EasyNote: Makes taking notes while reading easier

Check out my new blog at http://www.ecnusuperman.cn/blog   

EasyNote: Makes taking notes while reading easier
2008-2-8 21:07:32
By Alex

        It always bugs me when I try to jot down some notes while reading a document on my laptop.

Google Notepad gadget is too simple. It's only a notepad, no hyper text, font and image support. And to key the notepad topmost you have to do two clicks.

MS Office Notes is a nice tool(not free). But it is too complicated, and the tab control makes using it confusing.

So I rolled up my sleeves and spent the afternoon making this Easy Note taking tool.

Let's look at the requirement again before heading into building the tool.

I usually want to take notes when reading documents in doc or pdf format. The note may consisted of text, screenshots images and sometimes hyperlinks. So I decided to save the notes in RTF format.

When reading documents I would like the note taking tool stay on the screen so that I do not need to bother switching between different windows. So making the tool a topmost window should only be one click away.

Here's the feature list of the tool
 

• Auto save. It save the notes every 20 seconds automatically. In case you forget to save explicitly, you will only lose content produced in 20 seconds
• Pin button makes it one click away to let the main window stay topmost.
• Sticky to the screen edge. The main window does not move outside the screen. And when you move the window closer to the screen edges, it will be docked to the screen edge.
• Inserting current time: Ctrl+t. Since I usually use it to keep a daily log of my activity.
  

The tool is a bit buggy now, but feel free to play around with it and I'll be glad to get some feedback.
You can find the installation msi file here: [ Link]
You'll need .net framework 2.0 to run the setup file. At least you need to have a redistributable package which you can download from here:[ Link]