TabletPC2 has it’s list out!

29 November 2006 Posted By: Tracy
Posted in: Blog Related, Hardware, Websites

Every year I love the Christmas list TabletPC2.com puts out. Cute, creative, and great stuff! If you’re looking for ideas for your own list, a gift for someone, or just an addition to your collection, it’s a great place to start!

There are Tablet PCs, Ultra Mobile PCs - UMPC’s, MP3 and DVD players. Home theatre Controllers, Speakers in Audio and Entertainment, Headsets, Digital Cameras and Printers. Digital Media, Everything Bluetooth innovations, i Pods, Bags and Cases, Storage, Software, Accessories and more.

BTW, StudentTabletPC turns two this Friday, Dec. 1st!!! I’ll be thinking of ideas of ways to celebrate, so check back later!

iTablet in 2007?

26 November 2006 Posted By: Andrew
Posted in: News

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.

Some interesting news out of Engadet, they heard a rumor that a Mac tablet is claimed for a mid-2007 launch:

apparently “sources in Taiwan” have informed Smarthouse that Apple has units in the works for education and enterprise verticals — two areas they’ve mildly backed away from in the past couple of years. If the rumor is to believed, the device will launch mid-2007

However, like all good things, this one may be too good to be true. And so like Engadget, I too will be “tucking this one away for reference and little else.”

Journal: the undervalued notes program

8 November 2006 Posted By: Tracy
Posted in: Blog Related

Yes, you heard me. Journal is undervalued. Let’s show a little Journal love today.



In light of my recent OneNote fun, I had switched to Journal out of need since all I had installed was a broken OneNote beta and Journal. When the beta wouldn’t install again so I could get to my notes, I panicked and installed the OneNote 2007 Beta 2 on another computer in the house, printed all my OneNote notes to Journal, and then copied all the Journal files to my tablet. It was Journal that I finished up my busy week with since I didn’t have time to try to figure out what was going on with my beta of OneNote.

(Later that week I found out there were remnants of the beta refresh even after uninstalling it that not even regular window’s cleaners would remove. I had to use CCleaner to remove the remaining parts before it would reinstall. Anyone who knows the steps of reinstalling the Office 2007 beta knows this took quite a while to do.)

What did I gain from this? Well, I’m still only using Journal. That’s right. This whole Journal thing is working for me. I really thought I’d miss little things about OneNote after using it all semester, especially after using the new OneNote all semester with all the new features. Did I slip and hit my head at some point this week? No, I’m not going crazy, I just realized a few things that are important to a student:

1. Stability
2. Flexibility
3. Familiarity
4. Simplicity

But, Tracy!! What about all the cool things OneNote offers?!? What about audio/video recording, searching those recording, OCR of imported documents, high-tech flagging, notebooks, sections, pages, and subpages, what about the screen clipper?!?

Hm, this might take some convincing, but stay with me!

1. Stability

Journal is to note-taking as Notepad is to word-processing. Barebones, easy, free, already installed and simple. Have you ever had Notepad crash on you? Freeze your computer? Overtake your power supply with 100 processes? No, of course not. It’s complexity is right up there with that MineSweeper game that’s always in the games folder. It has no reason to crash. If the barebones program isn’t stable then there’s something wrong with your computer.

Yes, Journal is more complex than Notepad, but not half, or even a quarter, of what OneNote or GoBinder is. Journal is tested, tried, and true. Even if you use another notes program, Journal is your back-up program, your scratch paper program, your demo ink program because it’s least likely to freeze mid-demo or confuse the person your showing it to (if it’s not your demo program, I highly suggest it). Journal is all these things because it’s small, quiet, and works.

I’ve had GoBinder crash, I’ve had GoBinder 2005 crash, I’ve had OneNote 2003 crash, and I’ve had, as noted, OneNote 2006 really crash. Trust me, it’s not fun waiting for the pen to switch to an eraser as the lecturer continues full speed ahead, or wait the two minutes while your entire notebook reboots. I’ve done this several, several times after using a tablet for almost 3 years in class.

OK, so even IF Journal decides to go crazy, even if you have the worst luck ever and are horrible to your computer and Journal decides to not let you open a file, because Journal doesn’t clump everything together into one program, all you’ve lost is one file, not your entire notebook (but I can’t see a Journal file messing up so bad that you couldn’t ever reopen it). If your big-time program messes, you’re stuck waiting until you have time to fix it before you can look at your notes again. Is that a risk you’re willing to take? Remember Murphy, and remember it will probably happen when you have the most homework due.

2. Flexibility

With all the features OneNote has, the one it lacks is the ability to put two notes pages next to each other. You have to either be on one page or another, no doubling up. If you want to look at three pages, well then you just have to remember what section and folder each page is located. It’s the equivalent of doing your homework in the same notebook you took your notes in. Of course it’s do-able, but I haven’t found a student that doesn’t like a big desk to spread all their papers out on so they have everything in easy reach and can see more than one thing at a time. 



With Journal, you can have your notes open, the homework assignment open, and an blank file you actually work the homework in. Any additional files can easily be opened and tucked away on your toolbar. You can even arrange the files to where one file fills half the screen and the other fills the other half (a personal favorite of mine). Working with multiple Journal pages (as long as they’re separate files) is much easier than working with multiple OneNote pages.

Journal also has discrete pages that print just how you would expect them too. This falls in the realm of flexibility for the simple reason that you may not always work on your tablet. With Journal you can easily go from a file that looks great on your tablet, to a file that looks great on paper or a PDF.



