Note taking is and almost daily activity for me, be it project meetings, society minuting or lecture notes, one of the main tasks I use my LifeDrive (and now my new Treo) for is note taking.
I am not one for using anything but the simplest tool for the job, typically I just knock my notes out in memo or a couple of bullet points WordToGo, this has worked satisfactorily for as long as I can remember, it’s not elegant and it does take a while to decipher notes though, but it gets the job done.
SplashNotes peaked my interest; I must admit I was skeptical about how useful a note taking program would be, I mean there’s not much to note taking right? So I installed SplashNoes on my PC (it works nicely under Vista), sync’d it onto my Treo and popped off to a business meeting.
One of my problems with note taking on my Treo was the flow of ideas; it was hard to see what new ideas are and what are simply sub ideas, since my typical note taking session is 100 points long things get messy.
I get to my meeting which happened to be a project brainstorming meeting, I start up Splash Notes and create a blank note page, nothing hugely special here I thought, it’s just a list of bullet points.
The first note goes in; Topic A. We quickly move onto Topic B, then someone chirps back with an idea for Topic A… This is where I usually have problems; I have to scroll back up, insert a new line break, and enter the text (which is most likely on the wrong line). Wait a minute I can just add another line in with the tap of an icon, oh and I can tab it in with another tap…
By the end of the meeting I was at about 60 points, the difference today was they were all neatly laid out with varying tabbing and I could follow the train of thought without thinking, brilliant.
I get back home, pop my Treo in it’s cradle and sync it. Then I open up SplashNotes on my PC and right there in front of me are my notes, all neatly formatted exactly the same as on my Treo. I select all and copy it into Word, a quick bit of formatting and my meeting minutes are done in record time!
With regards to features SplashNotes contains everything you need, you can add check boxes, or number the bullet points in different styles (Roman, legal etc.), tabbing is done simply with two arrow buttons in the main screen, one for tabbing in, and one for tabbing out. It’s main view is clear, uncluttered and very intuitive.
So do I like SplashNotes? Simply put, yes I love it. If you do any kind of note taking or project outlining on your Palm then is simply worth its memory footprint in gold, it’s boost to my own productivity was huge I may even consider a hard button for it!
Pop over to SplashData's website and download a trial to see for yourself!