portnotes
description
The prevelence of using a laptop to take notes during lectures is rising rapidly. So far, the leading applications that students use to do this are: MS Word, Google Documents, and Evernote. This project is a web application aimed at a target niche: college students such as ourselves. The idea is simple: make notetaking on a laptop as easy and reliable as possible - comparable to taking notes on paper - whilst adding the benefits of technology.
Like previously mentioned, the majority of students use Word, Docs, and Evernote, however, all of these aren't quite good enough. Word lacks simplicity, Docs lacks flexibility, and Evernote is quite frankly an over-simplified, lacking variant of Docs and Word. All of them lack what we need during lecture: the ability to quickly, reliably, and directly record whatever we feel is necessary during class without worrying about the limitations of the product.
Lets go deeper into some of the flaws of these applications. Everyone knows Microsoft Word. It is the world's most popular text processor. With it, you can type all you want (in a top down format), insert images, videos, and do a lot of intricate formatting. However, college students do not need all of that crazy formatting unless they aren't in class and doing essays. Word lacks simplicity because it has too many buttons, too many ways to format text, and for many, results in sluggishness in use. This is one of the reasons why many have opted for Google Documents instead.
Google Docs does a lot better than Word. It offers cloud storage, a simpler interface (although still arguably too complicated for many class settings), and integrates with all other Google services. However, it still isn't as flexible as students need it to be. Like Word, it is only capable of taking top-down notes. You can't insert text wherever you want. This becomes problematic because all of a sudden the only note-taking style you can use is with paragraphs.
Evernote is quite simply a joke. It is designed to be a universal way to save things. It saves images, websites, and text. When it does save text, its formatting is simpler than the rest of the competition, but not intentionally. Its just not designed for seamless notetaking.