Google Notebook built into the Opera Browser already
Published May 16th, 2006 5:42 PM EDT By Daniel Goldman
Google today released Google Notebook, which allows you to clip and organize information from across the web in a single online location.
The new Google Notebook is available only for Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox as a plugin/extension. The Opera and Safari browsers aren’t supported at this time, but Google says that it may add support for it in the future.
While Google Notebook doesn’t support the Opera browser, Opera users need not worry. Most of the functionality that Google Notebook provides is already built into the Opera Browser by default.
Opera calls this feature “Notes” (No surprise there). It operates similar to Google Notebook, you select (highlight) some text on a webpage, right click, click on “Copy to note” and the text will be copied a Note. Your notes are stored in the “Notes” panel (To show/hide the panel, click on the left most part of the browser or you could use the F4 shortcut key). You could also access your notes by going to Tools > Notes in the menu bar.
Opera allows you to easily search your notes; double clicking the note opens the original web page. You could also edit the note in real-time without the need to save it.
One of the main advantages to Google Notebook, however, is that your notes are saved online, which gives you the ability to access them on other computers. With Opera’s notes, it only saves it to your local computer (similar to POP3 email).
The “Opera Notebook” feature has been available since Opera 7.
So there you go, us Opera users won’t be bullied by Google 
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It would be even better an Opera with built-in sticky-notes (post-it), providing “the other direction” in the organization of informations that our mind uses (the “notes” work in just one direction, and “post-it” work in the other one). I’ve managed to have them as a UserJS, but built-in ones would be fine
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=107065
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I’m sorry if I come of as a troll but sorry.
1. You can’t share Opera’s “Notes”
2. Links and Images aren’t part of “Notes”
3. Sorry Dan, but you claiming Notebook is built-in is no worse than Asa claiming something like this or that is in Firefox as an extension.
4. Well if you think about it, Firefox has numerous extensions that do the same.
The concept of Clipping is something entirely different compared to “Notes”. The only edge Google Notebook has over Clipmarks (which is something I use), is it’s integrated into Google Results. I’m gonna leave now.
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Opera’s rendering core is so much better than the competition. Why Google continues to support FireFox over Opera I’ll never understand. Since the sites all work fine in Opera with a few tricks, they should really stop identifying the browser at page load time and concentrate on coding sites that simply use proper code.
Ugh. It’s hard to show people how great the Opera browser is when places like Google continually break support, for no particularly good reason.
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Agree with SairaM… GN is about sharing the notes, as digg or other services do.
It’s an excuse, and we all know it, so, Notes is nothing like Google Notebook.
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Daniel, my congratuations — you are Idiot!
notepad is good for notes too, like opera. But what, if I need online notes, with sinchronizing. And with images, and with html…
Opera isn`t ideal browser, and have many defects…
PS: I don`t like FFFanboys, but you are worse — you behave like Asa, and this post isn`t good for opera.
PPS: кг/ам.
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Kildor, we can have a clean debate without any name calling.
Both Google and Opera have their pros and cons.
You mentioned the Google’s notes are better since it’s online. But that may not **always** be a good thing. What if you’re doing some research or writing something and you need to look at your notes BUT you don’t have internet access? Having your notes online wouldn’t help you one bit.
I’m not suggesting, however, that Google’s model is wrong. There are pros and cons to both models.
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Can I share my opera notes with my friends online?
Can I view my opera notes on another computer?
C’mon, opera notes != google notebook, and we all know that.
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You all bring up good points, but ultimately, Opera notes meets the same goals and this.
From google:
“Google Notebook makes web research of all kinds – from planning a vacation to researching a school paper to buying a car – easier and more efficient by enabling you to clip and gather information even while you’re browsing the web.
And since Google Notebook lives in your browser, you won’t be left with a scattered collection of notes, Word docs, and browser bookmarks to sort through; all your web findings will be gathering into one organized, easy accessible location that you can access from any computer.”
..this is exactly what Opera’s notes has meant to accomplish.
Ok, so you can’t publish them online. So what? Who is going to care about your notes? Don’t get caught up the social networking hype- and learn the lesson (http://bokardo.com/archives/the-delicious-lesson/) that personal value precedes network value. Opera already nails it on personal value as Daniel said since version 7.0
I will say that getting notes to reside online would only be useful (TO ME!) for the afore mentioned retrevial on another computer. This is a shortcoming in Opera that Google notes has brought new to the table. Point taken… but please don’t hype the “I can share it online” stuff. Social networking is fine, useful and cool, but only in so far as it helps the end user with his own goals. Nobody wakes up and says “I need to start sharing some notes with people!” no- they make them for themselves. Opera has been helping users do that for years.
