Version 1.5 / 1999-09-18

FreeNote Users Manual

Introduction

Get rid of those yellow sticky notes around your monitor! Here is FreeNote, a program for the Windows-world which does a much better job! FreeNote helps you organizing all those little messages, to-do lists, Internet links, telephone numbers, ... It is easy to use! It resides in your tray-area -- waiting there until you need it. A single click and it pops up, ready to accept you important message. Another click, and it hides itself, waiting to slurp more of your notes. It also helps you being a better person by reminding you about upcoming events. Never come to late to a meeting again, never forget about you mother’s birthday!

In a work-group it let’s you do what is most important: teamwork! Share notes with your colleagues, leave them messages when somebody tried to call them and they were not on their desk. Never will you find yourself in the position that just now you are out of those handy yellow papers or that again somebody has stolen your last pen. FreeNote makes your world easier, and it does that in a polite way without declaring itself as the center of the universe.

And the best of all: It is free!

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Features

FreeNote ...

• ... makes it simple and fast to enter, store and maintain your messages / ideas / memos / contacts / ... whatever!
• ... let’s you categorize your Notes in Groups.
• ... helps you finding your Notes with it’s powerful search engine.
• ... allows you to prioritize your Notes by assigning different icons to them.
• ... gives you many choices to format Notes with your preferred fonts, colors, and more!
• ... is communicative with other applications. Notes can be exported and imported in RTF or ASCII format.
• ... is ready for the world-wide-web: Notes can be exported in HTML format to be published on your local Intranet.
• ... reminds you about upcoming events.
• ... is never pushy. It sits silently in the tray area all the time, but it is always only one mouse click away -- ready for you when you need it! Another single click, and it is gone again, keeping your valuable information safely stored.
• ... let’s you share Notes with your team members and colleagues via network.
• ... is resource-friendly by not consuming a lot of memory, harddisk space or CPU time.
• ... is freeware!

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Overview

The FreeNote window is divided into several sub-windows:

(click on image for larger version)

You can toggle between the several sub-windows by pressing the TAB key. Almost all of the windows have a context menu that can be accessed by clicking the right mouse button.

 

FreeNote has a built-in hierarchy for managing Notes: Notes are stored in Groups, and Groups are stored in Catalogs. Catalogs can be shared between users via network, but there is always at least one local Catalog -- the Root-Catalog.

 

FreeNote is always there for you. Even when you press Alt+F4 or close FreeNote using the system menu or the window icons, it always stays silently as a small icon in your tray-area -- waiting for you! A single click with the left mouse button on the FreeNote icon brings it up again. Another click, and it disappears until the next round comes up. For those of you who like to squeeze the last millisecond out of the time spent with an application, you can hit the F4 button when FreeNote is active and it will disappear instantly.

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Working with Notes

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Adding a new Note

To add a new Note in the current active Group, simply press the “New” button on the toolbar or press Alt+N. Alternatively you can press the INS key when the Note-List is active.

A new Note is opened and the cursor appears in the title bar of the Note. Enter the Note-Title and press ENTER. The cursor jumps in the Note-Body and you can enter your message. When you are done, click the “Update” button on the toolbar or press F8 to store your new Note.

Probably the fastest way to create a Note is to double-click the tray icon. When double-clicking the tray icon, FreeNote creates a new Note named with the title "Quicknote", followed by the current date and time. Of course, you can change that title if you want.

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Navigating Notes

To see another Note, simply click on it’s title in the Note-List. You can also use the TAB key until the Note-List is active and use the cursor keys to browse through the existing Notes.

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Changing exiting Notes

Navigate to the Note you want to change, position the mouse in the Note-Body and start changing your text. You can also click on the Note-Title and change the title if necessary. To store the changes, click on the “Update” button on the toolbar or press F8. If you want to discard the changes press the ESC button.

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Removing Notes

To remove a Note select it in the Note-List and press the “Delete” button in the toolbar. Alternatively you can press the DEL key. A warning appears, asking you if you really want to permanently remove the selected Note. If you choose yes the Note will be deleted permanently -- there is no way to get it back, so watch out!

