I don’t care what you think you do for a living, the truth is that the most absorbing occupation you have is probably taking and organizing notes. Just go into any meeting and everyone is taking notes like there are possessed.
Now, way back in the BC era (Before Computers) we all used legal pads or some such media for note taking and we accumulated these pads at quite a pace. Back in my corporate days (a long time BC) I had a file cabinet full of these because I could never transcribe and or file my notes fast enough. The result was that only the really important meetings ever got categorized and filed; the rest sat in a drawer turning slowly but inexorably into high-grade, yellow mulch.
Once laptops became the standard accessory to meetings the problem of how to take notes got a new twist but now, as we accumulated notes faster and faster, we had a new problem; how to organize and share them. Ad hoc solutions including copying and pasting into email were OK but not very sophisticated
Now that we are a few years Ai (After iPad) we have a whole new set of problems; how to share notes among all of the devices that we use, not just our PCs but our pad computers, our smartphones, our e-readers, and so on.
My focus today, Catch.com, is a Web service that offers an interesting take on capturing, filing, and synchronizing notes across multiple platforms.
Catch, a Web-based service and can be used from pretty much any browser and also offers apps for Android and iOS (both iPad and iPhone formats), is remarkably simple. The service’s clean and simply Web interface allows you to add a note, append files to notes, and view notes by alphabetical sorting, by date, or by tag. To create or use an existing tag you simply preface any word in a note with a hash symbol (“#”).
The iOS and Android apps are a little more sophisticated providing integrated audio recording notes, offline access, SSL encryption of sync sessions, audio notification of new synced notes, font display controls, and automatic geo-tagging of notes.
Two types of account, Catch Free and Catch Pro are available. The free Catch account is allowed 70MB of uploads while the Catch Pro account ($5 per month or $45 per year) allows for 1GB of uploads per month (there is no limit on total note storage size for either account) and Catch says the Pro account will add support for PDF and other productivity file formats in the near future. Both accounts allow notes of up to 100,000 characters.
Catch claims on its site that it provides for sharing notes using Facebook, Twitter, and email but while that’s true for the Android app, the iOS app appears to only support email at present.
Catch also provides a simple REST API over HTTPS that allows you to include Catch’s services in any application you care to build and there are Objective-C, Java, and Python open source libraries are available, for free, to make that even easier. The available API calls support all of the functionality of the Catch platform including account creation and deactivation.
This is a very cool idea and one which should have lots of useful applications in knowledge management, project management, and your personal life. And maybe your note taking will become just that bit more effective.
