I've been playing with Microsoft's OneNote Beta. There are some really cool things about it.

Better note taking ability than Journal.
Where Journal is like digital paper, OneNote is like a digital scrapbook. I like that it provides a structure for organizing pages and organizing notes within pages, you still have a lot of freedom and have to do your own organizing, but OneNote gives you facility to group things easier, just by dragging objects together. With Journal, you have to circle things with the right click or with the lasso for temporary grouping or do a group command. However, I've had some trouble with ink speed. Sometimes there is a delay with my tablet and i get fragments of ink on the page. Don't know if that's the slowness of this tablet or the bloat of OneNote, but Journal inking is more responsive.

Combining Ink and text
I like having ink and text abilities, mostly seamless in the same app. It was cool to see having 1 text object and 1 note object and combining them into a single list.

Pen responsiveness
As stated above, sometimes responsiveness to the pen has been tough. I still like using one note better with a mouse than a pen because of targeting and lack of precision of the pen. I'm guessing that they will re-render the large icons in the full release. just scaling the 16x16s is grotesque. While you can show large icons for the toolbars, selecting and moving objects is still a bit dicey with the pen.

Quicknote
There are things i really like about the quick note feature, but it's kind of a misnomer. the first time it starts up, it's like launching the app, so it's not that quick. The cool thing about that, however, is that you can expand a quick note to become a full instance of the app.

10:53:37 AM    comment []