Take better notes with Notalon

Using a laptop or netbook for taking notes often sounds like a good idea. Touch typists can normally type faster than they can write and it is often easier to read.

Notalon is a dedicated program for taking notes based on the Cornell method that has been used with paper and pen note taking for some time.

The Cornell method reserves the left-hand third of the page for section titles with more detail in the right-hand side. Matching the titles with the notes is not easy in Word, certainly not while trying to keep up with a talk. Onenote comes closer but still involves playing around with the mouse when you could be typing.

Notalon solves all of the these problems. The titles are created in the left hand column and the text can the be entered in the main part of the window. Indenting items in a list with the tab key automatically converts them into a bullet pointed list. Once the notes document has been created, everything can be done with keyboard shortcuts, which is a great time saver.

There is also a fullscreen mode, which is useful for getting rid of distractions when you should be working.

Once your notes have been finished they can be exported as plain text or a PDF file. It's a shame that there is no export to an editable formatted document type like RTF or HTML because it would make it easier to incorporated the notes into other projects. Text can be extracted using copy and paste.

We were pleased to discover that development of Notalon has now started again.