How do you quickly note down numbers or certain information? In spite of being on the computer from sunrise in India to noon on the US east coast, I used the paper and pencil. The main reason being it was not very convenient to open whatever I wanted to use to save the information. Until I started using the sticky notes applications, like KNotes. However, the problem with these notes is that they end up being too unstructured. I could not later efficiently search or filter across the different notes. Secondly my information used to be in more than one formats – images, links, text, which the sticky notes could not handle.
That is when I realised that one of the key requirements of tools for productivity is to be able to build structured data, but also allow entering data in different formats, which is sometimes unstructured. This can bring in convenience and efficiency together.
One of the applications I discovered that did this best was BasKet. Notice the K there! Yes, it is a KDE application. It might dishearten some of you, but I think this application should be available everywhere for everyone.
As the name says, it is a basket which holds things, without specifying their types or sizes or number. The beauty of basket is that it can sits in your system tray, and you can start entering data with a single click, or copy contents from the clipboard without worrying about format of the data.
Where it scores over other note-taking applications is that you can choose to structure the information later. Today, the application lets you create multiple baskets, if you wish to, create items of different types like todo tasks or images or hyperlinks. These baskets can be arranged the way you want, including in a hierarchy. It also lets you filter information, password protect baskets, many more things. All this without hogging your memory. You can checkout the roadmap to understand where the application is headed.
BasKet today is one of the key applications for me. It holds lot of information for me, and it is something that makes my computer more usable and me more productive.
