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.