411155 - note taking/gathering, OneNote/EverNote replacement

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 116945

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Stefan Kueng]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.11; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11
Build Identifier: 20071031

As mentioned here:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=555691
feature requests are valid bug reports. So I'm filing this in the hope to interest some people to implement this feature request.

Thunderbird as a mail client is already used by many people as a place to store notes and reminders. E.g., people send themselves mails with information they don't want to lose. This could be improved a lot, maybe even as a completely separate application.

Looking at EverNote (http://wwww.evernote.com), a lot of the features EverNote provides are already implemented in Thunderbird or at least seem to be possible with not too much effort:

* search/filter notes (http://www.evernote.com/products/evernote/how_to/basics.php#search_filter) : 'safed search' in Thunderbird
* create new note : new mail in Thunderbird
* add category to note : tags in Thunderbird

But what's missing in Thunderbird to be used easily as a note taking application:
* editing existing notes/mails (and 'locking' of notes to prevent them from being edited accidentally)
* limited amount of available tags
* 'saved search' not as powerful (missing date-ranges, note-types, with/without attachement, ...)
* automatic saving of notes that are edited (currently, every new mail/note must be explicitely saved to a folder)
* browsing through all notes not as easy as with EverNote and its 'tape' view

I really think that Thunderbird or a separate application using the Thunderbird code as a base could be a very successful application. Especially in light that both OneNote and EverNote are Windows-only and use proprietary file formats.
Together with FireFox (storing web pages as notes) and Thunderbird (convert mails to notes for better organizing), sharing of notes, sending them around and even synching with web-based note apps (Google Notebook, Zoho, ...) could be done (e.g., with plugins).

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Stefan Kueng]

issues related to this may be:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=404045
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=231062

Comment 2

[Stefan Kueng]

discussion about this:
http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird/browse_thread/thread/7f61294164d09547/36a3f60093b1643b#36a3f60093b1643b

Comment 3

[Neil Sheldon]

I vote for this, but would personally like to see this built as a separate application, since the user interface for note taking (esp. when competing with OneNote and EverNote) is going to be slightly different than for sending e-mail. However, a setup like Sunbird/Lightning where it can come in either flavor would be sufficient.

I would also like to see the notes stored as simple HTML files within a folder, instead of one gargantuan .mbox file, as Thunderbird would do. This would allow easy sharing of notes with people who don't have the same application. This would also make it easy to implement a "note sharing" feature, by just storing the notes on a WebDAV server. This would also make it easier to include other types of files as "notes": jpg, mp3, svg, etc. Without having to attach them.

I think that in order to bring users in, it would eventually also have to integrate with Tablet functionality (handwriting recognition, etc.) -- even if that's only available on platforms where such features are supported in the Desktop environment. Sketches and diagrams would probably also require a simple SVG editor control.