God Damn Beta's

I am sick and tired of everything on earth being a GD Beta. I have used MS Onenote in the past and like the product, but don't feel like dropping $100 for everyone of my machines (there are a lot of the damn things I use), so I went looking for alternatives.

The field is :

MS Onenote
Google Notebook
Zoho Notebook
Evernote

I use Google Notebook and have no specific complaints, but it has become more of a link dump for me and I don't like the FireFox plugin, couple that with it isn't quite as cool as the snip tool I have gotten used to on a Tablet PC and Google Notebook is free and functional, but kind of meh. One note takes the snipped content (which can really be anything) and you past it in to Onenote to annotate. The functionality is really nice for the handwritten notes that you just never realized where way more natural and usable than typed notes. I am constantly creating typed notes, I have hundreds of typed notes in various applications all over the place. Outlook notes and notepad notes are the ones that I was using the most prior to Google Notebook.

I took all of my class notes from a recent developers class in Google's Notebook and was happy with the links and organization of the pages and individual blurbs. The notes were easy to layout and fill with content, the code even pasted in well. The only sad part was finding the limit of data in one individual note was shorter than I wanted it to be. I pasted like 10 pages of text and Google Notebook choked; I pushed the limits and the app crapped out. It is nice to know the limitations of a piece of software so I am glad that it wasn't at a critical juncture that it failed, but I was still disappointed. Really my complaint for Google's Notebook is that it is fundamentally a web app, and lives only where the bandwidth is plentiful. I hope Google implements Gears for Notebook in the future to give it the offline functionality I think it really needs.


Zoho was fine, I didn't like the way that you had notes and snippets in the note pages with scroll bars, but that is more personal preference than anything else. I pasted a section of text and didn't like the way it was layed out so I left.


Evernote looks like the mix of online sync and off line functionality that I am looking for and really the reason I am writing this whole post is to bitch about them letting you download the software but not run it without a beta invite. Put the code behind the wall if you aren't letting the software work at all without a beta invite. How fucking unbelievably shitty is it to download some software and install it, and then not be able to run it? Pretty shitty, thats how shitty. I am pissed off about it in fact, I would be fine if I hit invite and didn't get a code for how ever long, but to have the download outside the wall and install it only to find out I will be waiting for an invite is a real bad choice. So until further notice Evernote is on my shit list.