Juiced On Writing

SpringNote, an advanced online notetaking application, began life in South Korea in March 2007. It now offers some fantastic – and free – online note-taking and wiki capabilities, making it well worth a look if you’re after a notebook application which provides enough features to make many writers or particularly collaborative writing groups satisfied.

Registration and Signup

I found registration relatively difficult – particularly when dealing with this on the iPhone application also (more on that later). SpringNote uses OpenID signons for users who possess these, or you can create a new OpenID through MyOpenID. I created a new ID in this way, and once the email address chosen had been confirmed the process leads you immediately into SpringNote.

However, this means that signing onto SpringNote, both online and on the iPhone, requires the input of a long URL OpenID (which in my case contains my username and the myopenid address), then being sent via a browser to your OpenID provider of choice to enter security passwords, before you finally get into the actual SpringNote application.

This is particularly difficult if you wish to use the iPhone application for quick note-taking on the fly – you have to enter this long URL id using your thumb-taps, remembering to go back and make sure the first ‘h’ for the ‘http://’ is not capitalised, as the application naturally capitalises the first character in the text input. Then you have to wait for the browser to open on your iPhone, increase the size of the page so that you can input the password, and wait to signon.

Additionally, you have to remember to check the ‘Keep Signed In’ box to allow you to access the SpringNotes application on your phone after each time you close it – and for off-line access, else you will need to go through this entire process again everytime you want to use it.

Once you are signed up and in to SpringNote with your OpenID, you will be asked to choose a name for your first personal notebook which will provide the URL. Most of the names I came up with were alerted as being invalid. It took me a minute to realise that your springnote notebook name must be in lowercase.

You will also have to pick a template for your notes. The selection box gives you a choice between For Studying, For Office Work, For Personal Life, Planning, School Projects, Work Projects, Knowledge Base – and a No Templates option.

Depending on what is chosen, you will be provided with various pages for your notebook account. For instance, if choosing the For Study template, you will be given a monthly calendar, to-do list, class time table and other pages. You can choose the No Templates option initially, and then choose the appropriate template for each individual page, creating a personal set of pages to fit your needs.

Selecting each option brings up a template list to give you an idea over what pages will be included. I wanted bits out of many of the template groups, however decided to start off with For Office Work (even for a personal notebook) and build from there.

You then must select the publish this notebook (make public) checkbox or not. I decided this was my private notebook, so went without publication.

The new notebook is then populated with the templated pages, but the screen darkens off and you are led through a series of help tips showing you some of the major functions of the screen.

Your First Note(s)

Creating or typing in your first note is relatively easy using the simple text editor supplied. Insert allows the attachment of files or images up to 20MB of size. Through SpringNote menu options you can also upload documents up to 5MB of size. Notes can be tagged also, with key words, making searching easy.

Right-click options provide deletions of objects such as tables. This is a little too easy to do – I ended up doing this on several occasions when intending to just delete an internal object within a table.

Knowledge of some wiki-style approaches to entering text is helpful, but when using templates to setup a page, the sections are infilled with help-text showing you how to, say, enter a date into a bulletin item.

Look and Functions

Storage and Price.

With 2GB of storage for each user, SpringNote provides copious advanced – but simple – functions for free. There is no mention of any future plans for paid services, so both individual notepads and group colloborations are free.

Navigation.

The Global Navigation Bar at the top provides access to notebooks, the dashboard, messages and links, once signed in.

The My Dashboard is the SpringNote homebase, containing tabs Tfor the Dashboard, Inbox, Comments and Account changes.

The Dashboard itself is the central zone for notebook usage. This can include information on personal notebooks, group notebooks and watched notebooks (those owned by others) and includes a left hand panel which holds Recently updated and All Pages tabs.

Edit Mode shows your notebook pages in a tree-like structure to the left called the Page Navigation Panel. You can move your pages around in this tree-structure by simple drag and drop. To the right of this page navigation panel is the page selected with text editor menu bar above. Users without write access have a View Mode which contains a tree-like structure of pages to the left, and pages displayed on the right. Edit Mode importantly gives you access to see all the revision history of a page – and you can revert back to previous versions.

