Wherever Note

Update: Merely 24h after I wrote this, there’s a new version available that improves performance a tad (even under WINE). Sadly, the UI still follows the same approach, and actually looks much uglier under WINE. Here’s a shot of it with the new toolbar:

After a few days of using the new version with favorites/offline support, I think it’s fair to say that has finally become useful to me.

I still don’t think its entry-level offering is for professional use, but I find it good enough to draft random bits of stuff in.

My sole woe right now is that its version has the grace and UI styling of, well, a rather sluggish green elephant. Whereas the version is sleek, fast and has a sensible UI layout that showcases most of the features (even if it doesn’t do client-side OCR), the version has a “river of notes” view that I find fiddly and aggravating to use – after you’ve used the version, everything pales in comparison.

So much so, in fact, that I sometimes prefer to just use the web interface on , something I only usually did on my netbook1. Speaking of that, by now most people know that will run mostly OK under WINE or Crossover Office2, albeit with some visual quirks – if they had a couple of options to remove the gradients and use a “flat” toolbar, it would be just dandy.

Still, it’s nice to have options. I personally see no point in a fully native port of with my current setup (and the company has stated that they will be publishing an API for third-party programs to talk to their platform, which should prmpt someone to write a native client for the “Gnome”:Wikipedia:GNOME desktop), but on other platforms things seem to be shaping up.

I’m not sure if it’s really the best notetaking application out there (and I should point out that I use for all the sensitive stuff, so I can readily compare the two), but at least now it’s sort of working for me.

1 It bears mentioning at this point that their Web UI, despite very polished, wastes far too much vertical real estate to be truly useful on the current crop of 1024×600 LCDs that most netbooks use – something that could readily be fixed by using a pop-out note editor (a fairly simple development, I think).

2 Which, incidentally, I got a free license for, but that regretfully seems to be only moderately better than the stock WINE for my (very casual) use.

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