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Assigning Icons / Priorities to Notes

FreeNote allows you to assign icons to Notes so that you can differentiate priorities. You can see the list of available icons by clicking in the Note-List with the right mouse button. A floating menu shows up, select the first entry named “Show Iconlist” in the menu. Alternatively, you can double click on any Note in the Note-List. Double-click on the icon you want and it is assigned to the current selected Note.

FreeNote lets you sort your Notes by either their title (= sort by name) or their icons (= sort by icon). To change the sort order, either use the pop-up menu that appears when you right-click in the Note-List or press Ctrl+N for sorting by name and Ctrl+I for sorting by icon. When sorting by icon, the sort order is exactly like the order of icons in the Iconlist -- except for the “Standard” icon which has the lowest priority.

You can easily return a Note to the “Standard” icon by pressing Ctrl+S in the Note-List.

There are also two special icons available: “HTML export” and “HTML append”. Their special role is described in chapter “Communicating with the outside world”.

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Formatting Notes

FreeNote offers you many possibilities to format Notes: you can change the font face, font size, font style, colors, alignment of paragraphs, etc.

All the possibilities are accessible using the small toolbar which pops up when the cursor is in the Note-Body. Select the text you want to format and choose the desired font face, size, color, etc. from the toolbar.

FreeNote also comes with some pre-defined formatting, accessible via Ctrl+1 .. Ctrl+9 and Ctrl+0. Those formatting set pre-defined font sizes and font styles, but they do not affect the font face, color or paragraph alignment.

(click on image for larger version)

Some formats apply to all Notes: You can set the background color of the Notes by pressing Ctrl+B or selecting the appropriate menu item from the right-click pop-up menu of the Note-Body. You can also select the font face and color for the Note-Title by right-clicking on it.

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Shortcut Keys for Formatting

Key	Function		Key	Function
Ctrl+N	reset Bold / Underline / Italic		Ctrl+1	8pt / not Bold / no Underline
Ctrl+F	toggle Bold		Ctrl+2	10pt / not Bold / no Underline
Ctrl+U	toggle Underline		Ctrl+3	12pt / not Bold / no Underline
Ctrl+I	toggle Italic		Ctrl+4	8pt / Bold / no Underline
Ctrl+H	toggle Right justification of the paragraph		Ctrl+5	10pt / Bold / no Underline
Ctrl+T	toggle Centering of the paragraph		Ctrl+6	12pt / Bold / no Underline
Ctrl+B	choose background color (applicable to all Notes)		Ctrl+7	16pt / Bold / no Underline
			Ctrl+8	16pt / Bold / Underline
			Ctrl+9	18pt / Bold / no Underline
			Ctrl+0	18pt / Bold / Underline

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Performing simple calculations

Want to calculate something? Let FreeNote do it for you! Simply write the calculations in a note (like ‘16889.44*2.43=’) and hit Alt+C. FreeNote parses your Note and calculates all formulas you have entered! Note that FreeNote can only handle simple formulas that consist of only one operator. It understands ‘+’, ‘-’, ‘*’ and ‘/’. FreeNote rounds to two digits after the comma.

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Printing Notes

You want to bring your thoughts to paper? Fine! Hit the F7 key and you will get a nice formatted print-out of you valuable data. Alternatively you can click on the print icon on the toolbar or use Alt+P.

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Increasing your productivity when editing Notes

FreeNote is designed to make your life easier. To do that it provides you with several keyboard shortcuts when editing notes so that you don’t have to move your hand between mouse and keyboard all the time to do certain task.

For example, if you like to change the font face, simply hit F2 and the font face drop-down listbox will receive the focus. Select the new font using the cursor keys and hit enter to accept the selection and the cursor will automatically jump back into the Note-Body.

Almost the same can be done with the font size; use F3 to select the font size drop-down listbox.

Sometimes it is necessary to put the current date or time in a Note. No problem, press F5 and the current date will be inserted, press F6 and the date will show up.

