![]() (Another moral of the story for me is to stick as much as possible to tools that don’t lock my data in a proprietary format.) So, I use Zotero for references, notes, and PDFs I use OmniOutliner (or Ecco Pro), as well as Cmap Tools for outlining and brainstorming and some drafting and then I use a word processor for the final stage. The moral of the story for me (although I don’t profess to have cracked this particular nut) is that in the long run it makes more sense to use a combination of dedicated tools rather than a single integrated application. As for writing and drafting, I do some of it in the outliner and the rest in a word processor. It tries to be a combination of outliner and word processor, but I find that I can do my outlining much better in an actual outliner (I love OmniOutliner on the Mac the free Ecco Pro is great on the PC, although I wish it could export OPML-InfoQube may do that). I just checked out StoryBox, and it’s definitely not at a point where I’d use it yet, but it’s a promising start.Įven though I have an (aging) Mac, I have not settled on Scrivener as a writing environment. I have not worked much with Ultra Recall or Zoot, so perhaps I should still give them another look. ![]() IdeaMason isn’t bad, but I find it frustrating that one can’t just write directly in a draft (or “composition”)-one must take the time to create a new “Idea” first, which I find interrupts my ideational flow. Biblioscape tries to offer something similar but I found it still primitive and not really usable. Whizfolders, for instance, has a combined *view*, but you can’t edit in that view. I haven’t found other programs that offer this. So one can switch back and forth between working on the document as a whole and working on just one isolated section. For me, the killer feature of Scrivener is the ability to view one’s assembled chunks of text as an integrated draft and to edit that draft. However, neither of the products mentioned above serves very well as a serious writing/drafting environment, in my opinion. In the same vein, Mendeley offers much of the same functionality as Zotero, and they say they will support OCR soon. Zotero has rich-text notes and tagging as well. PDF’s are automatically indexed (so long as they have text information-Zotero does not do OCR like Evernote). Zotero gives you (something like) 300 MB of free storage, although I set up Zotero to use a WebDAV account through my university so that I can have more storage room. ![]() So, I’ve tried them all (almost).įirst off, I would point out that the current beta version of Zotero offers much of the same functionality as Evernote. I also know that, for myself, the software search can become a big distraction (a situation amplified by the fact that I have both an inherited Powerbook and a PC). Looking for PIM / Thesis Writing Software for the PCĪs a fellow PhD student (although not yet at dissertation stage), I can relate to your quandary.
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