels of high-level navigation I have in the document overview, jump too and zoom in on any particular section. Drag and drop various clippings, images, even entire files for my notes. It takes audio-recordings right in the outline (must have taken that idea from Microsoft’s Office 2004), and is a lot more configurable in its display to help you visually organize your data better. In general, its a great solution for what I was looking for. The only feature request I’ve filed so far is the ability to open multiple windows to view different places in the same document.

Now, I’ve just got to figure out some type of Bluetooth-enabled drawing stylus that I can use too scratch random hand-drawn pictures and graphs in to my system.

If you’ve got a Mac, check them out. They likely came bundled with the original OS installation.