Tools for Thought

Online notebook applications are fast becoming a dime a dozen. With solutions like Zoho Notebook and Evernote, does the world need another notebook? Perhaps not, in terms of functionality, but for polish and accessibility, Springpad is unique.

As with other notebook apps, Springpad lets you collect notes and information related to a topic into “notebooks” with an arbitrary number of pages. Pages can consist of photos, documents or web services. It can take some up-front discipline to remember to use the notebook where you’re doing online research if your habit is to simply surf the web by free association, but once the collection habit is ingrained, you might save hours of inadvertently retracing your steps.

Once you create a notebook, or “springpad,” you can share it with individuals or groups by selecting the Share option, which provides urls to the notebook’s text or HTML for pasting into an email or web page.

Interface

Springpad shines with it’s slick Martha Stewart-meets-37signals user interface. Features are generally more discoverable in Springpad than other notebook apps, partly due to layout, but mainly because of the large number of preformatted notebook templates already installed — like the difference between using Microsoft Works versus Microsoft Word. Springpad has exercise trackers, favorite restaurant checklists, meal planners, generic To Do lists, and about three dozen others springpads.

All pages elements, like notes, lists, appointments and maps, can be reordered by drag-and-drop.

Alarms can be set to send email or text alerts. Other elements that can be added to a page are:

• Budget
• Contact
• File
• General List
• Packing List
• Recipe
• Restaurant
• Shopping List

Each springpad occupies a somewhat smaller pane, and with smaller fonts, than most online notebooks. I find this less sprawling view much clearer for some reason — my eyes don’t wander around the page as much.

GTD and personal organizing

While I’ve never been fond of using notebook apps as task managers, there’s no reason they can’t be configured for that purpose. The default GTD Notebook is pretty threadbare, with tabs for Inbox, Home, Work and Someday. I tried to customize the tabs in Page Settings and found a Tab Control option that disappeared when I selected it, never to appear again.

The apparent lack of customizable contexts can be compensated by tags, which can be applied to any list item or other page elements. Once tagged, you can view a filtered list by the corresponding tab. Calendar entries or list entries with due dates will show up in the weekly Agenda column on the home page.

Next to the Agenda column is a Recent Updates column that lists your most recent edits. I would have preferred that the space taken up by Recent Updates be used to display a user definable pane, like an alternate calendar (monthly or daily view) or an untimed task list.

Conclusion

Springpad has a clean layout that easier to intuit your way through than competing apps. Google and Zoho notebooks has tighter integration with their office suites, but I don’t find myself making much use of that integration. Usually I just want throw pictures, web clips and notes under the same label without exporting the collection to other tools, so Springpad fits the bill more elegantly. If you don’t need Evernote’s ability to maintain notebooks offline, Springpad is a good first choice.

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