I keep wondering how to integrate other sources of information with notetaking applications, such as OneNote. What I’d like is an adaptor interface that third-party applications could publish into–the content of which could be posted into OneNote. The content could be a transparent stream, such as a video or audio stream (OneNote already has the audio stream, for instance), or it could be “pasted” into the notetaking application on demand. To keep things nice and simple and relatively safe, it could support basic data types much like the clipboard–for example, text and bitmaps.
Here’s one way I’d like to use this feature:
I take lots of notes while programming. I often jot down changes I’ve made to source code. Sometimes I use ShareKMC to copy/paste code snippets into OneNote and then annotate them. What would save me time, however, is a Visual Studio-like publisher that I could subscribe to in OneNote which would let me click and paste the recent deltas into my notes.
I could use another adaptor that captures screenshots for instance of all the current windows.
Or maybe a publisher of graphs generated by Excel would make sense.
I imagine developers could come up with tons of ways to leverage something like this. And, yes, I imagine the OneNote database could explode in size–especially if everyone started syncing their notes to every application they used. And generally I’m not a fan of push techniques–and maybe there’s a pull permutation of this that might make more sense, but as long as the hard drives get faster and networks improve, I think I’d use it a lot.
Now there are some challenges here: For instance, the content needs a thumbnail view or menu item view for a picker over in OneNote as well as rendering issues of the content. And there are plenty of security issues. And it’s got to work across machines–because I often take notes on one machine and have my work apps on others.
Today I realized I’ve been trying to solve the information sharing problem with my notetaking apps many times over. I spent a month last year taking ShareKMC down a path of enhancing the clipboard, for instance, until I realized that the simple fact is that the clipboard is terribly weak and it needs fixing. Any features I’d add to ShareKMC would be patchwork that might save time in a few cases but would appear klunky in most.
Maybe information adaptors similar to what I’ve spelled out here might help. I imagine apps could be written to simply call OneNote’s api or menu items could be added to make calls back to external apps to retrieve content, but maybe a more generic implementation would be better so that Journal and other ink-based applications could share the content.
Hmm. I’ll keep thinking.