OneNote vs Evernote
Ok, let me preface this by saying I'm not finished with David Allen's book yet. But, I've used several software packages over the years to organize my notes for work. I'm something of a text editor junkie, so I try out new text manipulation applications frequently. Originally, I used simple text files with a dumbed down WIKI syntax and a mode in my text editor that let me jump from one file link to another based on this syntax. I graduated from that to a software program called KeyNote (
http://www.tranglos.com/free/keynote.html). This program was very nice (and feature wise, fairly close to oneNote). It had some excellent features like minimizing to the system tray, and a key stroke combo for calling it back up, but had a small annoyance in that the default font was hard to read, and changing the default font in the program settings didn't work. It is open source, but currently dropped by the original developer. Hopefully someone, somewhere will pick it up and fix this and any other issues as well.
Enter OneNote and Evernote. I had heard of OneNote from advertisements in magazines (though the Microsoft marketing juggernaut hasn't done much with this program). I read a paid article on how some grad students had use the program to track their research, and help them write their papers. Evernote, I simply stumbled across when searching for more objective information and reviews on OneNote.
My first impression of OneNote. Very polished, nice features. I like the mutiple levels of tabs. You can create folders that appear in the top tab section, which take you to other groups of tabs. This allows you to group your projects together, and then group project specific information together. As a final layer of grouping, you can create multiple pages of information on each subject through the page tabs that line either the left or right of the application, depending on user preference.
One of my favorite features is the ability to hilite specific pieces of information (more than just a bold or italic font). If you're not familiar with this feature, Word (and several other word processors) allows you to mark text as if with a hiliter pen. For me, it seems to make the desired text jump out more than just a bold face or italic font. As a Microsoft Office application, the editing UI should be familiar to most people. Most of the things you can do in Word, you can do in OneNote.
I don't have a tablet, so I can't speak to the handwriting recognition, but reviews I have read tout that as a top notch feature.
One feature that people rave about that I'm not as keen on is the abiltiy to freeform type. This means that wherever you click on the editing page is where your notes will go. This allows you to do some column based note taking, or even layer notes on top of notes (they go transparent when they aren't active). Text boxes can be moved around by clicking a small tab line at the top of each note, or joined by dragging one note into the text body of another note. This annoyed me, because I tend to like my notes to left align, much like a text editor or word processor, but it did allow me to cut a list of tasks gleaned from a recent meeting and paste them next to my notes from the meeting at the top of the page. In my other notes applications, this list appeared at the end of a lengthy outline of the meeting. That was nice, but it bothers me, when all I am trying to do is get focus to the application by clicking somewhere in the window, and a new text box appears with the cursor in it. Perhaps it is something I'll get used to, and I'll rave about the feature, but right now, it's different than I'm expecting so it throws me off.
Microsoft offers a 60 day trial of the program (180 days if you're a student), and I think that's an excellent way to get aquainted with the program, and a longer trial period than most competing applications. Although I generally am not a Microsoft fan (I've been Linux system administrator, and a developer on several open source software packages), OneNote seems at this point to be a very useful program. And with the features very similar to programs I've already been using, the learning curve is not very steep.
My first impression of Evernote. Very cool concept. Basically, they look at the editing area as a tape of text. Each note takes up a position on the tape, much like frames on a film reel. In this manner, you look at your notes in temporal order, with your oldest notes at the head of the tape, and the most recent notes at the end. In fact, on one side of the application, they have a "Time Band" that shows what day and time your notes were created, so you can jump to notes based on the day you wrote them.
Were this all it could do, it would be an interesting concept, but not very useful. However, they added the concept of categories. There are some pre-defined categories, such as notes with images, ink notes (free hand drawn), and Text notes. The user can also specify custom categories, and a single note can be part of many different categories. This is similar to categories in Outlook, or, if you are familiar with Google's GMail service, similar to Labels. I'm really looking forward to playing with this feature in terms of GTD, because It means I can have a global action list, and a project specific action list without the overhead of having to maintain the global list, simply by having my projects specific lists also have the global list category. It also has the ability to create new categories based on keywords in the notes. It seemd to automatically create one called "Button" for me when it detected that I had a couple of notes that shared that word. Very interesting.
Evernote also has shortcuts to allow you to jump to a new note from any application, or to paste into a new note from any application. Evernote also can minimize to the tray on close, instead of exiting the application. These features combine to make adding notes to the text tape very easy.
All is not rosy in Evernote though. The editing capabilities seem limited at this point. It doesn't have the hiliter feature present in OneNote. Advanced editing is made more difficult because things like bulleted lists, and numbered lists are hidden behind menus or use obscure shortcuts. In fact, the only place I could find the list features was in a context menu right clicking in the note. They seemed to have tried to unclutter the interface so much that basic features are actually obscured. Although I prefer keyboard shortcuts to icon bars, when I'm learning a new application, icon bars are nice.
Evernote has a free and a paid version. I've only used the free version to date, and I wasn't able to find a feature comparison of the two versions on their website. There may be even better features in the paid version, but most of the additional features seemed to be centered around the ink note feature (handwriting recognition and shape recognition for example). There is a 30 day trial of the paid version of Evernote, so if you intend to use it with a tablet, you may want to give that version a run.
Wow, this post has gotten much longer than I had intended. I hope this was useful, but your mileage might vary based on how you prefer to work.
! The concept of having one note placed in multiple categories, the ability to automatically categorize (tag) notes, and the category intersection panel are all priceless. I was a big fan of TreePad (similar to the sunny notes spam above) but EverNote allows for so much more flexibility when it comes to organizing.