Noteworthy • 06.04.13
Even though I’m a programmer, I can’t say I’m the master of technology when it comes to school stuff. I didn’t have a cellphone permanently attached to me back in high school like so many of my younger classmates might have. I grew up during a time when Motorola brick phones were the hip toy. My father bought one when it first came out for something like five thousand dollars, and even though it costed the equivalent of a fancy dinner for a family of five, he would often call us when he’s less than a block away from home, because he’s ridiculous that way.
What I’m trying to say is, I’ve never used my own laptop in class. The fanciest technology that I’ve used in class was a Livescribe pen, which is just a pen that records your writing and the audio playing. It was nice, I didn’t use the audio recording part very often, but when I did need it, it was such a blessing. Asking the teachers to repeat themselves was something I dreaded, so it was nice to be able to leave certain spots blank that I missed and come back to it later.
Having and using a laptop is a requirement for law school. I’m sure if it’s perfectly okay if I wanted to stick with my Livescribe pen, but I’m a faster typist than writer so I’ve been investigating note-taking software. Still, I wanted something that functions like my pen because having the audio recording did come in handy. I found a short list of software that did what I wanted, out of the list I found two that I am currently using and testing: Onenote and Evernote.
After playing around with them for a few days, I found Onenote to better suited for class note taking, if only for the fact that the interface feels like the love-child of a multi-subject notebook and Word. I create these “Notebooks” and it’s saved to Microsoft Skydrive, the beauty of this is: If my laptop is feeling a little suicidal, I don’t have to live in fear of losing my notes.
It’s beautiful. The fact that if I have recorded audio from class, and I click the little play button next a line that I’ve typed, it’ll play audio from that moment, is exactly what I wanted.
I’ve setup Onenote on both my desktop and laptop, and the “Notebooks” sync beautifully on each. When I am home, I prefer to work with the bigger desktop monitor, so it’s helpful that I don’t have to copy files back and forth.
It is now two weeks minus one day till law school starts. Obviously, this means I’m buried in homework. Files after files are sent to all entering class to ensure they will not get enjoy another sunny day, at least not without feeling guilty about procrastinating. All my homework files are nicely filed into my OneNote notebooks, both word and pdf. The sweet thing is, even though one of the pdf file was a grainy scan, OneNote still recognized all the texts in it, so the file is still searchable.
I’m pretty sure Evernote does pretty much everything I’ve described with the added bonus of being free and working on Macs, but I really prefer the interface of OneNote. For now I plan on using both of them: OneNote for school, Evernote for work research.