Many of us use a line of ‘-’ or ‘*’ characters to separate chapters or headings in their notes. FreeNote supports you here as well! Press F9 and a line of dashes (‘-’) will be inserted. Oh, but you prefer stars? No problem, press F10 and a line of stars (‘*’) appears! And finally there is the F11 key which serves you by entering a line of underscores (‘_’). Try it, and you will love it!

Though not related to formatting your Notes or inserting text, another neat shortcut is Shift+F3. No matter in which (FreeNote-) window you are, pressing Shift-F3 positions the cursor at the end of the body of the current active Note. You never need to scroll again to the end of a Note to append something!

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Working with Groups

Groups help you categorizing your Notes. Especially when you have a large number of Notes you might want to consider to store them in some kind of structure in order to find them back more easily.

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The Root-Group

There is one Group which has a very special position within FreeNote: the Root-Group. It is always there, you can not remove it, it has the highest priority and you can not change it’s icon. However, you are able to rename it: Press Ctrl+R or choose the appropriate menu entry from the right-click menu and give it a friendly name.

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Adding groups

To add a new Group, press INS when the Group-List is active or select “New group” from the right-click pop-up menu of the Group-List. Enter the name of the new Group in the appearing edit field and press ENTER. The new Group is added and becomes the active Group.

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Navigating Goups

You can navigate between different Groups by clicking on their names in the Group-List. The name of the active Group is always shown in the title bar of the Group-List. The Note-List shows the available Notes in the selected Group. To make sure your Note-List is up-to-date – especially in a Network environment – press the F5 key in the Group-List to update it.

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Removing Groups

For security reasons, you are only able to remove Groups that do not contain any Note. So the first thing before removing a Group is to either move or delete all Notes in the Group you want to delete. Empty Groups are removed by selecting them in the Group-List and pressing the DEL button.

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Renaming Groups

To give a Group another name, select it in the Group-List and press Ctrl+R. Alternatively, choose “Rename group” from the pop-up menu that appears when you right-click on the Group in the Group-List.

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Assigning Icons / Priorities to Groups

You can change the icon for a Group by right-clicking on it in the Group-List. A floating menu shows up, select the first entry named “Show Iconlist”. Alternatively, you can double click on any Group in the Group-List. Double-click on the icon you want and it is assigned to the current selected Group.

FreeNote lets you sort your Groups by either their name or the icon you selected. To change the sort order either use the pop-up menu that appears when you right-click in the Group-List or press Ctrl+N for sorting by name and Ctrl+I for sorting by icon. When sorting by icon, the sort order is exactly like the order of icons in the Iconlist -- except for the “Standard” icon which has the lowest priority.

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Moving Notes between Groups

To move Notes between Groups, simply drag them from the Note-List to the new Group in the Group-List. Alternatively you can press Ctrl+M on the selected Note in the Note-List and select the desired Group using the cursor keys in the Group-List. Confirm the move by pressing the ENTER key.

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Finding what you lost

Though FreeNote helps you structuring your Notes in Groups, sometimes you might find yourself in the position that you can not find a Note. This is where the search function can be very helpful and save you a lot of time. FreeNote allows you to search for a text in either the current Note, the current Group or all Notes in all Groups (called “Mega-Search”). Simply enter the word to search for in the field on the toolbar and press the desired button. You can jump from anywhere within FreeNote to the search field by pressing the Ctrl+F2 key.

(click on image for larger version)

If you select Group- or Mega-search, the search result window opens showing you the Notes containing the desired text. Simply click on the Note to see its content, the search term is highlighted. The search result window can be toggled by pressing Shift+F2.

Note that the search function is case insensitive.

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Replacing text

FreeNote can not only look for text, it can also replace text and change the formatting. To toggle between the search and the replace mode simply click the icon on the bottom-right in the search frame on the status bar.

Enter the text to search for in the upper edit-field and the replacement text in the lower edit-field. The replacement is executed on the current note as soon as you hit the flash icon on the top-right in the search frame.

