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Like you, I probably have about a thousand different ideas and streams of thought during the course of a day. Unlike you, I don't write any of them down.

I do this because there is no way I'd get anything done if I didn't. I don't mind forgetting some key insight, because if it was important or relevant enough, it'll translate into sometime I will write down when the time is right. If not, it's probably something that I shouldn't bother wasting my time with. (That's not to suggest it isn't valuable).

You only have so many hours in the day to work on so many things. People like us need to ignore our own brain 80% of the time to be productive. It's a curse really.

Thanks for all your responses.

I'm still missing a nice/simple way to add the photography of the whiteboard notes into my text notes.

Basically, I got fed up of not being able to find important pieces of information, when I needed them. So I'm building a web app (still in closed beta) around the idea that I should be able to store anything to do with my life (notes-to-self, ideas, to-do's, bookmarks, and, eventually, pdfs, photos, music etc). And then I should be able to find any of my stored info, in about the time it takes to do a Google search.

So this is what I've come up with:

* A windows explorer-like layout.

* Search-as-you-type

* Quick creation of notes and folders.

* Nested labels: any note or folder you create, can be in multiple parent folders. So you can use a hierarchy-like structure to store your data, or a flat label-like structure, or a combination of the two, depending on your mood, etc.

But, I was wondering: what kinds of features would you like to see in your ultimate information manager? iPhone app? A calendar? GMail plugin...?

I use and need a reasonably flat-form environment with tagging. I don't care for folders, hierarchies, or whatever, because I'm too impatient and have a bad memory for structure. I just want to throw stuff in and have it use tags or similar to figure out my intent. When it's time to get stuff out, I'd rather type in a query than go digging through folders, for instance (the Google vs Dmoz/ODP approach).

Zim aims to bring the concept of a wiki to your desktop. Every page is saved as a text file with wiki markup. Pages can contain links to other pages, and are saved automatically. Creating a new page is as easy as linking to a non-existing page. This tool is intended to keep track of TODO lists or to serve as a personal scratch book. But it will also serve you when writing longer and more complicated documents.
 

 A "desktop wiki" means that we try to capture the idea of a wiki, not as a webpage but as a collection of files on your local file system that can be edited with a GUI application. The main focus is a kind of personal wiki that serves for all kind of notes: todo-lists, addresses, brainstorm ideas etc.
 

 But we want to go further then just a wiki filled with random content. It should also be possible to use you random notes as the basis for more structured data: articles, presentations etc. Zim will not include tools to layout a presentation or something like that, you should use your office suite of choice for that, but it should be a tool that can deliver all the content for a presentation in a form that only needs a template and some layout before usage. Therefore certain features normally not found in wikis will be added.

The editor allows you to organize your notes

 The ability to hyperlink pages is a powerful way of organizing content. This goes further than hyperlinks in ordinary web pages. One example of this is that zim keeps track of all links and for each page shows which pages link to it, making links bi-directional. You can also link webpages or external files, when clicked zim will open these with the appropriate applications.
 

 Since zim has the GUI layout resembling a note-taking application you can organize your pages hierarchically, allowing for example to group pages by topic. But because you also have wiki-style back-tracking of links you could also have a category system by using backlinks so a page can link to multiple categories.

Wrttn is a simple notepad with many useful features, the main one being that you can save as much text as you like while taking advantage of the formatting options markup languages such as Textile or Markdown give you.

This means that you can use wrttn to jot down ideas, write an article, an essay, a collection of media (more on this later) or anything your heart desires: both privately (by not sharing the link), or publicly (by sharing the link).

Let’s have a look at the most prominent features of wrttn.