Posts tagged “review”
iA Writer as a Zettelkasten Note Archive
Lorenzo wrote an article about how to use iA Writer for macOS as your Zettelkasten note archive. Apparently, iA Writer has a sufficiently quick search for large archives (10,000 notes big, in fact), which surprises me.
As a native macOS app, you can use iA Writer to sync with Dropbox, iCloud, and other folder-based sync services and either use their mobile or Windows counterparts, or whatever else you like. No boxing-in.
Have a look at Lorenzo’s review for all the juicy details. Great work!
Using Trello as a Zettel Note Archive
If you paid attention to the comments feed of the past couple of months, you will know Nick already. He’s tinkering with interesting plain text stuff – I won’t spoil anything right now; I hope Nick will some day show us the power of plumber, instead. Then just like that he tried out Trello as a Zettelkasten note archive and wrote this amazingly detailed review, including animated GIFs and a sample Trello board to demonstrate what the Trello software can do. This is probably the most detailed post on the entire blog, with more than 50 links and 15 images!
OneNote Review
Today DutchPete, one of the most avid commenters on this blog, will help us fill the gap in software reviews for Windows by talking about OneNote as a Zettelkasten note archive. OneNote is part of the Microsoft Office family and thus available for a lot of different platforms, too, so this is not strictly speaking a PC-centered review. Now let’s see which conventions and techniques make DutchPete productive.
Tasks and Goals of my Daily Review
I forgot to share my repeating maintenance tasks with you! Yesterday, I wrote about my morning routine. It helps me clear my mind and to surface my anxieties. I feel a lot better afterwards – less clouded, less sub-consciously driven. Part of that routine is a daily review. It’s a daily recurring project:
How a Daily Review Routine Improved My Life and Work
I have picked up a habit which improves my well-being and helps me focus on the important parts in my life. It’s a daily review habit. I have tried to install this habit a few years ago already but failed miserably. A huge factor for my success in sticking to this habit is that I have a working morning ritual installed already. With the existing routine as a foundation, I simply had to attach this small habit and things were good.
DEVONthink as a Zettelkasten Note Archive
Today we host our good friend Marko as he tells us of the basic note-taking capabilities of DEVONthink and its appliance to the Zettelkasten method. The Zettelkasten method propagates heavy use of the note archive, stuffed with your own interpretations of things you have learned. The user we have in mind usually is a student of humanities, reading a lot and writing a lot. DEVONthink is capable of doing far more than managing notes, though. It can also in part replace a reference manager. Or you may benefit from its ability to deal with large amounts of files when it comes to seeking similarities in original sources. This can become really interesting for historians, for example.
Using nvALT as a Zettel Note Archive
I want to start this series of reviews with a software I’m fairly familiar with. While most things apply to the Notational Velocity base application, I will talk about nvALT exclusively in this review. nvALT is a fork by Brett Terpstra and David Halter of the original Notational Velocity, which was created by Zachary Schneirov, and a few modifications by yours truly. It’s Open Source, free, and very popular.
Baseline for Zettelkasten Software Reviews
I’m going to take a close look at applications to find out which are suitable to implement the Zettelkasten note archive. I already talked about reference managers. While reference managers can be switched pretty easily, migrating a database of notes is far from being a trivial task, depending on the software you used in the past. Therefore, we have to chose how to implement the note archive with great care. Here you’ll find my criteria.