I had the chance to take a look at Microsoft OneNote recently, and, having liked the concept since long before Microsoft came up with it, I looked around for an open-source alter­na­tive for my GNU/Linux system. I had done the same thing several years ago and come up with nothing, but this time I was pleas­antly surprised to find a good replace­ment, BasKet Note Pads, a KDE appli­ca­tion similar to OneNote but with less features.

I had actually tried out BasKet earlier, but it was at a more primi­tive stage of devel­op­ment then. It seems to have advanced to a greater level of sophis­ti­ca­tion since then.

Today, I put this software to practical use: I used it to make lecture-notes for a class. That worked out pretty well, although a Tablet PC with a stylus would certainly have been more convenient.

There are a few features missing in the appli­ca­tion, such as picture editing and annota­tion, handwriting/character recog­ni­tion etc. But it is possible to link an external appli­ca­tion (such as Krita) to edit images, and handwriting recog­ni­tion is not very useful without a stylus, so for personal use, BasKet seems to be an excel­lent option.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 14:44 and is filed under Daily Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.