Within Edit Node there is also a coloured tab network of pages to the right of the screen. Mouse over one of these pages and the tab pops out and you can click on the link to open that page for editing. These are the bookmarks. Therefore you have multiple ways of accessing your pages.

Pages and Editing

Editing, and menu options such as Delete are relevant to individual pages only. After importing in my own blog posts (see below) I suddenly realised that I had just created some large and multiple new pages in my personal notebook – which would be synchronised onto my iPhone. I didn’t want that synchonisation of such large files to go onto my phone, so searched for a way to delete a group of pages. This doesn’t exist (on first sight), meaning each had to be gone through individually.

Thirty minutes later I had deleted only some of them and suddenly realised that because they were sitting under the today pages, I couldn’t see the full structure of my notebook, nor that of the import. On viewing them under All Pages rather than the detault Recent Updates tab, it became apparent that the imports had come in under one main page named my blog, and under subpages for the various categories. Deleting that one blog-named page deleted the hundred plus blog posts in one click!

It might pay to read the entire user manual firstly, I thought to myself.

Another function which would be incredibly helpful but is missing currently is the ability to move or duplicate pages between multiple notebooks.

There is no undo button or save button on SpringNote edit mode, as by default the autosave function is set to on. Settings can be adjusted. I eventually got a right-click delete option on the calendar table created by this plugin. I then created further calendar pages as individual pages for this insert.

Tables and inserts can be deleted, however this is quite easy to do, leaving me with a missing top table on my main page for this notebook. The only way back was to delete out everything else, and use the plugin ‘Insert Template’ I chose the Group Profile template again.

Look.

The interface itself is simple but not simplistic, with advanced features for group collaboration, and a dashboard for managing multiple notebooks. Depending on the type of notebook, your colours will change. Your initial personal notebook will be blue, but group notebooks are distinguished in their brown colourings.

Internally the Notebooks contain the left-hand Page navigation panel and the page display in the centre. A page actually has a background image of a blue-lined notebook page. The lines are real lines – tab down a blank page and you can input onto each line as you please.

The text editor may be simple, but standard font changes can be made, there are styles set such as header styles, or a line style to differentiate sections on your page, and via the insert menu you can insert images, videos, files or maps to add to your notes. Inserting a table will give you the ability to design the look of the page even more forcefully, although you can’t choose border or padding options as you can with other html tables.

Collaboration and Sharing

You can have either a personal or group notebook, and both types can have varied settings for sharing. You can share full notebooks publicly, or keep them private. This choice is set when first setting up a group notebook, so consider the objectives and privacy needs immediately.

Group Notebooks can be worked on collaboratively by affiliated members. These are managed by the owner of the group notebook.  All group members have read/write access. Others can be invited to participate in the group with a simple click of one button, and inputting an email or OpenID address. Group owners can send messages to members via emails.

Personal Notebooks have more choices for privacy than Group Notebooks. Each page can be selected to be shared – or not. And Personal Notebooks can also have two different shared access rights – Viewers – Read Only, or Collaborators with Read/Write access. Collaborators can be invited via email also.

Comments

Other SpringNote users can leave comments on your shared notebooks, and you can pick these up within your My Dashboard.

Settings

Notebooks can have various settings applied, including blog settings which provide the capability of submitting your note to your blog; notebook settings such as backing up the notebook (to html); and Plug-in Settings. Individual pages can also be backed up to your computer from the page itself.

Blogging

The Menu options from pages offered me the option to Export to Blog also. On clicking this I was displayed a SpringNotes server error page, then brought to the settings area to setup my blog firstly. Your page can be exported to Typepad, Moveabletype, WordPress and Blogger blogs. There appears no meta-api export allowing you to export to many other blogging services, which is a pity.