Links and images aren’t part of notes, but the notes link back to the orginal pages right?
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..and I’ll agree with insert_nick too… I’ve had a long standing request that notes work the other way… ala sticky notes. I tried sticky notes for a time and raved about it, but it got lost in the upgrades and beta and weeklys… maybe I’ll try it again when 9 is final, but I really think the notes panel should handle this. Jakob Nielsen talked about in Jan 2005:
“User-Constructed Structure
A particularly interesting form of structural UI is any structure that’s built by the user and added on top of existing hypertext. Annotations and guided tours are two examples.
Annotations superimpose user-generated content, such as text, doodles, or links to other sites. This structure has many uses, including simply letting you post reminders to yourself about your last experience with a site.
Guided tours let you collect a series of pages and subsites and combine them with additional material into a new structure that you can communicate to others. This is great for e-learning applications, but also has more pragmatic uses. For example, you might research a business purchase and send your boss a guided tour with the pros and cons of different options.”
(http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050103.html)
Scott Berken also mentions this as well, although he’s essentially just describing “notes” as they exist today…
“To support this kind of research, browsers should provide two things: basic project and annotation functionality. It should be possible to save the state of browser, tabs, pages and all, and return to it at will (Opera does this reasonably well with it’s save/open session commands). Then a student writing a paper, or a programmer planning a vacation, can stop their research whenever they want, and return to it in exactly the same state. The only UI necessary for this is a menu command to save the project state, and another one to recover it. Anyone that doesn’t work this way is largely unaffected.
The second part of this is some basic way to write commentary about the pages or websites in a project. This is a more difficult proposition: Finding the right place to make notes and creating the interaction model for it is messy. As mentioned above, the minimal (and probably crappy) way to do this would be to allow annotations of bookmarks. Then a user could type in their notes about a hotel or research paper into the bookmark, and work with a set of bookmarks for a given project. This would quickly become cumbersome since you want to see all of your comments at once: the world shouldn’t revolve around the bookmark system, it should revolve around doing research.”
(http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/essay37.htm)
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…at the end of the day, the only thing that matters more than the feature set is how well it will help you get your task done. If you have to access to data on multiple computers, then fine, you have a valid point (although I do recall someone working on a sync at some point). But lets not totally dismiss Opera Notes as they are by google’s own definition above trying to accomplish something that Opera already lets you do. They just have a different way of doing it, some ways better, some worse…. what way would that be? well, for one- Opera also has tigher integration with it’s notes- so you can right click and insert them into any form.
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There is one big advantage for Opera notes - Google won’t spy you.
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The two products are not equal in any way, and both are superior in their own way.
Notes in Opera are great for notes, yes, but also stuff like saving boilerplate text you want to add to sites frequently (the ability to insert a note in any text-entry field in a browser with a right-click is great) but the Notes function and Googles effort are different animals entirely.
Personally I use notes as well as the UserJS yellow sticky notes that save their contents as cookies on my machine(s) and enjoy both. I’m sure I’ll look at Google’s effort too, though.
I’m an avid Opera user, but comparing the built-in Notes with Googles effort is comparing apples with oranges.
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Kimmo-
They are different I agree- but how are they not equal in any way? What makes it a different animals entirely?
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I will also admit to not having a terribly long time to play with google’s offering to get a full understanding.
From my point of view, it appear like comparing Opera’s bookmarks to delicious. They are different animals, but nobody has given up there own bookmarks in favor of on online solution entirely? and I stand by my earlier link I posted that the only reason those are successful is because they provide first a value to the individual user before the “network” So they are different but both are still bookmark tools right?
Is that your point with notes?
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I think Eddie/Daniel make some good points about how Opera’s notes isn’t a million miles away from this, but I still find it really annoying how often Opera gets excluded from these sort of things, especially on stuff where you can get around it by masking as another browser and everything seems to work fine (most recent example ive come across is AOLs admitidly lame youtube clone at http://communityvideo.aol.com/Main.do ).
Fair enough Opera users only make up a tiny minority but doesn’t that tiny minority still represent something like 10-15 million (?) people..a fair amount of people to risk generating bad blood with.
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Stahn
I don’t believe it’s “about” sharing notes. I believe that is a feature… yes a useful one. But what it’s about is notetaking.
I do see the desire of that functionality- sharing research notes with your team and all that, but it’s still not an apples and oranges type comparison.
