SmartNotes

To keep yourself organized and focused while juggling multiple tasks, you need a good assistant delivered in digital format. Designed as an ergonomic note-taking app, SmartNotes facilitates a simple interface and straightforward options for writing notes and capturing text from external sources.

Both installer and portable versions are available, so you can download whichever suits you best (the portable edition is ideal for keeping the tool stored on a USB flash drive).

As far as the interface is concerned, the program emphasizes simplicity above all else, and it seems to be optimized for tablets. Notes can be added right away. Besides specifying a display name and the message itself, it's possible to enter tags and attach files.

HTML code is supported, which means that text can be customized in color, emphasized with special effects, accompanied by pictures or emoticons, and so on. More importantly, formatted text can be added as notes from the clipboard using the Ctrl+F12 hotkey (this can be changed from the settings panel into anything else).

Tags can be modified for many notes at the same time. You can check out statistics about single or linked tags, date archives for notes, as well as notes created on the current week (grouped by day).

Additional settings can be configured, too. For example, you can instruct the utility to automatically start running as soon as you start up the computer, as well as modify the default keyboard shortcuts for showing the main window and adding new notes.

We haven't experienced any compatibility issues with the newest Windows edition in our tests. SmartNotes doesn't bring anything new to the table as far as features are concerned, but it's easy to use for writing notes, adding tags and viewing overall statistics.