There are many ways to take notes and study, but visual methods like mind maps and infinite canvas
can be very effective. So, in this video, I'm going to show you some of the best visual note
apps that you can use for writing and studying. This video is sponsored by Shortform.
Number one, and probably the most polished visual note app out there is Heptabase. It
has the most complete set of features including tasks, Readwise integration,
daily journal and mobile app for both iOS and Android. Not many visual note-taking apps have
mobile apps. Heptabase is one of the few that do. Anyway, there are different ways to use this tool.
One is simply to use the daily journal and write your thoughts,
todos and something you read or learned. And Create a new page which is called a "card" in
Heptabase for writing about something in depth. Also all the todos you made will be in the Task
tab so you can see them all in one place. I think this is a new addition which I really
like. You can even schedule them to be done by a certain date. It's kind of basic right now,
but I'm sure it will get better. But as a visual note app,
it lets you organise your notes visually in an infinite canvas which are called "whiteboards".
So if you go to Map, you will see collections of the whiteboards you have in your knowledge
base. And you can organise them however you want so you can create sort of a map of your brain.
I haven't used it much recently, but in mine, I have whiteboards for goals, life principles
which are a bunch of my favourite quotes from the books I read, and for personal finance which was
my messy attempt to visualise my cash flow. Just like this, you can make a whiteboard for
anything you want to organise visually. It can be for preparing for an exam, writing a novel
or article, organising recipes, planning a trip, or whatever you want. The way it works is pretty
intuitive - you just drag and drop the cards you want to use from the sidebar. Then arrange them
on the whiteboard. Arrows and lines can be useful to make it easier to visualise the relationships
between cards. You have an option to create a mindmap too if you prefer.
Check out my full review if you want to see more details of Heptabase.
Scrintal is another good visual note app that I have tried. It is very similar to Heptabase
but instead of daily journal, Scrintal has My Desk which is your temporary workspace for everything.
It's like your notepad on your desk that you can write anything on. Then once there's something you
want to keep, you can select them to create a new whiteboard. If you don't need the rest, you can
just clean the desk like you do in real life. Inside a board, you can search for cards you
want to use and drag them to where you want them. You can also create columns like this
to make it easier to organise the cards. If you like the kanban board style way to
organise information, this might come in handy. But I cannot help but feel some things are lacking
in this app, especially after seeing Heptabase. Like Readwise integration is essential to me to
import my reading highlights, but Scrintal doesn't have it. Also no mobile app. I
know it's still early days for them, so I'm sure they will add more features.
Traverse is a new visual note app that's especially great for students. It's very
unique because it combines mindmap, flashcards and bi-directional linking.
It might look a bit basic, but I think it has a lot of potential. You can create as
many whiteboards as you like, which are called "traverses" in this app. So you may have one for
a book you read, one for a project you're working on, one for a class you're taking and so on.
Now you can make a new note and place it on the board. Write about the topic
you're learning or an idea you got. Now, what's special about Traverse is that you
can create flashcards from these notes. Just hit this "new flashcard" button,
or highlight the part you want to memorise and turn it into a flashcard. But I tend
to create a cloze for the things I want to remember or review later because it's easier.
So you can repeat this for each note. But another cool thing is that you can turn them into mindmap
by connecting them with lines and arrows to make it easier to see how they're related.
And finally, you can even use bi-directional linking to connect different notes across
different traverses. So by clicking on the link, you can jump right to the other side of the
connection even if it's on another traverse. Also it already has a mobile app so you can
create flashcards on the go and review them on your phone which I think is really nice
because I like to review my flashcards whenever I have a few minutes free.
Visual methods like mind map and infinite canvas are very effective because they help
you organise your thoughts and link them to one another. I learned many
effective learning techniques from books like How to Take Smart Notes and Learning
How to Learn. And I've been reading them again because I found them on Shortform.
Shortform is my go-to app to learn the key concepts of different topics and discover
new books to read next. It offers many collections of detailed book guides for
non-fiction across different categories such as productivity, business and psychology.
You may think this is just a typical book summary app. But what sets it apart, and why I find it so
effective for studying, is the inclusion of expert commentary and analysis that provides additional
insights into the books' themes and ideas. This expert insight helps bridge the gap between just
reading a book summary and truly understanding the content, leading to an better learning experience.