You have to give some credit to Opera in this regard. Again- I’m not an expert on google notebook, so the following is said with a grain of salt, but:
my requirements for notes are fast, easy ways to get get relevant pieces of information (to serve as my reminder) and a link back to where I got it. It has to be fast, and easy to do. And it doesn’t have to be pretty. It’s going to be formatted pretty when I get it where it needs to be (a blog post, word processor, or just deleted when I get the info I need)
I don’t see google notes as meeting that requirement. First, I don’t care in any regard that I can share with others… here, I’ll share a note with you right now… ready? 229531. That’s it. That’s a note in my note panel. What do you care? It means a good deal to me though. I will say that I would like to be able to have one management point for notes. I guess. I really have work research and home research. They rarely overlap, so this isn’t a big issue to me, but a nice to have.
What google notebook does have is an interface that is patched on. I admire that they made it as easy as right clicking, but there seems to be too much overhead in creating and managing/retrieving these notes to actually help in focusing on research gathering.
And why do I want to put images in them? I have many other choices for word processing, blogging, sharing, etc. For me, the research gathering process is an intermediate step. I don’t care that my text doesn’t have images embedded in it. it’s all going to go into my blog post anyway… why worry about that stuff twice?
and in conclusion- I’ve had this post in my notes panel and added to it through most of the day.
I guess I’ve beaten this to death though…wow.
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Eddie. Who told you Images and Links aren’t part of Notebook, they are. Oh my god it’s morons like you that drive users away. How about a little open mindedness.
Daniel, it is true you are sounding a bit like Asa. Change back man.
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“Links and images aren’t part of notes, but the notes link back to the orginal pages right?”
Nice job flame-bait. How about a little open mindedness? I was talking about Opera’s “Notes” I’m sorry I missed the capital there. I tried to refer to google’s offering as either “google’s notes” or “notebook”
Who am I driving away? I clearly stated that these are two products that approach the same problem in different ways. I was just illustrating that everyone calling D.G. a troll and saying he’s way off base was incorrect. Yes, they are different. But they are not apples and oranges.
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…I love how I was asked to be more open-minded. Classic.
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Excuse me, flame. What the hell is your problem, there’s nothing more annoying than people like you who think the world revolves around them and their products. I don’t want to start a war. But if you do, do you really think you’re up to it.
I’m leaving now, Calculus homework is more important.
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The fact that one is portable and the other is local makes them different. Perhaps not entirely different animals, but having access to your notes in any browser you regularly use is very useful.
I may have the greatest note on the planet on my Opera at home, but that doesn’t do squat for me when I’m at work.
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I have a product? I use Google. I use Opera. I like google. I like Opera.
If you want a note-taking product that is fast, lightweight, no-frills, well integrated, I’d recommend Opera “Notes”. If you want a web-app based (re: always available, but the overhead of a web app) note-taking product that you can use a presentation medium, then use the Google’s Notebook. Also, if your research and internet hunting is so fascinating that others might want to see it as well, I’d recommend google again.
You’re obviously baiting me by calling me a moron and attacking me personally when you haven’t yet said anything about the points I’ve made (except ones you’ve incorrectly read). If you feel the need to further point out my shortcomings, feel free to email me (usability at el73.net) and not waste everyone else’s time who have come here to read about Opera Notes and Google Noteboook.
Good day sir.
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Kimmo-
I agree. I was just trying to shed *some* light on the similarities, but yes, they are different and are for different requirements. For me, the responsiveness of having it built into the browser is a greater requirement than having them available online for me. But like I’ve said many times, I’d like to have that feature available in Opera Notes, just not at the cost of the tight integration.
I currently meet this (rare) requirement pretty easily by just emailing my notes file or the actual note.
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This is the expected behavior of Google Notebook: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericajoy/tags/notebook/
Opera Notes is somewhat useful, but I insist that it lacks the feature of sharing what you’ve found. Yes, it’s optional, but lacks it.
Anyways, it’s not problem of Opera, it’s Googlers lazyness.
If we want support, better flood the Google Groups boards.
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I just don’t get the point of sharing notes. Why would I want to share my research notes? I might want to share an edited post, but raw notes?
As to synching, I really think people ought to look at OSynch - which seems to take care of the entire mobile Opera profile thing. Of course, it’d be nice if Opera integrated this, but it is available for use. Better yet, it can encompass the entire browser profile (like a Windows Roaming Profile) as opposed to just one very small part of it.
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The Scrapbook extension for Firefox is the best.
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All the browser has con and pros but Opera’s Notes just doesn’t do the job of Google Notebook, so, bye bye Opera until both Google Calendar and Notebook are supported.
Remember it not totally fault of Opera, but they should do the strategic alliances.
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Opera is by far the best browser out there.
Why google isn’t doing everything to help support such a good browser I can’t figure out.
Google notes which we use at our company so employees can acess information over the internet would not be able to use the opera’s notes since that is indepentant to the users computer.