Thursday, January 21, 2010

Review: 3Banana Notes, a note taking application for Android

The other day I found myself in need of a notes application for my Droid phone.  A quick search of the Market turned up several likely possibilities, but the one that stood out was the oddly named "3Banana Notes", by Snaptic.  This application turns out to have some seriously cool features.

Tagging, hot links, and multimedia


3Banana lets you tag your notes with Twitter-esque hashtags.  Just add a "#" before a word and that words becomes a tag for your note.  You can filter your notes by tag in both the Android application and the web site.

3Banana will also convert a number of common text elements into hotlinks.  Click on URLs to open them in a browser, and click on phone numbers to dial them.

3Banana makes it very easy to attach photos to your notes.  Just click the camera icon on the main screen, take a picture, and then return to 3Banana where you can add text.

Synchronization


The application can synchronize your notes to the snaptic.com website.  These folks have made account registration a smooth and easy process -- if you have a Google account (which you do, by definition, if you're using the Android Market), you can sign in using your Google credentials and end up logged into a snaptic.com account without any further work on your part.  Listen up, other websites!  This is how it should be!

Once you've established your snaptic.com account, notes are synchronized automatically in both directions.

Sharing


Notes on the snaptic.com website are generally private.  You can share them with others by generating a special URL that links directly to the note (without exposing any of your other notes).  Snaptic uses this feature to provide an interesting sharing mechanism: both the Android application and the website can generate a QR code encoding the sharing URL for a note.

You can also share notes using the standard suite of sharing services: Twitter, Facebook, SMS, Email, etc.

Snaptic suggests using the "sharing URL" feature to create small informal communities -- share information with groups of friends and have conversations via comments attached to your note.

Final thoughts


3Banana is a great note taking application.  The tagging, hyperlinks, and synchronization features make it excellent for personal use, and the sharing features make it an interesting collaborative tool.  It has definately earned a place on my home screen.

Posted by at 9:26 PM
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4 comments:

  1. 3Banana is a great note taking app, I really like its features. Did you also try out Mobisle Notes? I really like that one too, especially the checklists it enables you to make.

    Nice review, good info :)
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  2. Thanks for reading :). I took a looko at Mobisle Notes, but I'm already using Remember The Milk + Astrid for todo lists.
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  3. Wow ! I really like this app as this app is quite interesting and also useful. I think this app can be quite helpful in making our life so much independent. Myemma is another app that also helps us in keeping updated and confident in our business processes. If you want to know more on apps then Appsummary.com can help you a lot as it has a great specialization in app reviews.
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  4. Obviously, a set of notes, in and of itself is a valuable thing. However, said set of notes becomes much, much more valuable if the notes themselves are related in an appropriate manner.

    Having context gives you a lot of benefits. For example, context enables both easy and quick discovery of information saving you time. Furthermore, context enables you to expand your knowledge without the risk of your knowledge becoming disjointed or fragmented.

    Hence, PolishedCode's NotesMappr’s distinguishing feature is the ability to both establish formal relationships (or associations) between notes and subsequently “navigate” said notes in a very straightforward manner.

    NotesMappr: semantic note taking app for Google’s Android platform. In other words, NotesMappr is note taking that fits your brain.
    ReplyDelete

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