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Beta M10 Help |
CintaNotes is a small and easy to use personal note management application. It is designed to be your indispensable assistant in the daily task of collecting numerous pieces of information, whatever they may be: your own thoughts and ideas, book and article excerpts, job postings, famous people quotes, research data, curious facts, Wikipedia definitions, blog posts, important news, you name it.
It lets you quickly jot down and tag any piece of useful information that you come across while reading documents or surfing the Net - just select the text and press Ctrl+F12. With CintaNotes, this is really all it takes to make a note! CintaNotes does not clutter your workspace with "sticky notes", all notes are neatly organized in an easily navigable list. And unlike browser-based tools like Google Notebook or Firefox plug-ins CintaNotes does not require a web browser to work - it works in Microsoft Word, Outlook, Adobe Acrobat - the "text-capturing magic" works in all applications that can copy text to clipboard!
Retrieving information is also trivial: just open CintaNotes and start typing, and only notes which contain the text you type will remain in the list. More sophisticated search criteria are supported, like searching by title or by URL the note was taken from.
CintaNotes is a totally self-contained application, meaning that you can put it on a flash drive and run it directly from there - in this way, your notes will always be with you.
CintaNotes runs under Microsoft Windows® 2000, 2003, XP and Vista. It does not require any runtime support.
Installing CintaNotes is a straightforward procedure. After you download and run the installer, you'll be prompted to specify the folder where CintaNotes will reside (Program Files by default), then you'll be asked for the Start Menu folder name. After the installation is complete, check the "Launch CintaNotes" option to get rolling.
CintaNotes can also work without installation. You are free to copy the CintaNotes folder to any other location, create a shortcut to it and thus have two independent note managers (mind, however, that CintaNotes does not support running two instances of the application simultaniously, even from different locations). Also please pay attention that if you have Windows Vista and install CintaNotes into the Program Files folder, your note data and settings will be stored separately in the Application Data folder, so simple copying of the CintaNotes folder will result in a fully functional but empty application. You can find and copy your data files manually.
Installing CintaNotes does not require administrative privileges. However, you have to be an administrator if you want to install CintaNotes into the Program Files folder.
CintaNotes provides you with several ways to take notes. You can enter notes manually, clip text from other applications, or paste text from clipboard.
Open CintaNotes and select the "Add" command from the "Edit" menu (or just press the Ins key). CintaNotes creates a new note and displays the note editing dialog. In this dialog, you can enter note's title, note's text, note's link, and note tags.
The "Link" is just some URL associated with the note. If CintaNotes recognizes contents of the "Link" field to be a URL, it displays a small blue arrow icon to the right inside of the "Link" edit box. Clicking on this icon will open the URL in your default browser.
There's also a "Browse Link" command in note's context menu, which enables you to browse the note's URL without opening the note edit dialog.
The "Tags" field is used to categorize notes (see "Using tags to categorize notes" section below).
None of these fields is required, so you are free to leave any of them empty. After you've entered the information you want to store, press "OK" (or Ctrl+Enter) to add the note to your notebook.
Entering notes manually is great if you want to write down some brilliant idea of yours, but more often you just want to store a piece of information you've found elsewhere. This is the case where CintaNotes really shines.
Provided CintaNotes is running in the background (usually it will reside in the system tray), all you need to do is mark the text you want to store and press Ctrl+F12. Et voilà! CintaNotes' main window pops up, focused on the new note with the text you've just selected. Some fields beside text are also filled automatically - the title of the source application window is taken as note's title, and if you clip text from a web page, the note's "Link" field automatically receives the URL of the page from the address bar of your browser (Internet Explorer, FireFox, Opera, Chrome and Safari are supported).
At this moment you might want to edit the new note to add information to it or tag it. Or you can just press Esc to minimize CintaNotes and continue reading where you left off.
