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Thursday, July 9, 2009

New Tool: KeepNote

Obviously I haven't updated much here lately - I've been pretty busy and inspiration hasn't struck me much in the last few days to get anything written. However, I started using some new software this morning, and I'm enjoying it so much I figured I have to share.

One of the big problems I have, as a bioinformatician, is keeping track of all the notes and one off scripts I write. I don't want to use an SVN, because it's just a repository with no organization. I don't want to use a wiki, because it's a huge hassle to maintain for small projects, and I hate using text files.

The compromise, it seems, is to use standards compliant files with a hell of a wrapper around them that does the organization for you, and the one I found is called KeepNote. The project page and downloads can be found at http://rasm.ods.org/keepnote/. The software is available for all major OS (Linux, Mac and even Windows), and can be installed relatively quickly and (for the most part) painlessly. (Linux builds are missing a library in the dependencies, but that can be figured out pretty quickly - just apt-get the missing lib and re-install if you hit this problem.)

While it may not fit everyone's workflow, my few hours of using it have already helped me get my tools organized and assembled in a logical manner, and it's allowed me to remove a load of files from my desktop. There are still bugs with it: I had to manually do some configuration of the the web browser, text editor and such before I could get started, but so far I haven't hit any of the bugs.

It also claims to help you organize notes - which I can clearly see. next time I go to a conference, I'll be using this for recording and organizing the usual 30-40 pages of notes I take.

For me, this falls under the heading of required tools for bioinformaticians and students alike and I look forward to seeing the project evolve and grow.

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4 Comments:

Blogger Dan said...

Weakling! Why aren't all of your notes written on vi, in TeX, and re-compiled and backed up daily by a cron job?

July 9, 2009 4:48:00 PM PDT  
Blogger Anthony Fejes said...

And what do you think I did before Keepnote???

July 9, 2009 7:49:00 PM PDT  
Blogger Rod said...

Another (non-free) alternative for Mac, at least, is Yojimbo:
http://www.barebones.com/products/Yojimbo/

July 21, 2009 12:21:00 PM PDT  
Blogger Will said...

This tool is the jam. Great tip!

August 11, 2009 7:26:00 AM PDT  

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