I dearly love Microsoft OneNote for note taking and collating material and it is surely one of the most original applications from Microsoft for a long time. Out of note taking applications I’ve seen and tried, OneNote does the best job of balancing free-form entry with “value-add” of technology, such as searching, tagging, organising and so forth. It’s not without its annoyances, for example having too much interface “chrome” and the lack of ability to zoom out of note pages and be able to rearrange and group them as you would a set of post it notes.

Unfortunately, in terms of collaboration or multiple-machine usage, OneNote was constructed from a Microsoft-centric world-view, where everyone is running Microsoft Windows with a copy of OneNote. Undoubtedly, this provides a rich experience but it simply doesn’t fit with today’s computing environment. Ideas and inspiration doesn’t stop when you’re away from your Windows machine.

Microsoft is soon launching a web-accessible version of OneNote so that you can view and edit your notebooks from the web, with possibly some kind of sharing features on top of that. This is great, but again assumes we are accessing the system from a full-blown laptop or desktop. I doubt the online version of OneNote will be usable on more exotic platforms. What I am also very doubtful of is whether it’ll have an API to allow third parties to interact with cloud-hosted OneNote notebooks. This would be a killer and necessary feature.

Consider the multitude of devices and platforms out there that a person might want to use to view and edit their notebooks from – Microsoft alone will not be able to cater for this. They are barely able to make a useful OneNote client for their own mobile platform, let alone a bespoke application for iOS or Android. Now that OneNote is online, it is a perfect time to make up a reasonable API which lets people write their own clients – of whatever level of richness – for the platform of their choice.

Take for example, Evernote. It’s a poor man’s version of OneNote in many senses, however you can use it from practically every family of mobile device and major desktop operating systems. Moreover, it has an API, so people can write their own clients, or offer simple functionality such as “clip to Evernote”. Right now, my notes and clippings are spread across email inboxes, wikis, OneNote, Evernote, Instapaper and Delicious. Each has their place, although I really wish they could be consolidated. Having a decent, open version of OneNote with offline synchronisation on the mobile platforms of my choice would be close to ideal. OneNote offers an excellent rich experience on my desktop and notebook, and today it’s easy to keep those two in sync, however what happens when I am in-between machines? The opportunity for OneNote lies in this gulf.

I’ve put up some new pictures from 2010 in the cityslices, urban, gallimaufry and people sections.

Cityslices

Urban

Gallimaufry

People

When I first arrived in Norway, I was struck by the ridiculous number of baby carriages around the place. Norway, or at least Oslo – or at the very least, Grünerløkka – is serious about making babies. The sight above, in front of the newly-opened and rather popular Nighthawk Diner is a typical one.

It’s no wonder, though, when there is excellent paid leave for both parents and attitudes are such that having a baby during university or early career is not seen as terribly unfortunate.

Putting the risk in “vegetarisk” (Norwegian for “vegetarian”).

I’ve had a great deal of trouble joining wifi networks which require web-based authentication. These are common at hotels and for many public access points. I was simply unable to join any of these hotspots: Safari would open and prompt me for a login, and then freeze when I tried to submit the details.

The solution: In Safari’s options, turn off “Auto fill” prior to attempting to join the network. Apparently the “save password” dialogue box is the culprit and is kind of broken until Apple releases a fix.