CintaNotes also supports direct text pasting from the Windows clipboard. Select the "Paste" command from the "Edit" menu or press Ctrl+V. CintaNotes creates a new note with the text from the clipboard. It also tries to determine which application has put the data into the clipboard, and if successful uses the application window title as the note's title. Unfortunately reliable clipboard data source detection is not always possible, and when CintaNotes fails to find the source window, the first line of the pasted text becomes also the note's title.
Generally you should prefer clipping to direct pasting, because in the former case more data can be filled automatically for you.
You can go back to editing any note anytime - just double-click on it, or highlight it and press the Enter (or F2) key.
Deleting notes is also straightforward - select the notes you want to delete, and press the Delete key (or select "Delete" from the "Edit" or note's context menu).
Oftentimes when you read a long text and make notes along the way, you end up with a whole bunch of short notes on the same topic. In many cases this is ok, but sometimes what you really want is just one note with all the text you've copied.
In CintaNotes, you can merge these notes together via selecting all of them and choosing the "Edit/Merge" command (or pressing Ctrl+M). The selected notes will be merged into one. What exaclty happens here is the following: text of the second and subsequent notes is appended to the text of the first (earliest) selected note, then the appended notes are removed since they are no longer necessary.
The "Merge" command is also accessible from the note's context menu. It is enabled only when two or more notes are selected.
By default, CintaNotes displays all notes which are in the notebook organized in a list.
You can, however, specify a search string to limit the display to the notes containing this string. To begin entering the search string, just start typing in the main CintaNotes window. The focus will go to the search box, and the note list will be updated right as you type.
Filtering/searching has a number of modes which specify what data fields are examined during the search. By default CintaNotes includes all fields into the search. You can change the search mode via clicking on the search mode icon in the search box and selecting a mode from the menu (or right-click in the search-box). Aside from the default mode, the following search modes are available:
All search is done in a case-insensitive fashion. To reset the search filter and go back to the full list,click the X button inside of the search box, or press Esc. Adding a new note will reset the search filter as well.
When you take a lot of notes every day, having all of them in a single list becomes unmanageable very quickly. Note tags are used to address this problem. While editing a note, you can specify any text in the note's "Tags" field. Later you can use part of this text to quickly filter out notes which don't contain it in their "Tags" field, thus greatly narrowing down your search
For example, you might decide to tag all notes related to your current research project with a "res1" tag. So every time you take such a note, you put "res1" into the "Tags" field. After that this tag will appear on the tag sidebar (see the section below), so you will be able so highlight it, and CintaNotes will be displaying just your research notes. Alternatively, you can turn on tag search (see "Finding notes" section) and type "res1" as your search string.
If you want to associate two or more tags with a note, just put them all into the "Tags" separated by spaces (comma and semicolon are also allowed, but are autoconverted to spaces).
Tags can include any symbols, not just alphanumeric. So "#1!" is a perfectly valid tag. Remember also that tags are case-insensitive, so whatever you enter into the "Tags" field is converted into lower case.
It's possible to tag several notes at once: just select them and press F4 (or select the Tag... command from the context menu).
The Edit/Replace Tags command allows tag renaming, splitting, merging and deleting. Generally, each tag specified in the first edit box is replaced with all tags from the second edit box.
In any tag-entering field CintaNotes displays a dropdown list of available tags as soon as you start typing. Pressing Spacebar, Return or Tab accept the currently highlighted suggestion, whereas Esc or Del cancel it. You can also force autocomplete display via pressing Ctrl+Space.
The Beta M8 version of CintaNotes introduces the Tag Sidebar. This is a handy tool for fast access to different tags and tag sets. It is basically the controller of the built-in tags filter.
The sidebar is not displayed by default, you can turn it on using the View/Tag Sidebar menu command.
There is a list of clickable labels on the sidebar. The first two labels are "All" and "Untagged", they are predefined and cannot be changed. When you click on the "All" label on the sidebar, you make sure that no tags filter is applied. The "Untagged" label will display only notes having no tags.
The Untagged label is your natural note inbox which gives you a quick and convenient access to recently captured information pieces that need categorization (provided you are using tags, of course).
