One of the great struggles of the last 10 years for me has been note taking. I have spent a good deal of time and money attempting to find the right note taking application for my personal uses. Mostly for planning tabletop rpg games. Tiddlywiki was almost perfect, but lacked the ability to be used from phones or tablets effectively.
I’m going to shill for a bit. I have no affiliation with this product, I’m just a happy user. I don’t recall where exactly I first heard of Trello, but I’m pretty sure it was on social media where roleplayers had gathered; someone mentioned that they found it to be quite useful when planning their games. Always looking for the bigger, better deal, I dived in to see if this new tool would work for me or not. The first thing that you notice is that the UI is deceptive. It looks bad. Then you use it for a while and it’s not bad. Sadly the horizontal scrolling will be bad for everyone who doesn’t have a Mac touchpad, and I don’t see anyway for out of that, but that is the only really bad thing I can say about it.
Trello gives me 3 things I critically need these days: markdown, inter-note linking, and cross platform support. It also supports a large number of features for sharing and collaborating, which turn out to be remarkably useful when running a game, but those are bonus points. Markdown is best note taking markup language around and I pretty much require it these days. Inter-note linking was the thing that made Tiddlywiki very attractive, because it means that whenever I need to reference something it’s just a click away. Trello has apps running on iOS and Android which means that I can read and make edits on the go, which for me is extremely valuable because I’m a multi-device kind of guy.
Trello gets out of my way and lets me take notes effectively for all my game (and other) planning. It’s awesome, and as soon as all my gold runs out I’m going to have to buy some more.