by Kevin Sanchez

Created on: July 29, 2010

These days, we have lots of information such as thoughts and ideas, blog postings, research data, facts, quotes etc. at our fingertips and organizing it can be a tough job. While you could use lots of post-it notes to write the information on, and stick it on your computer screen, there are better ways to organize information. One way is to use a program that does the organizing for you, such as the free program CintaNotes.

= Features =

CintaNotes is program that assists you in the daily tasks of organizing all of this information. It offers lots of features and can clip text from anywhere. It's as easy as one, two, three: just select the information you want to organise and press the hotkey you defined and CintaNotes saves the information. This works in ally application that can copy text to the clipboard, unlike browser-based tools like Google Notebook.

Other features include a fast search engine, that can retrieve saved information as you type. You can even search by title or by URL the note was taken from. As icing on the cake, CintaNotes is very portable. It is a totally self-contained application that you can put on any flash drive and run it directly from there on any computer. CintaNotes and your information will always be in your pocket.

= Taking CintaNotes for a spin =

I downloaded CintaNotes 1.2 here. It's a tiny setup file of 894 KB. Just like any other program, it's easy to install by following the instructions on the screen. After checking the 'Launch CintaNotes' check box, a screen that notifies me that my notebook is empty greets me. CintaNotes shows the default hotkey (CTRL+F12) and some other instructions to get me going.

= Saving a Wikipedia article =

I searched for CintaNotes on Wikipedia and found an article about it. I selected the article and pressed the hotkey CintaNotes showed me. CintaNotes pops up and the article shows up in a neat interface. The title has been automatically set. It's the title of the web page the article came from: 'CintaNotes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Mozilla Firefox'. Pressing Enter, I can adjust the note I saved.

= Tagging the note =

I added the tags wikipedia, cintanotes and software and pressed OK. The tags I just entered show up in a menu on the left. Pressing one of the tags in that menu shows me all notes containing that tag. Handy!

= Search as you type =

This feature is very interesting and to give it a good spin, I added nine other notes, giving me a total of ten notes. I typed 'beetle' in the search bar which you can find on top of the CintaNotes interface, and the Wikipedia article about the coccinellidae I saved shows up in the blink of an eye.

= Conclusion and final score =

The developers of this program are right; CintaNotes does all the organizing. All the user has to do is feed CintaNotes articles and information, apply tags, and if you want to recall a note, just enter a suitable word in the search bar or click one of the tags in the menu on the left.

User-friendliness: 4/5
Good: Neat and to the point interface.
Bad: CintaNotes is only available in English, but the makers plan to add other languages very soon.

Customization: 4/5
Good: You can adjust the font of your notes, the hotkeys, and the color theme of your notes.
Bad: The color theme of your notes comes in eight fixed colors, the user can't choose his/her own unique color.

Performance: 5/5
Good: CintaNotes takes up 6 MB of your RAM-memory, and 1,41 MB of your hard disk space.

Features: 5/5
Good: 'Search as you type', 'tagging', 'hotkey clipping' are three very successful features.

Overall score: 4,5/5

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