StenoWeb

One thought that occurred to me this morning is that in the past year or so, I’ve been very lax on what used to be a very strong policy of mine to keep a daily log in some form or another. When I stopped using my Steno pad as an organizer and journal so much, the way I did in high school, I switched over to blogging on nearly a daily basis, one or two of the big events or things that occupied my mind on that particular day. After that, I went back to the Steno Pad again, thinking it would be easier and even was telling people I liked it because it turned on instantly, it had a huge display and great user interface.

After that, when I’d decided to try using my iPhone as a daily log, I pretty much stopped having one most days. Admittedly most of those days weren’t necessarily incredibly important, but it’s still nice to be able to flip through my life as it had been once in the past and see what I was doing and thinking about. Necessary? By no means, but it’s also a way for me to record thoughts, quotes and anecdotes to be used later on my blog, or referred to later while reminiscing, or whatever.

One of the things I tried to do with my TouchPro2 was to determine the best possible way to get take these notes in a digital format, as my desire to be dependent upon paper products continues to decrease. I love paper, but I hate buying it,  hauling it around, not having it when I need or want it the most, and the variety of other inconveniences it can pose, such as my inability to read my own handwriting,  the inability to quickly send any bit of the text to somebody else, and the inability to search it later on. I can’t just search my old steno pads for the text “Geometry the Musical” — unfortunately.

So far, there have been two solutions I tried on the TouchPro2. The first of which seemed the most obvious at first, synchronizing a “Notes from Phone” section of my OneNote notebook between SuperSlab and the phone. This produced a situation where I could pre-create notes for all of the days in the month, then write on them, hypothetically from either the PC or the phone, and then just bring them together with synchronization.

Unfortunately, OneNote is mired in problems with synchronization. It simply can’t sync, or it copies in an entirely new copy of your mobile OneNote notes if you do something like edit the notes on your PC when  you have made other unsynchronized changes on your phone. It can’t just keep a phone and a PC version of that page, it does up a copy of the entire notebook, leaving you to figure out what changes need to be merged manually. Additionally, my phone can be synchronized through either bluetooth, or by hooking it up to USB. However, changing the way you sync the phone actually creates a new notebook in OneNote, which means if I’m not paying attention, I could easily (and have) end up with a half dozen different notebook files with different versions of everything in it. There’s some very huge room for improvement here.

The idea of using OneNote was that eventually Microsoft was going to release the Office OneNote Web App, which promises to be just about as awesome as the OneNote desktop app, but accessible from the Web. There are a few ways this works. Firstly, you can use it in a browser, just like all other web apps. However, the real power that’s supposed to be available is the ability to create a notebook on the web from within the desktop app, and sync it either at an interval, when changes are made, or just on command. Then, you are purportedly able to sync your OneNote web notebook (or one of them) with your phone Again, either continuously, on-demand, as needed or at an interval. I know Office 2010 isn’t officially released yet, but this functionality would have made the beta way better. Way better.

Then, I re-discovered (or initially discovered, I’m never sure which it was) Evernote, an app that lives on the web and in a huge variety of desktop and mobile applications, and that does exactly what I wanted the OneNote web app to do. Except in a far more terrible fashion. The idea is pretty solid, and the execution is, I’d say, at least 70% there. The missing 30% though is the exact reason that I still can’t bring myself to use EverNote for in-class note taking. It just lacks the formatting capability and ease that OneNote has, which won me over to the program for notetaking and information gathering compared with a traditional word processor, outlining app, or text editor. So while Evernote is 70% “there” for me, OneNote is probably 85% so, just because despite some idiosyncrasies with synchronization, it lets me very easily create pretty flexible tables, insert drawings with a mouse or a tablet, and it has better note organization functionality, at least for me. I think the remaining bits of OneNote being suitable for note taking will be fixed by me either setting up a WebDAV server that OneNote can use for note synchronization

The other part of daily recording is willpower and remembering to do so. Part of why I remembered to write things down was that I had the thing in my pocket or carried it around, and a lot of people had this really weird interest in it, often saying things such as “Ooh, what have you put in it today?” or “Oh, can I write something in it?” Odd, but it helped keep me interested too. These days, there’s no real interest in somebody who writes everything down in a mobile phone, and the steno pad is a little bit too cumbersome, especially as sometimes I’m on my computer and sometimes I’m just walking around. I carry one around, but it tends to be for special use cases, like when I have an appointment where I need to take notes, or where I’m working on a specific project or information gathering task where I will need to write information down.

We’ll see what happens from here. I’ll probably continue to try to find new and interesting ways to record things that happen to me throughout the day. I may try doing things like becoming a more active user of Twitter or Facebook to record things as they happen, or I may continue to search for (and find) other notetaking solutions, maybe even choosing to have separate solutions for the phone (where evernote has all the formatting I’d legitimately need) and the computer (where the added complexity of OneNote is very easy to use and helpful) and even a physical note taking “platform” like provisioning a new steno pad for the fall 2010 semester.

As of last night, I’ve started using the iPhone again, both to continue reading the most recent book club book, as well as to listen to music as I walk around, or am waiting for things to happen. This is the iPhone that, as I have mentioned several times, is pretty severely broken. I hadn’t thought of it in this way before, but you might say that it’s past its prime.

I was told recently by one of my supervisors that there have recently been a few rumors floating about concerining a version of the newest iPhone hardware for VerizonWireless, and I almost immediately said (paraphrased slightly), “I don’t actually think it’ll happen, as Apple has had three hardware generations’ opportunity to do this, but if they do, I might have to be the first in line to get one.”

It was odd, thinking about getting another iPhone. My supervisor then asked  why I’d do that, especially as I’m very strongly on the record as having switched to a Windows Mobile handset, and being interested in Android-based handsets.

Part of what would make a new generation of the iPhone significant, for me, is the possibility that I could have the incredible ease of use, fantastic Internet browser, fantastic calendar and contacts applications, along with the fantastic music playing application, in a larger form factor (hypothetically) along with some multitasking that would let Pandora or other background-suitable apps like an SSH client or IM application continue to run in the background.

… Anyway, it occurs to me that not only is my specific iPhone a little bit physically damaged, but that the first generation, EDGE iPhones in general are old. They can run the current iPhone software, but for how long? An interesting thing about which to think, as soon as I get over the fact that the TouchPro2 is extremely unlikely to ever run Windows Phone 7, even with the help of the homebrew community.