What the Heck was I Thinking!?

A progress report:
I have toyed with the Hipster PDA for several months. I’ve looked at the package of 3x5 card formats, printed samples of nearly all of them to see what works with me, and fussed around with various ways to use them. All, seemingly, to no real avail - I still don’t have a system that I have confidence in.
I should explain, I have a Palm Tungsten E - nice, contains tons of information, has Note Studio 3.1 a very nice browserlike/wiki-like program that’s easy to use. I had used Megawiki before I bought the T|E, but that didn’t work under the new OS. I also cannot take my T|E into the office, nor can I connect it to my work scheduling and contact information - company rules. I also frequently find myself in places where an electronic PDA is not permitted by my hosts. That’s why I had been interested in the hipster - analog is allowed wherever I go.
I think I can make use of the hipster 3x5 format, but I’ve got to find ways to get the information from the 3x5s into my computer so I can do some other organizing with it. I frequently use email (both Yahoo! and Gmail) both at work, when I travel and at home. I’ve seen the articles advocating the use of Gmail for next actions (ala David Allen). Yahoo! also has a Notes section on their web mail, so I can use that. I just haven’t found the right way(s) to record in analog format, find the right place and method to transfer to electronic format (available whereever I find myself, since I can’t predict where, when or in what context I might need some things).

One thing I have come to see - I bought a 3x5 calendar book for 2006. I had found one of those to be very useful in the past. It was cheap, looked nice, and may turn out to be the best way to do things for me. In the mean time, I’m using the week view hPDA cards in a small card holder. I’ve printed enough to use through the end of the year. What I’ve done is printed only on one side, leaving the other blank to write notes on. If this turns out to be the easiest way for me to keep track, I’ll have a nice gift to give someone at the office… the other week-view schedule.
I also have other 3x5 cards in my holder for other kinds of notes, but blank ones seem the kind I like the best.

More later…

I just received a copy of Note Studio 3. There has been extensive beta testing of this update to the application, with numerous “under the hood” changes to the file format and other improvements. Much of the change that went into this major revision is not evident to the casual user. Some of the changes are significant for people with multiple machines (especially mixed PC and Mac communities) - e.g., group access to shared NS files. Others, the change to a new XML standard format, aren’t evident, except to someone with a lot of technical skills - that leaves me safely out! It works very well and the conversion process was seamless from 2.09.

The authors have promised additional fixes and additions over the next several months.

One of the neat tricks that Note Studio lets you do is generate, either temporarily or in a new page, backlinks to a page. This can be done on either the Palm or desktop. Thus, if you want to know (and especially if you want to jump back and forth between) what links are connected to the page you’re on, you can get a listing of them.

On the desktop, this is one of two views under the Navigate button. On the Palm, you press and hold a link to generate a backlink list. This becomes a page that you can rename and keep within the book.

Only backlinks within the current book (the one you’re viewing) are listed.

This helps me when I’m looking at a page well down in my book and want to remember all the ways that I might have come to this point.

One more thing about Note Studio that I’d like to see - a find feature that highlights the text in the searched record and allows you to open the page for editing at that point. Otherwise, I’m strongly inclined to creat only short pages of text so that I can find the parts I want more easily.

What is it about Note Studio that I don’t like?
* No linking to other apps in the Palm suite.
Yes, I’ve heard that PSlink will link from within Note Studio to other apps. It requires that you be in edit mode to have the link active, which means that you don’t have the benefit of the wiki syntax display. That reminds me of working with the old versions of Framemaker - you see everything that’s going on, whether you want to or not. I’m sure a dune buggy ride is exhilerating, but I’d like a car with fenders, doors, roof, and hood for my daily drive to work.

* No easy way to copy or move pages between books.
That is one of the complaints I’ve heard others mention as well. The cut, copy, and paste process is primitive at best. Since the authors of the program have changed to an XML data structure, I hope they will be able to add lots of new features, including this one.

* Printing - you want it printed, here it comes.
There’s no way to reformat printing to some other size, for example 3x5 card or 5 1/2 by 8 1/2. Not sure how this could be done (remember, I’m no programmer), but I wonder if there isn’t a way to skin this cat.

* There is a page size limit of 30K - sounds fairly large, but what if I want to pour in a word document that I have found or some other such thing that’s larger than 30K? This has to do with Palm’s record size limit as I understand it.

* No alarm feature - I can’t use this as a more full-featured PIM, since I can’t use my calendar pages to pop up a reminder that I need to do something without using another application and rewriting the information.

What I’d like is a write-once-use-many-times type of Wiki on both the Palm and the desktop.

Anybody have any ideas?

So, what is it about Note Studio that I like?
* As I said in my earlier post - I love the fact that the application has a desktop companion that behaves mostly the same as the Palm app. There are slight variations (tables behave in the desktop app but don’t do so well on the Palm), but for the most part they look and behave the same.

I tried Cyberpoche, from Jacques Turbe, with his desktop counterpart - Note Tab Pro. Whew! That sucker is a like a power tool with all the attachments! I am not a programmer and I don’t play one on the web, so I quickly got lost in the MANY features of Note Tab Pro. Never could get it to do what Jacques said. Too hard, too steep a learning curve…gimme something simple for my simple mind. That’s where I found Note Studio.

* You can link across books and add and remove books.
This is sweet. I have been using a couple of books for my information on the Palm. One covers my main pages. Another covers all my contact information, cross-linked between alphabetic and category. I can have as many categories as I’ve go names to call things. One trick I learned was to dump all my memos, work up all the information I need for pages in an editor (I use Edit Pad Lite from JGSoft), put those into a spreadsheet to get individual “memos,” aka rows, then copy them into the Palm memo desktop. That creates all the memos for me. I change any categories I want to change, then import them into Note Studio! Voila! I have multiple pages (linked by categories on a main page) in a Note Studio book.

Wikis and Palm Handhelds
Another factor in my organizing style is that I see connections everywhere. I have notes about someone that lists the phone number or address, which connects in my mind to my address book/PIM/Palm. That’s why I was very excited to find wikis. My preferred wiki, only because it acts mostly the same on Palm or on desktop, is Note Studio. There are things it doesn’t do that I’d love to have it do. There are things it does that I’d rather it didn’t do. But all in all it does onething quite well - behaves the same on desktop and on Palm.

Before I bought my Palm T|E, I had an older Palm IIIC. It was fine, but I had to turn it back in when I switched assignments at work. The new office didn’t allow any Palms of any kind in the office area. When I switched, I lost my then favorite app - MegaWiki. That app was a neat gadget! I could link things all over my Palm. I could link to or from appointments (or create one if none existed), addresses, memos and todos. BUT… (there’s that big but again) it only worked on the Palm, there was no desktop equivalent. I didn’t realize how important that was until I used Note Studio. I tried several other MegaWiki-like apps - Acrowiki, PSLink, Mobile Note (the freeware ver 0.6), etc. - but none of them really fit the bill. Then I tried Note Studio and found out that the plus - desktop behaved the same as the Palm app - far outweighed the shortcomings.