Beside simply replacing text, you can also switch the formatting of the replaced text. First thing to do is what you actually want to format during the replace action. You have the choice of formatting the whole line where the change text was found, format the whole word that contains the replaced text or just the characters that were actually replaced. In terms of formatting you can choose whether you want the replaced text Bold, Underlined, Italic, or even remove any formatting ("N").
You can also set the foreground color of the replaced text. To do so right-click (right-clicking toggles the color replacement) on the color pallette and then select the desired color with the left mouse button.

(click on image for larger version)

Note that the replace function always works on the current Note and always replaced any found text in the Note.

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Grabbing text into a new Note

The replace function has also the neat functionality to put the lines that contain the found text into a separate Note. This can be useful to filter log-files or similar. To grab text into a new Note click the "Grab" text on the toolbar. When you execute a replacement afterwards each line in the current Note that contains the text you are looking for will be copied into a new "QuickNote".

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Communicating with the outside world

FreeNote is open for exchanging Notes with other applications: you can export Notes as either text-files or in RTF (Rich-Text-Format, almost all wordprocessors nowadays can read that -- even Wordpad that comes with Windows). You can import messages generated by other programs and stored as either Text or in RTF. And you can generate web-pages of several notes to be published on the WWW or your company Intranet.

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Importing text into a Note

Note: importing text will erase the current content of the Note.
Click Ctrl+M when the Note-Body is active. A warning message appears, stating that you are about to loose the content of the Note. Click the “Yes” button to proceed and select the file to import. The source file can be either in ASCII (text-) format or in RTF. Importing RTF files preserves the original formatting as good as possible.

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Linking to files

Beside of making Notes with FreeNote, it is also possible to edit text files stored outside the FreeNote environment somewhere on your harddisk or your network drive. To create a link click the right mouse button in the NoteList and select "Create Link to...". Browse to the text file you want to link to and click "Ok". The selected file is now available in FreeNote and it's text can be edited just like a normal Note.

You can also launch files you have linked to with the program that is registered in the Window's Explorer. Select the link in the NoteList and right-click it. Select "Execute..." from the pop-up menu. A dialog appears that allows you to enter additional parameters and modify the start-up path. The execute function is particularly useful for maintaining a set of scripts with FreeNote.

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Exporting Notes

To export a Note, click Ctrl+E when the Note-Body is active. Choose the file format and file name that the generated file will receive. Note that formatting is only preserved when storing Notes in RTF.

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Exporting several Notes in one HTML page

FreeNote has the capability to export marked messages in a HTML document. To prepare the process, you have to assign the “HTML Export” icon to all messages you want to store in the resulting HTML document. You can do this by selecting the Notes in the Note-List and pressing Ctrl+E, or select “HTML Export icon” from the right-click pop-up menu. If you have selected all Notes to export press the “Export” button on the toolbar. Enter the file name of the HTML document to generate and FreeNote will make a nicely formatted HTML file containing all Notes in the current Group that have the “HTML Export icon”.

Just in case you want to have Notes from different Groups in one HTML document, you can add Notes by assigning the “HTML Append” icon to them and clicking the “Append” button on the toolbar. Select an existing HTML file and FreeNote will add all Notes with the “Append icon”. After adding the marked Notes, FreeNote asks you whether you want to change all “HTML Append” icons into “HTML Export” icons or keep them as they are.

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Links in exported Notes

Being a Internet-aware application, FreeNote detects URL's in Notes that you are going to export into a HTML page and makes a hyperlink out of them. FreeNote knows http, ftp, mailto and file links.

Example:

The latest version of FreeNote can be found at http://www.danbbs.dk/~mugo

ftp://ftp.somewhere.com¤ is a typical FTP link.

You can write to mailto:mugpet@hotmail.com to thank Mugo Petersen!

Programs are located at file:c:\Program Files

To terminate links which are followed by other text you have to add the ¤ character at the end of the link, as in the FTP example above. (If your keyboard does not have the ¤ character, enter Alt+0164).

Example:

The folder file:c:\Program Files\FreeNote¤ might be a good

place to put FreeNote.

All examples above in a single Note would generate the following HTML file when exported by FreeNote:

05-02-1999	20:44	Links in Notes
The latest version of FreeNote can be found at www.danbbs.dk/~mugo ftp.somewhere.com is a typical FTP link. You can write to mugpet@hotmail.com to thank Mugo Petersen! Programs are located at c:\Program Files The folder c:\Program Files\FreeNote might be a good place to put FreeNote.