However setting up to my WordPress blog worked immediately, and I was surprised to find that I then had the option to import my blog posts into SpringNotes also. The import worked reasonably well, bringing in images used also. However, paragraphs and linebreaks and formatting were not imported, although areas of listings were. This means your blog posts are in large text blocks.

BackUp / Export

Each page in a SpringNote can be backed up via the menu option, to a zipped html file. An entire notebook can be backed up to an html zip file via the Settings area. It would perhaps be helpful if you could get to your notes in other offline ways such as exporting out to rich text files in particular. This would allow you to take your thoughts or notes into Word or similar for further development as a writer.

Export options, as mentioned above, are to a blog post.

SpringNote Website Features

SpringNote itself, offers some nice features for the browser. The homepage introducing the web app features a simple video introduction, a tour – which shows you many categorised example note examples, and some featured public SpringNote wikis.

As I was introduced to SpringNote, a featured notebook was that of the WriteClub Official Notebook, a group which offers writing exercises, and at that point contained 7 members colloborating on the same notebook.

As a SpringNote user, you can look at other (public) notebooks such as this, and if interested add them to your watch list. The Notebook will then show up in your own Dashboard.

From the frontpage of SpringNote you will also find a Forum, where users with problems are often provided with help on how to do something; and a Help Centre containing some impressive FAQS, Glossaries, and the excellent SpringNote User Manual.

Finding Other SpringNotes

Once logged onto your springnote, through your dashboard you can watch other user’s springnotes when they are published to the public.

There is a Find Others function within your watch list tab. This takes you to a search page where you search for keywords. The search field is prepopulated with the search ‘ideas’ but I wanted to locate some good writing themed notebooks. The search word ‘writing’ brought up 70 pages of findings, which had to be browsed through. I would make one comment here – the page numbers of this search filter and list are small and positioned down the bottom of the page, and there is no differentiation to notify you of which page you are currently on. Once you’ve clicked through a few, you can find yourself forgetting where you are.

The ‘writing’ search term is also a difficult one, as the results will bring back any notebook page with the word within. For notebooks which users have started but never amended, many of the templates have infilled help text such as ‘Please start writing here’ and those have been left or the springnote page never returned to. A slightly better term is something like ‘Writer’.

Group Notebooks

After setting up my own first personal notebook, I decided to try out the Group Notebook creation. This went similarly to that of creating a personal notebook, including selecting templates. For this trial, I decided to simply create a notebook based on this website, so chose the domain name as juicedonwriting.springnote.com. I also chose the Knowledgebase template group, which gave me a simple discussion page, guestbook and notification page.

Once the new group notebook, in brown, was displayed, I was surprised to find that it was still displaying my personal name as the name of the notebook. So I edited it to be called Juiced on Writing Notebook.

Plug Ins

There are also plug-ins for pages, accessible on the page menu bar, or under your Settings area. Plugins can add features such as month calendar tables, sub-page lists, and content lists. Such linked pages and sub-pages appear at the bottom of the note.

Within the Group Notebook I chose the plugins dropdown, and created a calendar for the month.  This happened to insert the calendar into the page I was on – my main page. Which was not my intention. I spent quite some time trying to work out how to delete this calendar and retain my main page as it had been initially.

Plugins for a table of contents and subpage list are handy, and eventually with some trial and error I came up with a simple structure I am happy with, leaving notes in for each area for any new members to work out how to use the text editors available.

The Star rating plugin might be very helpful for a group springnote where members will be able to rate an item under discussion.

MashUps

The iPhone application for SpringNotes is one example of a mashup. You can also post your Googletalk or MSN thoughts via a mashup to SpringNote. This one is called the MSN Messenger Bot. Both the iPhone and MSN mashups feature on the homepage, so are well represented, but one other is a bit hidden.

Under the Settings panel is the Plugin tab, which features a section called Best Mashups. Here, I found the ClipNote mashup – a well needed function to be able to take web-clippings (text only) from outside of SpringNote. The OpenMaru Mashup gallery currently holds ten mashups including Sprinkl – a firefox toolbar, a flickr one, and two for firefox to do with copying text portions of the webpage from the Firefox clipboard to SpringNote. ClipNote has a low rating, and I have not used it.

