Searching for parts: easily one of the most important tasks when creating a new design. Get lazy here, and it will haunt designs later. The importance is paired with the significant amount of time that it takes to get just the right parts selected. This is probably why engineers everywhere fight specification changes once the parts are defined. It's a fine balance for each part to work with one another in concert.
Given the importance of the part selection process, surely there are many different tools out there to help discover, keep track of part possibilities, and manage notes that one comes up with while searching. But sadly, the only tools that exist are the search tools provided by the part distributors. These are great for finding parts based on a wide array of specs, however each search is merely a way to find information. While some CAD tools like Cadence and Synopsys have solutions, they are expensive and generally only accesible to engineers at large companies. Beyond that, taking notes and remembering parts is a job usually ascribed to Excel or a paper notebook. That's a great solution... for the year 1998!
That's where Frame-It steps in. Their team noticed that the wealth of information collected during part selection needed an organized location and digital notepad. From there, they created Frame-It. It's a Google Chrome extension that will save webpages or documents that are being browsed while allowing the user to take notes on the content. The content can also be named and organized with folders and tags which makes it easy to find later:
Where does the saved data go? Straight to the user's frame-it account in the cloud, all without disrupting the part exploration process. When users later say, “Oh! I was just looking at a part last week that might help!” they can refer to their Frame-It workbench and review all of their data:
It's one of those products that is so simple, clean, and straightforward that one might wonder why it hasn't been mainstream for years.
As with any totally new product launch, there are a few things that make it tricky to use. First, if you're taking notes and switch to another tab, it will erase the work-in-progress. (I use 2 different browser windows to account for this). Also, scrolling through a document can only be done with a mouse scroll wheel instead of the side bar. A few quirks, but certainly easy to temporarily accept.
I have been using it for over a year on a few projects and have found it to be a remarkable tool for capturing information and accessing it later. It is fast, unobstructive, and builds a wonderful personal repository for future projects. I encourage you to give it a shot!