Zoho Notebook

I make heavy use of Evernote, but it is costly (I pay $50 a year) and bloated (I don't need most of the features it offers). The free version does not meet my needs because I use more than two devices to do the work I do and I tend to store multiple images from Skitch (an Evernote clipper and annotation service) for brief periods of time. The images exceed the capacity of Evernote's free version. Evernote works great, but it is relatively overpriced for the way in which I work - content collection rather than content curation.

I have been exploring Zoho Notebook as an alternative and decided to offer some observations. Notebook is a free service.

I use Zoho Notebook by way of the Chrome extension. This places an icon at the top of my browser.

Selecting the browser bar Notebook icon opens a menu offering multiple ways to clip and save content from the web page being reviewed. Actually, you can also upload content from your computer or enter text directly, but I am concentrating on the process of collecting information from web pages in this description. 

The options are self-descriptive. Clean view stores the text and image content of a web page ignoring superfluous content in other page columns. Clip link saves just a link to the page being viewed. This might than be used to add notes.

A screenshot allows the storage of the browser window.

The text and photo options open a window that overlays the right-hand portion of your screen and you then drag content (an image, selected text) from the browser window into this second window. 

You can drag a photo into an open text window so the labels for the two options are a little misleading.

Saved notes are stored within Notebooks (you can create multiple notebooks) and appear as thumbnails. Clicking a thumbnail opens the stored content as full sized.

You also interact with the thumbnails to perform other actions. The thumbnails will appear with a dog-eared up right corner.

Clicking within this dog-ear reveals the options for additional actions. 

This should be enough to get you started. Zoho Notebook is easy to use and quite powerful. It is presently free which always concerns me a bit. However, as I said earlier, I use such services as part of a content collection process that will result in a product (this blog post) and I do not depend on such services for long-term storage.