Right below is the list of all tags defined in the notes. This list displays all tags in the alphabetical order. If the list is long and doesn't fit, two scroll buttons appear (you can also scroll this list using the mouse wheel, and this is probably the most convenient way).
Clicking on a tag activates it, and only notes having this tag will be displayed. Using Ctrl+Click or Alt+Click, you can expand the tag selection to additional tags. Keep in mind that with Ctrl+Click, a tag intersection is used when multiple tags are selected (i.e. notes having all of the selected tags will be included), whereas with Alt+Click, a tag union is used (i.e. notes having any of the tags will be included).
Tags selected in tag union mode have a yellowish highlight, as opposed to the normal white tag intersection highlight. The two modes are mutually exclusive.
Entering tags into the search box also implies tag intersection. The difference here is that you don't have to use your mouse, and that you don't have to enter complete tags.
Tag sidebar also highlights tags which are related to any tag of the currently selected set. Two tags are considered related if there are notes which have them both.
Each tag label in the tag sidebar has a right-click context menu which allows you to rename or delete a given tag. When multiple tags are selected, you can merge them as well.
The View / Reverse Order command reverses the notes in the list so that the latest notes come first.
CintaNotes supports note exporting in several ways:
When using the File / Export command, you have a choice whether to export all notes or only the selected ones.
You can import notes using the File/Import command. You can import notes from previously exported XML files, and from .dat files from other CintaNotes istallations.
CintaNotes automatically creates three backup files: notebook.hourly.dat is updated each hour, notebook.daily.dat — each day, and notebook.weekly.dat is updated once per week. The files are written into the folder which is specified in the cintanotes.settings file (see the "Advanced Configuration" subsection of the next section for details).
CintaNotes lets you configure a wide range of parameters, e.g. the fonts used in the main note list, the note color theme, or the way the program behaves when its window is closed or minimized.
The Color Theme submenu of the View menu lets you select the most pleasant color theme.
The Note Appearance command of the View menu opens a dialog box where you can pick fonts for note's header and text, and adjust now many note lines should be displayed directly in the list.
The Hot Keys command from the Options menu enables you to change the default system-wide key combinations for clipping text, activating CinatNotes window and adding a new note.
If Options / Silent Clipping is activated, CintaNotes will not pop up after each clipping, but will display a balloon tip instead. Clicking on it would open CintaNotes.
Options / After Clipping / Switch View to Untagged specifies whether you want to switch the tag filter to show only untagged notes after clipping, which is convenient for separating newly taken notes from the rest, and for tagging them.
Options / After Clipping / Open in Editor lets you open a newly clipped note in editor for immediate tagging and probably further editing. Usually you would prefer tagging multiple notes at once after a working session, but this possibility to review and edit each note may sometimes come in quite handy .
If you want CintaNotes to minimize itself to the system notification area (otherwise known as "system tray"), turn on the Minimize to System Tray option in the Options menu.
Turn on the Close to System Tray option if you want the program to behave the same way when you close the window (that is, when you click on the window's Close button or press Alt+F4). When this option is turned on, closing the window will not exit the program. To exit CintaNotes, you will have to select the "File/Exit" command, or right-click on the CintaNotes icon in the notification area and select Exit.
If you want CintaNotes window to be always on top of other windows, turn on the Always on Top option.
Check Options / Run at system startup to have CintaNotes start automatically. It will start minimized to the system tray. Use this option with care if you run CintaNotes from an USB stick, since if the stick is absent CintaNotes won't be found during system startup.
The options in the File / Backup menu control which of the three backup files should be created and kept up-to-date. If you uncheck one of these options, already existing backup file is retained, but is not updated anymore.
Some options of CintaNotes can only be set via editing the cintanotes.settings file. Be sure to edit it using a Unicode-aware text editor (e.g. Notepad).
This program is distributed on AS IS basis, and WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Cinta Software can not be made responsible for any, direct or indirect, damage caused by the program.
CintaNotes is a free program for personal use. Do not redistribute it. Cinta Software reserves the right to change licensing terms in future.
©2008 Cinta Software. All rights reserved.