Note Taking Apps

The history of note taking apps

- According to me (Seth)

In the beginning

Evernote is the “OG” when it comes to note taking apps. I guess OneNote was around before Evernote was, but in the beginning OneNote was behind the 8 ball because it didn’t have the cloud based capabilities it has now.

Over time Evernote got clunky. It was like it was trying to be too many things and I was finding it harder and harder to find things in it.

OneNote

I went back to OneNote for a while, but I lost confidence that I was able to find my notebooks. It seems that Microsoft has made a mess with their business accounts vs personal accounts vs school accounts and somehow I’ve acquired all of them tied to my Nerd Enterprises, Inc. Email. So the last time I tried signing into OneNote I was eventually able to find my notebooks, but with difficulty and those difficulties made me nervous. As in, this time I found them, but I might not be so lucky next time.

ClickUp & NoteJoy

Then I started using ClickUp because their Docs feature is awesome. Then I ran into a little bug with the docs feature while I was reading and tying to take notes in it on my mobile. Plus I really want a note taking app that is just that. So I checked out an app I had read about in an article on note taking apps. It’s called NoteJoy and I’ve been playing around with it, and I like it so far.

Hypernotes

Most recently I’ve been looking at something brand new (like Beta new) called “Hypernotes.”

Remember the guys who made Wunderlist, before it was sold to Microsoft? Then Microsoft bought it, and in 2020 they ate it. So these other guys came out with Zenkit Todo. It was built with the same look and feel as Wunderlist. They also have Zenkit Base which is a more robust / dynamic database tool.

I’ve talked to one of the guys at Zenkit. They are building a really interesting model. Think Zoho, where there are many different apps that serve a wide range of purposes. But they all sit on top of one giant database, so as you connect new apps in their ecosystem the data is easily shared between them. This is powerful.

So now I am looking at Hypernotes and I really like it. This is going to sound dumb but I really love the little graphic it creates when you set up a new notebook.

When you get into the note taking part it has a Dynalist-like layout with the bullet points. But it has some really interesting features including a graph that lets you link notes in a mind-map style, but without the linear restrictions most mind mapping tools have.