Springpad Provides Everyday Note-Taking Alternative to Evernote, OneNote

Melanie Gross
Jun 14, 2011
Updated • Jan 1, 2013
Internet
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Those looking for tools to help them organize their technologically-enhanced lives have plenty of options. Windows users can turn to the expensive prospect of using OneNote, which revolutionized online image clipping and note organization for the PC. Others are quite fond of Evernote, which took many of the features that make OneNote so appealing and put them online for free. For quite some time these two options have been the focus of the world’s note-taking attention, but new contenders are quickly coming up that challenge their dominance in the field. Among them is Springpad, which over the past year has become the favorite of many computer users for general, everyday note organization.

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.

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Comments

  1. ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
    Reply

    Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on August 4, 2012 at 7:57 pm
      Reply

      Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.

    2. Leonidas Burton said on September 4, 2023 at 4:51 am
      Reply

      I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
      http://www.google.com/saved

  2. VioletMoon said on August 16, 2023 at 5:26 pm
    Reply

    @Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!

  3. Karl said on August 17, 2023 at 10:36 pm
    Reply

    @Martin

    The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
    https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/

    Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.

  4. Anonymous said on August 25, 2023 at 11:44 am
    Reply

    Omg a badge!!!
    Some tangible reward lmao.

    It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.

  5. Scroogled said on August 25, 2023 at 10:57 pm
    Reply

    With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.

    1. lollmaoeven said on August 27, 2023 at 6:24 am
      Reply

      This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)

  6. El Duderino said on August 25, 2023 at 11:14 pm
    Reply

    Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.

    And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.

  7. John G. said on August 26, 2023 at 1:29 am
    Reply

    First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm

    For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[

  8. Kalmly said on August 26, 2023 at 4:42 pm
    Reply

    Yes. Please. Fix the comments.

  9. Kim Schmidt said on September 3, 2023 at 3:42 pm
    Reply

    With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.

    Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.

    The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.

    If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.

    And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.

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