And one final thing on flexibility, unless you want to keep every little piece of paper you wrote from a class you took last year open all the time, you aren’t going to have easy access to previous class notes if you use a program like OneNote or GoBinder. You’ll probably archive all that stuff once you realize how much space everything is taking on your computer (especially with GoBinder) and just keep your current class notes available. On the other hand, if all of your notes are in Journal you can keep a folder called “Finished Class Notes” in your school folder and open “History 101 notes.jnt” just as easy as you can open any other file on your computer. I’m going to print all my old notes to Journal for this very reason because as of right now they’re all stuck in GoBinder and I have to reload everything into the program just to view the notes (along with everything else I saved in that class’s folder).

3. Familiarity

Tablet uber-users, like the many who read this blog, are just going to have to understand that not everyone wants to spend time exploring their new computer and all it can do. Out-of-box experience is important to the consumer and that’s something Journal has the one-up on, at least for now.

No matter what Tablet PC you buy, Journal will be pre-installed. It was probably the first program most of us tablet-users played with when we opened up our first tablet. There isn’t any set-up involved, you don’t have to understand a complex program structure or spend time getting your mind around where everything is. It’s easy, intuitive, and what Word users are use to. Open the program, write something down, give it a name, and save.

Journal wins on the familiarity game because it’s just what a person would expect a digital note-taking solution to be. Now, that doesn’t win it any creativity points, but it does make it more like home. If the average person picked up a spiral notebook, said, “Hey, let’s put this on the computer,” and made a program to mimic the spiral notebook, Journal would be the result. If the average person looked at Word and said, “Hey, let’s make a program like this, except you can write with a pen instead of a keyboard,” Journal would probably be the result.

A student doesn’t have to change how they take notes in order to use Journal. You can argue that OneNote and GoBinder don’t make a student change their style, but you have to go against the structure of the program to do that. Those programs want you to frequently create individual pages. They’re built upon it. If you’ve ever tried to have a really long OneNote page, then you know it’s not too friendly to the one-continuous-lecture style of note-taking because it’s difficult and slow to navigate up and down the page. Journal allows for one long continuous note but still has pages with page numbers and it’s still quick to scroll. It’s just like taking notes into a spiral notebook.

OneNote is great for many many things, but I argue that you have to be willing to change how you take notes in order to use it as a student. For some student’s this isn’t a problem, but many aren’t willing to change this late in the game (assuming you pick up a tablet in college).

4. Simplicity

OK, now what about all that hoopla about the many features I’m missing out on by not using OneNote?

The recording is nice. I can replay a section of the lecture if I have no idea what I was writing in the notes later on, but this whole semester I’ve only used it once even though I’ve pressed the record button every time I start taking notes. If I’m taking detailed enough notes that I can see what was being said at a certain point in the lecture, then I probably don’t need the help anyway, and if I didn’t take detailed notes, then I have to listen to the entire lecture just to hear the material I need.

As a student, I highly suggest not relying on audio recording for help later on. If you really have problems keeping up with a lecturer, just record the lecture using one of those handheld things or a free recording program. You’re going to need to listen to the whole lecture later on, so you might as well have a flexible solution. Recording every lecture just gives you an excuse to daydream or surf the web, thinking, “I can listen to the recording later on if I really need to be paying attention right now.” Well, you won’t, and come test day, you’ll be kicking yourself (says the girl who was kicking herself come test day).

As for OCR, don’t even think you can use it to OCR your whole book. It takes hours just to import the whole book in an organized manner and then you’re stuck because OneNote isn’t good for quickly flipping through pages that are that big in file size. I’ve tried it. Don’t waste your time. Go to your campus computer store, search around on LimeWire or BitTorrent, and find yourself a cheap/free version of Acrobat or Omnipage. You’ll save yourself a lot of time if you’re goal is to have a searchable digital book. For files under 10 pages or so, OneNote works fine, but personally, I don’t usually need to search a file that’s only a few pages long.

So what about these high tech note flags of all shapes and sizes? I never used them. Maybe they just weren’t ready for use in the beta, but they didn’t work that well (if I circled something and flagged it, it just flagged all the individual chunks of things I circled so I’d end up with 12 flags when I just wanted one). Plus, mid lecture I don’t really have time to mess with flags. It’s easier to just underline something. I never had time to review the few flags I did mark, so what good did they really do? This may be just a personal preference, but considering Journal has simple flags of different colors, I can get the same benefit from the Journal flags as I do the OneNote flags.



Everything else, I just don’t need. If I was doing alright with a pencil and paper taking notes and doing homework, do you really think I need an army of tools at my fingertips to successfully take notes all of a sudden? Not really. Yes, I love having several different pens to write the notes with (found in any notes program) and I love having everything on my computer so I don’t lose anything (also found with any notes program), but seriously, I can still search my notes with Journal, so what else do I need? I’m not diss-ing OneNote as a program, it’s great for many people in many situations, but looking at it from an undergraduate student perspective, it may be a bit of overkill.

Related STPC article: The Journal Spiral

Where, oh where, did the OneNote beta go?

1 November 2006 Posted By: Tracy
Posted in: OneNote

Has anyone tried finding the OneNote beta lately? Has anyone actually found it? I’ve been searching all day and I’m out of ideas.



The Microsoft Beta site? No, the links send you to the Office 2007 beta download. Is it in the Office pack now? No, there’s still no sign of OneNote there either. A Google shows no signs of a relocation, and I can’t think of a better place to fine the OneNote 2007 beta than the OneNote “Connect” website (the Connect site is replacing Microsoft Beta Place), and yet, no OneNote.

Why am I looking so desperately? My OneNote 2007 decided to break and refused to open without promptly crashing soon after. After trying to simply repair the program through Add/Remove Programs with no luck, I uninstalled thinking I could easily reinstall by redownloading the beta (once I relized I no longer had the original file download). Hm. (UPDATE: no longer in need of file, but still wondering where it went on the web)

Does anyone know where it went?