 

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Hyperlinks in Notes

Not only Notes that were exported into a HTML page allow you to launch hyperlinks, also from within a note you can bring up the linked page. To launch a hyperlink simply double-click or select the protocol-name (which is either "http", "ftp", "file" or "mailto") and then right-click the word ... and FreeNote launches your link!

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Reminders

FreeNote is a nice companion. When you are too busy with whatever you are doing on your computer and are about to forget about an important event, now you never have to worry in the future: FreeNote is happy to watch the clock for you and gives you a gentle warning about an upcoming event.

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The Reminder editor

When you click the “Reminder” button on the toolbar the Reminder editor will become visible.

(click on image for larger version)

Adding a Reminder is straight-forward: select the date you want to be reminded; select the time you want to be reminded; enter a message and click "Add".

You can also define repetitive events by specifying how often you want to repeat the Reminder.

When a Reminder elapses, FreeNote pops-up and shows the Reminder window with the Reminder message printed in it.

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Catalogs

FreeNote is co-operative. It offers to share Notes with your team members. This is done with Catalogs. A Catalog is an independent set of Groups and Notes. The default Catalog -- called Root-Catalog -- is stored on your local computer, but additional Catalogs might reside on a network drive where several people can share it.

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Creating a new Catalog

Activate the Group-List and press Ctrl+K. The Group-List changes into the Catalog-List and shows the available Catalogs. Press INS to create a new Catalog. Choose the directory where the new Catalog should reside and click the Ok button.

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Switching between Catalogs

Activate the Group-List and press Ctrl+K, the Catalog-List appears. You can also click on the path name shown above the title of the Group-List. Select the Catalog to use by double-clicking it.

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Removing Catalogs

Activate the Group-List and press Ctrl+K, the Catalog-List appears. Select the Catalog to remove and press the DEL button. Note that this does not remove any data, you can create a new Catalog in the same directory and the Groups and Notes will be still there.

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Catalogs and Reminders

You can add reminders to a Catalog other than the Root-Catalog. All people connected to this Catalog will be notified. However, FreeNote is designed to use a single Catalog at a time. So it will remind you only about events in the current open Catalog.

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Checking the status of Notes within a Catalog

By clicking the Status button on the toolbar, FreeNote performs a detailed analysis of all Notes in the current catalog and generates a new note containing the analysis results. If you encounter problems with a Note - especially in a network environment, it is a good idea to run such a status analysis to see if Notes are locked. Locking is required to prevent that a Note is updated by two people at the same time. If you find that one or more Notes are locked although they shouldn’t (which can happen for example if a computer was not properly turned off), then you can select the Note in the Group-window and press Ctrl+U.

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Customizing FreeNote

You can configure FreeNote in several manners. Most of the configuration items are available by clicking the tray-icon with the right mouse button:

• Select between 9 different tray-icons
• Select whether you want FreeNote in Danish or English
• Select whether FreeNote starts minimized or normal
• Check Auto-Update and FreeNote will always store your changes to Notes automatically. If Auto-Update is unchecked then FreeNote asks you whether to store or cancel your editing.

You can also select the size of the toolbar icons by right clicking on the toolbar.

All those settings are stored permanently.

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Author and Contact information

Mugo Petersen Brorsonsgade 7, st, th. 1624 Kbh. V. Denmark

mugpet@hotmail.com http://mugo.8m.com/

Documentation by Werner Lané, Leuven, Belgium

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The legal stuff...

[A note from Werner who wrote this doc: I really hate this chapter. But since I see it in almost all freeware programs I also include it just in case... Maybe we need it because there are too many <censored> around in this world...]

Copyright © 1998-1999 by Mugo Petersen. All rights reserved.

The information and code provided is provided as is without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. In no event shall Mugo Petersen be liable for any damages whatsoever including direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, loss of business profits or special damages, even if Mugo Petersen has been advised of the possibility of such damages.