Notes. Everyone has some of them, others have a lot of them. I’ve collected a fair share of random notes over the years, from article drafts to lists of favorite movies and stuff not to forget when going hiking. I’ve also tried and tested a fair share of tools to collect and organize them. I’ve tried text files in the Finder, notes in Mail.app, Yojimbo, and others. I needed a simple feature set, the ability to synchronize to other devices, a low price tag and preferably some easy to use syntax.
About a year ago I started to use PBwiki and found it to be quite fitting. It’s a pretty good web based wiki and it did the job. Yesterday I finally decided to migrate to the new and improved PBwiki 2.0. I have to admit it looks fresher and less cluttered. Yay! Unfortunately I was also faced with a WYSIWYG HTML toolbar. While there’s no doubt that these toolbars can be very useful, I usually turn them off. Especially on a wiki, right?
But I couldn’t find the switch. It was not possible. In PBwiki 1.0, one could easily switch to ‘classic mode’ and edit a wiki like a wiki. You know, with asterisks for lists, square brackets for links and so on. But when I wanted to make a link with this — I quote — improved editor
, I’d have to:
- select the text
- click the ‘link’ button
- wait for the lightbox style dialog to load
- click the ‘ok’ button
- wait for the dialog to disappear and the editor to update
To make matters worse, this editor disabled some system wide keyboard shortcuts and right-click menus, and it always preserved the formatting of copied text — what I virtually never want.
To cut a long story short, this is what their helpdesk replied:
Unfortunately, PBwiki 2.0 does not have a classic editor. If you’d like me to switch your wiki back to version 1.0, please just let me know.
So basically I should downgrade if I want my wiki to behave like a wiki. I call bullcrap.
Ergo, I’m back at square one looking for a decent tool to organize and collect my notes. Any suggestions?
Update: via the Get Satisfaction forums, I’m now told that they’ll be working on wiki markup soon, but don’t have an ETA.
I stumbled upon Google’s notebook a while ago and then tried it out for the first time. While it doesn’t really fit in my current workflow (I don’t want to leave del.icio.us – although they’re not exactly comparable), it looked pretty interesting.
Hiya Lennart,
I work at PBwiki and found this blog post via tweetscan.
Here is a “hack” that one of our users did to enable something like the “Classic Editor” on PBwiki 2.0: http://getsatisfaction.com/pbwiki/topics/tired_of_the_2_0_editor_for_quickly_adding_pages
It looks like you and Tim miss the “Classic Editor” for pretty much the same reasons…
Joel: this hack only works on paid accounts, right? I have a free account that doesn’t allow me to edit templates…
Tijs: hadn’t heard about Google Notebook before, thanks. It looks like it uses a similar editor without wiki style though.
I’ve spent a few more hours looking for a good solution this week, but found none. In the end, I dusted off my leet PHP skillz (NOT!) and made the damn thing myself.
It’s an uber-simple private wiki thing, using Markdown for syntax, with a few tweaks. It has what I need and only that, and does the job nicely so far.
I found SpringNote very practical to use.