Steven Johnson

I find my 'natural' retention is better with hand-written notes. I get a better 'general idea' and I organically remember certain parts of the lecture. However, I also end up

However, my long-term retention is far better and deeper with digital notes, as they are not only indexed by spotlight (osx), but I drop them into DEVONthink which can relate text to other text through word frequency (and perhaps some other techniques).

For example, I remember attending a lecture in my fourth year where the teacher's statements sparked a memory of some earlier lecture. I entered some search terms in these tools and immediately found both the notes I had made three years earlier as well as the original articles that they were based on. As a bonus, I ended up remembering more about both these lectures and the topic at hand.

My ideal approach would be to take notes by hand and then transcribe them into my 'information systems'. Unfortunately, I often forget this crucial second step and end up forgetting where I left those original notes, or losing them entirely.

The same principle applies to reading. I much prefer reading and annotating on paper, with all the 'drawing' freedom that gives me. But reading an ebook, exporting all my highlights and annotations, and then importing them into my 'systems' has been much more valuable in the long run.

(for an idea of how someone actually uses spotlight, devonthink, or some other digital storage system effectively, this could be…

I have been through all the apps mentioned here and settled on Sente (www.thirdstreetsoftware.com). Very powerful, does all the biblio/citation thing if you need it, as well as the visualization part that Papers does. It is not as polished as specific tools (such as a Papers/Endnote combo), but I find it nice to store all my pdfs in one place, automatically adding meta data through Google Scholar, Pubmed or whatever, and commenting/highlighting in the same application. There are also some very good applescripts to export notes to Devonthink and implement a citation database à la Steven Johnson (http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html). My main library also sits in Dropbox, and is always accessible even when I am not at a Mac.

The think I miss most is the quality software. Apple users are willing to pay for software, so you have great apps like Scrivener, OmniFocus, Coda, etc

Interesting that you say that: I just wrote to Literature & Latte (makers of Scrivener) asking about Linux, and they said they shut down development, which is a shame: https://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=32709&start=105. I suggested a Kickstarter.

On Linux, Da Vinci Resolve replaces FCP X effectively, but Scrivener and Devonthink Pro seem to have no good replacements.

(The real key for DTP is its "see also" function: https://stevenberlinjohnson.com/devonthink-continued-94e972b6d2f).