Mac Devcenter reader Ben K got in touch recently on the subject of snippet-keepers, something close to my heart.
Ben had seen my (somewhat out-of-date now) post about Sidenote, but his problem was a little more complex.
He needed something cross-platform because he uses Windows at work and a Mac at home, and that could store almost any file format, especially formatted text and images.
After much searching and testing, he settled for a commercially hosted wiki service, Stikipad. Ben said: “It offers a combination of good UI and easy backup offline (I can download the whole wiki in HTML easily). PBWiki was a close second (you can download the whole wiki as a zip file, but I didn’t like the UI as much).”
Since Ben needed something cross-platform and hassle-free, I rather think one of these hosted wiki services was by far his best bet. If any Mac Devcenter readers have other ideas or recommendations, by all means share them now…
http://www.google.com/notebook/
I was shown Google Notebook a couple of months back and I seem to recall being quite impressed with its integration on the Windows side - but it was rather basic on the Mac side.
I've been using BackPackIt (a free account, not a paid one) off and on all year and rather like it.
http://www.backpackit.com/
Hmm. There's a lot you can do with text files. I suppose some people want to have images and formatted text in their notes, but that stuff is usually superfluous. I couldn't use Stickies any more when the OS X version starting keeping the formatting of whatever text I pasted into it. Yuck!
Most of these note taking applications seem like they're just nice interfaces for organizing and viewing a library of text snippets -- seems like a perfect job for the lowly .txt. You can bring organization with some folders, well-named text files and a text editor with a nice project interface like TextMate. This system lacks an integrated search facility, but if you're organized you usually only need to find within a file and you can use system tools like grep or Spotlight for more extensive searching. But you never have to worry about being tied to a particular app or platform or your data being stuck in some weird DB.
Try PmWiki, it can easily be mirrored between for example a laptop and a hosted web server. It's also possible to run it from a USB stick (on Windows machines). EAsy to set up and configue and a lot of addons if desired.
I'm building up a site called CrossOSS which is dedicated to promoting cross platform software. So far have over 150 applications listed. Stikipad is a good solution though for what he wants and I'll be sure to list it. Web-based apps are an excellent way to cure the cross platform blues.
We're very glad StikiPad worked out for Ben. :)