Take note with Notesake

Although there are lots of freeware and pay-to-play note-taking programs, there hasn't been a note-killer, a single note-taker that makes you sit up and take notice. While scouring the Web for this elusive-but-essential tool, Notesake shines as a robust tool designed for the college lecture hall but useful for a myriad of purposes.

Notesake is not a note-taking panacea, but for a Web-based note-taking app, it works great and offers useful functions for the boardroom, the classroom, or just plain long-distance collaboration via Sharing.

The edit panel can handle most coding options, including Equations.

(Credit: CNET Networks, Inc.)

Its functions range from the basic to the advanced. Once you register and login, a big blue button invites you to, ?Take Notes?. From there a panel opens up that should be familiar to those who've used blogware--which is just about every Internet user. A text box takes up most of the screen, with a wealth of standard editing features resting above it.

The usual Bold, Strikethrough, and Underline are there, but so are Highlight, a series of Header tags, Indent, Blockquote, and Justify options. Also, equations get support from an < m > < /m > tag that makes them stand out from the rest of the note. When you finish typing, a big button at the bottom lets you Update the note.

Notesake.com's saved note panel offers several options, including exporting the note to your computer.

(Credit: CNET Networks, Inc.)

Notesake supports tags and course names, as well as mandatory note titles for helping you keep organized. There's a basic Print feature, as well as the nifty Sharing, which lets other, approved members of Notesake see and edit a specific note. There are also options for exporting to PDF and DOC formats, but the one feature that you'll hopefully never notice they have is system-wide backups performed every 12 hours. And since it's Web-based, being able to access your notes from anywhere there's an Internet connection has obvious appeal to those on the go.

Although I like the idea behind Notesake, I'd love to a Firefox plug-in for it that provides context menu access to your notes, so you can easily copy a URL or some text, paste it into a note, and save it for later. It's not a killer note-taker, but its versatility makes it a strong contender.

[notesk]

notesake.com went down without notifying its users or giving opportunity to save notes before there is no way to get them back. There is no note on the site what is going on. Poor.