Personal Knowledge Management

With a personal knowledge management system, users can collect and create information to organize for more effective future use. A knowledge flow starts from ideation, then structuring the knowledge and finally sharing this knowledge; Scrintal covers this whole process. PKM sounds daunting because of the breadth and depth of potentially relevant information, but with Scrintal you can organize information as it appears and make connections between topics. You can also customize the visual display of this information: make clusters, trees, or intricate maps as needed, or dismiss and display notes as needed without losing the connections. 

The ability to edit multiple notes at one time, even if they exist on different parts of one board, is a huge advantage Scrintal has over the other tools; this fully enables each user’s creative process without hindering it with navigation lags.

Connected Note Taking 

All docs can be linked to each other with backlinks, which work exactly like the links between Wikipedia pages. It indicates a meaningful connection that exists across your entire knowledge base. Removing the visual indication of this by dismissing a doc from your board does not dissolve the connection; it will show up again if you bring that doc back to the board. 

In Scrintal, you can also link to a doc that is not already present on the board, or you can link to an entire board, enabling ease of access during creative ideation. Unlike in Heptabase, which is the most similar tool to Scrintal, creating a backlink automatically creates the visual marker (an arrow), and creating a visual marker (dragging an arrow in the graph) creates a backlink automatically inside your note to indicate the connection between two cards. Many of the aforementioned tools utilize a similar mind-mapping function, but Scrintal supports text-heavy content, allows users to minimize, maximize, or dismiss docs, allows docs to exist on more than one board at once without having to recreate it, and has a floating tab system for multimedia files that increases the tool’s accessibility and convenience.

Intuitive User Experience 

It is important to note that intuitiveness can be a characteristic that varies from user to user, and that only by testing each tool can we find out which will work best for us. As someone who has tested each of these tools, I’ll explain why Scrintal is the most intuitive for me: if you find yourself agreeing with or relating to my points, give Scrintal a try!

Scrintal is not bloated with features or cumbersome to navigate. The platform is intuitive, navigable with a few clicks or a quick parsing of the shortcut menu, the latter of which is composed of commands that are commonly used in the same way on other platforms. This means that casual users don’t have to deal with a steep learning curve and dedicated users can easily find resources to use Scrintal to its fullest capacity. While many other tools are less structured and allow the user to exercise more control and creativity, this also means more time spent learning functions and organizing a workspace; Scrintal does not have this issue. Even the language used to describe its features are intuitive and realistic: the desk is your everyday workspace, a board is a place to preserve a particular representation of your docs with specific connections in a visually permanent way, and a doc (like a flashcard) is where notes are taken. You can also create blocks like sticky notes for quick notes. The search function is useful for retrieving pieces of your knowledge base, and features like tags, color-coded notes, free text and Kanban style blocks help you organize information without getting too complicated.