Keeping reference information on my handheld devices has always been important to me. After getting a Windows based Handheld, I needed to find a tool that would work for me.
After using Outlook and the highly sophisticated Notes application on Windows Mobile 5.0, I decided to look elsewhere. Outlook doesn’t give much in the way of organizing for your notes.
PhatNotes 4.6 from PhatWare is described on their website as an award winning application, but they don’t try to differentiate it from anything else. The website is probably the weakest part of the product.
Nonetheless, I decided to give it a try. Downloading and installing the application is uneventful. Once installed, you have a desktop and a mobile version of the application. Having a desktop version is a truly great thing. It’s so easy to create notes on the desktop and sync them down to the device. For me, I will paste sections of code on the desktop, then I can reference them when I’m in a meeting.
One of the features I found interesting was the ability to import files. For example, you can import a comma separated (CSV) file to create notes. I used this to import some data about a group of customers.
While not really hierarchical in nature, you can have multiple levels of organization for your notes. You can have different databases to collect notes. From there you can assign categories, colored flags and priorities. Your view of the notes can be grouped by any of these fields. I find myself using the colored flags to collect similar tasks.
Now that I’ve mentioned tasks, yes, I’ve even started tracking my tasks in PhatNotes instead of the Windows provided Tasks application. Their in a separate database from my notes. I’m still a little unsure about this, I do like the Outlook integration for tasks.
The desktop application can export your notes in a variety of formats. I’m particularly impressed with the export to HTML. This allows you to take a note, or a group of notes and export them to an HTML file. Your rich text formatting is preserved and the file produced is clean and presentable. This is a very nice touch.
Note applications for handheld devices are always limited by the ability to enter text, a nice desktop app helps tremendously with this. They are also limited by screen size. By supporting rich text and a simple screen layout, PhatNotes has made the best of this world. All notes are rich text, so you can easily create bulleted lists, change font sizes, colors, etc.
In addition to creating a nice set of applications, I was impressed with the quick responses I received from their support organization. I was also impressed with the manual. On initial inspection, I thought the 140+ page manual had to support multiple languages, but no, it’s all about PhatNotes. It goes into detail about the desktop, Windows Mobile and PalmOS versions of the program. It also gives some great advice on ways to use this tool.
My only real disappointment with PhatNotes is a lack of ink support. It only support text notes, unless you also get the companion application PhatPad.
There are numerous other features that I’ve not covered but include things like cross-linking notes, attaching files, images and voice notes.
Pros
- insert date/time
- great filtering (color, date range, regular expressions)
- direct tie to Outlook (insert contact, send to, etc.)
Cons