SpringNote on the iPhone 3G

Although the vast majority of your note-taking work may well be  online with SpringNote, there is an iPhone application allowing synching of notes between your iPhone and one notebook online. At this point in time, this can only synch between your personal notebook you originally create, and the iPhone. However SpringNote forums confirm there is an iPhone app  version coming out this year providing multiple notebook access.

Access is via either the 3G element of the phone, or more cheaply, a wireless wifi connection if you find one, or have one setup in your house. Signing on is difficult and long-winded – see the Registration section above for more detail on this. Once signing onto your OpenID webservice, make sure that you check the option to remain signed in, to allow you to continue to use the note or page features during your day, or offline.

Once into your Personal Notebook on the SpringNote application, your pages will synchronise between the two. You can take a cached copy of your pages offline also. Pages on the iPhone can be edited, or new ones created quite easily, using a simple markdown language for text formatting. Or the default is a simple view mode for the pages, helpful if you are using your Notebook as a PIM with calendar pages or checklists of to-dos.

When offline, you can still create new pages, which save and are synchronised to your online storage once you return to a wireless wifi network, or use your 3G capacities.

Viewpoint

What SpringNote is About

As an online notebook application, SpringNote tops others in many aspects, if you want a collaborative shared environment for a group of people to use – and all for free. There are no limitations to how many notebooks you have, nor how many pages you share publically. You can use SpringNote pages for many different subjects, and there is a good range of templates for such things as monthly calendars, to do lists, project planning sessions and study notes to get you started.

SpringNote does suffer in comparison to other online notebook applications such as Google Notebook, or EverNote, in that there is no real web-clipping ability (in full pages, or images from sites also), and in not having associated full browser plugins. Notes / pages are text-based only. In comparison, for an on-the-move synchronised note-taker, EverNote provides text notes, voice recordings, web-clips and photo-notes.

However, SpringNote’s wiki based approach tops many other similar wiki applications online, which provide users with the ability to create websites – often with lots of advertising or for a charge.

The wiki pages and collaborative nature of these are huge pluses where writing groups or creating something like a knowledgebase or perhaps even collecting structured research notes come into force. The Group and collobarative sharing is perhaps the most powerful feature of SpringNote – you can setup large pages of information, with other members adding to this, and editing it, and this website is completely free and advert-free also.

On a personal level, there are many good templates to organise your life with, making SpringNote a good personal information manager, if you’re after something like this online.

Some Difficulties

There were some areas of difficulty for me as a first-time user.

Some knowledge of wiki-type inputs would be helpful to anyone using their springnote pages.  Images and other inserts work reasonably well, but I couldn’t immediately fathom things like sizing and placement, and managed on more occasions than I liked, to accidentally delete entire sections of a page design, with no way to undo this.

The sign-on using OpenId is difficult…as is the initial setup of the iPhone application which also requires this sign-on. Creating pages both online and offline on the iPhone – for quick note-taking, is reasonably quick, and synchronises quickly with the online side.

Some missing functions such as moving between multiple notebooks would have been helpful. And reading into how to edit and delete would have saved me some frustrations firstly.

Overall

Overall, SpringNotes provides an excellent service and good-looking simple environment for the writer wanting to create an online wiki-type precense on the web, particularly for a group, or as an online personal base where different areas can be shared.

SpringNote provides a very worthwhile website-creation service for local writing groups wanting to share ideas and exercises, and without the advertising or fees you would normally encounter on other wiki-applications.

With SpringNote’s synchronisation through to the iPhone application, or the MSN Messanger mashup, the owner of the SpringNote site can update from afar. This feature would be enhanced further if multiple notebooks are accessed via mobile devices like this also.

Try out SpringNotes if you’re after a free online wiki-style Notebook application with copious features and excellent sharing abilities.

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