But that's not all. It also comes with an AI tool to help you learn from various online content,
including articles and YouTube videos. It can summarise the content you're browsing instantly,
which is a handy way to absorb key information without having to read or watch the entire piece.
There are many tools like this already, but what's special about it is that it
gives you not only the summary but also the context of the content, counter arguments and
relevant books. This makes it easy to dive deeper into the topic if you're interested.
You can try Shortform for free right now by going to shortform.com/shuomi
to get a free trial and 25% off the annual subscription - which is 3 months free.
AFFiNE is another new note app with an unique combination of features. It's
like Notion with mindmap. Also, it's local first, meaning all of your notes are stored
locally on your device. So even when you're offline, you can still access your notes.
Anyway, you can take notes just like in other note apps. And use slash to format text and
insert things like links, images, kanban boards and tables. And these are all blocks,
so you can rearrange them by dragging them around. So far, it's all super normal, but the best part
is that you can switch to the mindmap view at any time. So if you have a long document with lots of
information, this might be very useful because you can break it down into small pieces so you
can arrange them however you like on the canvas. And you can add more notes, shapes, images and
other things. But it's also possible to draw directly. I'm on my laptop,
so it's not quite easy to draw, but if you're on a tablet, it's probably very useful.
So AFFiNE is a great tool for not just taking notes, but also for brainstorming,
drawing, planning and more. I think it's free, so give it a try if you're curious.
Obsidian and Logseq are kind of like the ultimate note-taking apps with
tons of customisability. So they both have an infinite canvas feature as well. They have lots
of plugins you can install to modify the apps to suit your needs. So if you like to tinker
with your note app, they are a good choice. I won't go into details because there are
lots of videos about them. Plus, they are free so you can try them out right away.
Albus might be the best tool to learn new things. It's like an AI-powered mindmapping
app. I reviewed it a few months ago, but looks like they made a lot of improvements since then.
The way it works is that you make a board for a topic you want to learn. Then Albus
automatically generates a list of questions and subtopics to start with. Just pick one
you want to know more about and wait for it to generate cards for you. Then you can expand on
each of them to explore further. If you're not satisfied, it's possible to ask your own
question and it will answer it for you. But now you can even ask questions about
Youtube videos, PDF files you have, web pages and so on. For example, you can search Youtube
for something you want to learn directly in Albus. Pick one you're interested in and
enable insights. After a few seconds, it lets you ask anything about the video. This way,
you can learn without even watching the video. The same thing is possible for PDF files
and web pages. You just need to upload the file or the URL and ask questions.
I think this is such a cool idea and one of the best use cases of AI in education. Personally,
if it had a flashcard feature like in Traverse, it will be a perfect tool for studying.
The last one Lattics. Lattics is a note-taking app
that I think is perfect for students, academics and writers. If you're familiar with Zettelkasten
note-taking method or atomic note-taking method, this is actually a great app for that.
It is built on the idea of managing information hierarchically, where you can create projects,
articles, and cards. So a project is made up of articles, and an article is made up of cards.
The way I would use it is that I collect ideas as cards. And once I have enough, I can create
an article with them. I think this is such a perfect tool if you're looking for an app to do
Zettelkasten like it was mentioned in the book How to Take Smart Notes. Or if you're looking for a
digital tool to do Ryan Holiday's writing method. Also it supports comments like in Google docs,
as well as footnotes which makes it great for collaboration and academic writing. It lets you
even change the style of the document to look like Economist, APA paper and Medium articles.
And I noticed that there's typewriter mode and you can enable
the keyboard sound which feels really nice! Anyway, a nice thing about this app is that
you can switch to mindmap to get an overview of your notes and arrange the cards. You can develop
your writing directly from here too if you like. Overall, I really like the simplicity of Lattics
with the clean and intuitive user interface. If you find the other note apps a little bit
confusing with too many options, this is a great one to check out.
If you want to know more great note-taking apps, check out this video about the best
AI note apps. Thanks for watching till the end. I appreciate it! See you in the next one. Bye!