This article will walk you through some of the features of Springpad that set it apart from Evernote and OneNote, so if you haven’t already, you may want to jump over to Springpad’s website and sign up.

The first time you log in you will see one of Springpad’s most visually attractive features – your ready-made home theme. Make a selection, upload a profile photo if you think you need one, and then click next. Springpad will walk you through its unique organization system, which centers on the usual notebooks but makes them available through a graphical interface that you may find friendlier than that of OneNote and Evernote.

Where Springpad takes a sharp turn away from its competition is when you add notes to your notebooks by “looking things up.” For example, let’s say that you’ve just heard of a new album but don’t have time to look into it right away. By clicking the plus sign near the top of the screen and selecting Look it up, you bring up a search field which will crawl select sites for more information. By typing in the album and selecting the Album tab, Springpad presents you with a list of possible matches for your search. Selecting one adds it to your general notebook, where you can now find information about not only where the album can be purchased and for how much, but also when it was released and where the artist has been touring lately. You can even “Like” the album to Facebook, straight from your Springpad.

There are other quirks Springpad has that its competition does not. The checklist feature found in other note taking applications is streamlined in Springpad, and alerts can be set up to remind you to do things on the lists you create. You can sync your Google Calendar to your Springpad account, leaving the Google side of your calendar untouched but automatically providing additional information on Springpad’s side.

In conclusion, it is easy to see that Springpad is different from Evernote and OneNote is some distinct ways. These differences will not be right for everyone by any stretch of the imagination. Students will probably still find OneNote the best choice available, and computer users who are just trying to keep track of the bulky information they pull from the internet will still probably prefer Evernote. Yet if you are looking to add more organization to your life, if you are less interested in the information you are getting and more interested in putting it into arrangements that are more meaningful to you, then you may find Springpad the best possible option.

I’m a university student and having spent a few weeks attempting to organise my notes with MS Word (Trial Edition) I was quite excited to discover this great note taking application. OneNote really is useful, but I just couldn’t help feel as though it was a little overkill for me and how I would use it.

OneNote is targeted more at people working in business of course, which is shame because Microsoft is really losing out on the student market. In fact there are two main reasons I couldn’t effectively use OneNote:

• Organisation: Like many students I’m very unorganised. In fact considering most students are, designing a note taking program with this in mind would be a good decision.
• Too much for too little: What other reason aside from lectures and tutorials would I use OneNote? Sure I tried using it for some other things as well, but really it just feels like too big an application for what I need it for.

Enter EverNote.

I had a beta invitation to EverNote months ago, however based on reports of bugginess and performance issues I waited till the service has improved a little.

After the latest version 3.0 update yesterday I have begun to use EverNote for all my notetaking needs. I quickly discovered it’s a fantastic application for what I need it for. Here is why:

• Synchronisation: EverNote is running a ‘freemium’ model for their service. What? Pay?! I’m quite glad of this as it means EverNote is very likely to stick around as they have an actual business model! You will get 40mb free data synchronisation each month between different computers and mobile devices.
• Organisation: Is far easier and simpler, Use notebooks, tags and attributes to organise all your content. It is much quicker to just get in and start working and easier later to locate what you wrote through the search focused toolbar.
• Search in Images: It could still do with a lot of improvements but the Image searching feature of EverNote is pretty impressive. It will locate any text within any image you paste into your notes. You can also take screen clippings like OneNote which is handy.

In essence EverNote is a killer note taking product I couldn’t recommend more.

If you miss a class you still can take a look at the notes online without having to rely on friends who bring them to your house. Even better is that everyone in the group may edit or add content to those notes making it fairly easy to create a comprehensive summary of what happened during a course.

Once completed notes can be printed or exported in pdf and doc format for further editing or archiving those notes.

The editor can probably compared to Notepad with just a few needed formatting options added such as bold or underlined text and headlines. I was not able to find a way to upload images though which would be a real nice feature if you consider that many courses nowadays use graphics in their presentation.

Notesake converts mathematical equations into images and seems to support Latex although I was not really able to find any information on their site about the latter.

If they add private image hosting, offer a good online help explaining all the hidden functions and probably an import function they would really rock the note taking web. As of now this is an interesting online service that could to better.

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