What do you use as an Engineer's Notebook? Time for IdeaBook.com?

Would have to be a combination of such. GIMP with Notepad?

Wlodzimierz Wnukowski wrote:

 

GIMP with Notepad?

You mean this bloke?

A note book, one that you cant tear out the sheets is good other wise over time they always tear and get lost.

I also use  my tablet or more likely or my Note3 phone which is basically the same thing ...Good to use as a camera too for documentation purposes

I just found this list of online note apps on mashable.

Top 10 Online Note Taking Applications

I'm out in the field working right now, so I'll respod to everyones comments later, just so you understand the general direction of the online engineering "specific" notebook that I was imagining.

i would like an online application that is not device specific, that is searchable, stores URLS, images, schematics, possibly videos, etc.

I use Evernote and the Evernote Webclipper extension in Chrome. You can grab full articles that you want to save, create new rich text documents, save links, almost anything and tag them, file them, etc for easy searching later.

Hi Mike,

I used an old fashioned spiral notebook for all of my professional career.

The key is to use it daily to record events, and activities, and very importantly decisions and who made them.

Having issues in writing are priceless when you get into urinal Olympics over who said what at a meeting weeks or months past.

I always won because I would pull out my notebook, flip back to the meeting and show what I had recorded as a decision.

I know a lot of people have gone digital with this type of recording, but I just like the feel of a solid paper copy with the time and date nicely recorded in ink and easy to access anywhere I happen to be.

I always urged all of my new engineers to do the same.

The information is great at review time when you need to show all that you accomplished during the past year.  Otherwise you are at the mercy of your bosses memory or worse, his impression of you.

DAB

PS, I still use them for recording thoughts and ideas now that I am retired.   That is how I documented my thoughts for my book "I Killed Schrodinger's Cat!"

Paper is always valuable if you need to fight for idea protection.

Like DAB, I like paper.  I use college-ruled composition books -- the ones with the granite pattern on the covers.  I always prefer pen to pencil.

I always date my entries, which makes it much easier to find things when a problem from a year ago needs to be referenced.

Hi Mike!

I'd say OneNote _almost_ meets your entire requirements, and is free.

It has a browser-based version (so device-agnostic), and apps for iPhone/Android as well as the PC application. It stores images, and I just tested videos now too.

The requirement regarding search seems to be met for the PC and iPhone/Android applications, but the web client version has a slightly limited search where it will only search the current page of the notebook, although if you search additional pages in the notebook you don't need to retype the search query, but you do need to select the page.

The apps versions can search all pages in a notebook automatically in one fell swoop.

The web client version search capability may not be such a restriction if (say) you organize your documents into many few-paged sections/notebooks, so that you already know the section you want, and then there may be only a few pages to click through. However I guess the web client search capability is only needed if you don't have your mobile with you or your normal day-to-day PC.

I've seen these type of discussions before, and while the new technolgy tends to make some of them possible, I've got a question for you to ponder.

Do you remember phone numbers, now you have a phone that stores it?

Have you lost that ability to recall even 5 or 6 common ones.?

The above becomes worse when you keep using that Technology to store meeting dates, birthdays, shopping and the like.

You rely more and more on the technology and stop actually remembering.

So now instead of recalling the event or item, you have to search for "what was that thing I had to do/I've seen this before" event.

I agree that paper is often the best method, as the process of writing it tends to help cement it into the grey matter.

Mark

vsluiter, I do understand your methodology and your reasons for wanting to maintain it on your own server.  I pretty much do something similar to that right now, albeit not on my own server.  Dropbox and Google Drive act as my file cabinets and I keep all of my links sorted under tabs within Chrome.  As I use Chrome on all of my devices, all of the links carry over and I don't have to worry about links on an Apple being different than links on a PC.  This method works, but I still have to do all of the sorting and filing.  I'm looking to press the EASY button.  I would like to just have a note app where I can drag images, type text, draw pictures, maybe enter a few tags and have it be searchable.  I don't want to have to rely on myself and the dewey decimal system to find something that I have filed away.  I used to do all of my business accounting on my PC and several times, I had bad things happen.  Hard drive failures, software glitches during updates, etc. where I was freaked out.  About 6 years ago I moved to Netsuite for my business accounting solution.  It is expensive, but backup is redundant, systems are maintained, my data is available anywhere I go and it makes me happy inside.