Solve your notes condundrum with Perpetual Notes
Firstly, there are 2 types of people in the world. Those who take notes and those who don’t. If you are in the latter category, then you discover the joy of note taking from this blog post. If you are a note taking veteran, then you may see your note taking from a different perspective going forward.
It is important to understand the differences between a note and word processing document.
Documents
- Content and format focussed
- Searching inside single document is common
- Often printed
- Fewer in number but typically long content
- Formal
Notes
- Content focussed
- Search inside all notes at once by default
- Rarely printed
- Many more in number but typically short content
- Informal
Change of mindset — from app focussed to format focussed
The internet is full of comparison among note taking applications — with some common apps like Evernote, Onenote, Notion, Keep etc.
Most of these apps are available cross platform, namely Windows, Mac and Linux on computers and Android and iOS on smartphones, often with web access too.
But they all suffer from same problem — the format. Unless the apps are stroing notes in plain text format only [where you can have formatting or images], they usually store in proprietary notes format. This makes switch apps is complex process due to data migration inolved [from source app’s format to target app’s format].
More number of notes you have, higher is the migration effort.
From the note app vendor’s point of view, this approach makes sense as they endeavor to locked you in their apps. Only then you will keep them paying via subscription services. OK, there are some free notes providers too but they all suffer from same proprietary note format.
Some people try to overcome this problem by adopting Markdown where you can get some formatting while still keeping the notes in plain text mode. But in this day and age, using symbols like * _ etc. to indicate bold, italics is not only ridiculous but also painstaking as well.
So what is the solution?
Simple — do not focus on the app, focus on the note format instead.
You can be forgiven for thinking this is a shameless sales pitch to sell Perpetual Notes to you. Well, not entirely because Perpetual Notes is completely free to use!
What sets apart Perpetual Notes from competitors is the philosophy.
Perpetual Notes’s notes are computers files stored on your disk! Currently Perpetual Notes currently supports Rich Text Format (RTF) and unicode plain text.
In future Perpetual Notes plans to support other formats like HTML and DOCX.
The beauty of this approach is that you are not vendor locked. You can quit Perpetual Notes tomorrow without any data migration and your notes are still editable using other apps. There are tons of free apps which can edit RTF files.
Now, that is an immense benefit to any note taker. You can read RTF files in all operating systems using built-in apps. We also offer a separate standalone application, Office Search which can search across all Office (docx, xlsx, pptx, vsdx, odt, ods etc.) files
We are not claiming Perpetual Notes is the solution to all your notes problem. Compared to well established notes apps, it is not yet cross platform. It is Windows only at present with plans to introduce mobile and other OS versions. But for no-nonsense note taking, you can’t find a better alternative than Perpetual Notes especially if you predominantly use desktop keyboard for your note taking.
Many other note taking apps adopt mobile first approach which sacrifices desktop users’ experience. Perpetual Notes follows desktop first and mobile second approach.
There there is an elephant in the room — the cloud security. Other vendors tie you in saving your notes in their cloud server only. With Perpetual Notes, it is your choice. You can keep your notes offline or choose a syncing cloud platform (like Dropbox, Google Drive, Onedrive etc.) of your own. With Perpetual Notes, your notes are entirely yours. We collect no data about you — we don’t even ask you register in order to use our products!
Pertual Notes even offers facility to encrypt full or part of your note with password.
So, don’t delay — download Perpetual Notes today.