I can hardly believe I am trying out yet another system for keeping track of my characters and my plot, and yet…
I recently heard of a relatively newcomer to the PKMS scene (that’s Personal Knowledge Management Systems, just to remind you). The developers were very sneaky and posted on a reddit group I’m in asking people to comment on the new on-boarding video he’d created. Of course, I watched it and liked everything he was going over.
SuperNotes is a card-based PKMS. You easily create cards by just staring to type. You can tag each card and set up bi-directional linking (meaning that when I link on card to another, I can link the second card back to the first).
I’ve worked with other card-based systems, but they usually don’t have linking at all (Mem, Google Keep are two examples). You just have random cards scattered over your screen. You can usually tag them, but that’s still not very well organized. In SuperNotes, there are not only a display of cards, but also a menu on the left side of the screen where you can put cards into folders for better organization.
One thing I’ve really missed with all of the PKMS I’ve tried is templates. I like being able to just click a template and create a card (or page) that is a duplicate of the template. I do this for my character cards. This is what they look like:
In SuperNotes, creating a template is incredibly easy and then it just sits happily in the left-hand menu for whenever you need it.
There is also a calendar so you can keep track of when you wrote a card and you can write cards and date them in the future. Sadly, there is no reminder so it won’t just pop up that card on that date.
For those who like to share, it’s very easy to do so with SuperNotes. With a few clicks you can get the URL for the individual card you want to share and then whoever has that URL can see the card whether they are a SuperNotes user or not.
And finally, unlike some apps, this one can be accessed on the web, downloaded to your computer (PC or Mac), and there’s even a mobile version for IOS and Android.
The only thing about the program is that if you plan on using it a lot you do have to pay for it, but it’s not a break-the-bank amount. It’s $90 for a year’s subscription which gives you unlimited cards and access to their AI if you’re into that.
So far, I’m really enjoying SuperNotes. It makes organizing my characters and scenes a breeze.