Five Best Note Taking Applications [Hive Five]

Whether you're headed back to school this fall or you just want a better way to keep your notes, memos, and other tidbits of information organized, you have a number of applications to choose from. Some of them just help you get your thoughts down quickly, others sync with online services that organize your notes for you. Here are, based on your nominations, the top five apps or services for the job.

We asked you earlier in the week which applications or services you used to take notes and organize your thoughts so you could get back to them quickly. You responded, and we collected the votes. Now we're back to highlight the top five. Photo by MagneticNorth.

Evernote

Evernote helps you remember everything-and by everything, we really do mean everything. The service's webapp, desktop apps for Windows and Mac OS, mobile apps for iPhone and iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7, and even WebOS mean that Evernote can help you take notes, save them, tag them with a location, create and organize notebooks, and share them anywhere you are and on any device you happen to have on you. Evernote is great for taking notes and organizing them, but it's just as good at letting you capture, scan, and save objects in real life, clip web pages you browse, and share them with friends, colleagues, and classmates.

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Springpad

Springpad takes the hassle out of organizing your notes and thoughts for you, and organizes everything without your help. You have to set up a few basic categories, but of all of the note taking services, Springpad is probably the best at automatically guessing what it is you've just clipped from the web, snapped a photo of, or uploaded to your notebooks and organizing it without your help. Products you've saved automatically go into a wishlist and you're alerted on price drops, notes go into notebooks organized by topic, and more. Plus, Springpad's webapp and mobile app for iPhone, iPad, and Android mean you're never without your notes and the ability to access them. Plus, the service just updated to incorporate your Facebook friends' likes and interests to your account.

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MS OneNote

OneNote grew from a side-component of Microsoft Office (for Windows) into a full-fledged and robust note taking and organization tool in its own right. The tool functions like a basic word proessor, but it saves automatically, lets you enter any kind of information anywhere, create and save notebooks for specific subjects and projects, and then share those notes and notebooks with others. OneNote is easy to get started with and use, and makes note taking and organization incredibly simple. While OneNote is part of Microsoft Office, you can download versions of the suite for the iPhone and for Windows Phone 7, and use the OneNote webapp to take and save notes on the go from any web-enabled device.

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Simplenote

Simplenote is easy to use, free, and has a robust user and developer community behind it creating apps and utilities that plug into the service to make it even easier to use. Simplenote lets you easily jot down your thoughts and organize them by tag, search note contents and tags later to find what you need again later, search through revision history for your notes, share them with others, and access them on any web-enabled device. Simplenote does have premium accounts, but all of the service's basic functions are free. There are Simplenote apps for the web and iOS, but developers have built dozens of notetaking apps that work in conjunction with Simplenote for Windows and Mac OS.

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Pen(cil) and Paper

Many of you said you don't need a special app to take notes: you don't even need a computer or a tablet to stay organized. Sometimes the oldest methods are the best, and you said that when you head to class or into a meeting, you bring pen and paper instead of laptop or tablet. What happens to those notes after the meeting vary; some of you type them up and store them, others just organize your paper notes, but for many of you paper and pen (or pencil) is the way to go. Photo by Ramunas Geciauskas.

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Now that you've seen the top five contenders, it's time to vote for an all-out winner.

Honorable mentions this week go out to Notational Velocity and Catch, both of which have a large and dedicated following. Notational Velocity is Mac only, but boasts the ability to sync with Simplenote, the ability to search note content, title, and tags quickly, and make it incredibly easy to encrypt, save, and retrieve your important data. Catch on the other hand sports a robust webapp and mobile apps for the iPhone. iPad, and Android devices. It also keeps your notes secure, lets you share them on Twitter, and allows you to clip and save almost anything you want to keep and remember later.

Also worth mentioning is the venerable text editor-many of you said you use whatever text editor you have on hand instead of a specific app or service, and that suits you just fine. Have anything to say about the contenders? Did your favorite not make the list? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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You can reach Alan Henry, the author of this post, at alan@lifehacker.com, or better yet, follow him on Twitter or Google+.

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/JyDqpK9JXfc/five-best-note-taking-applications

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