As you may already know, I’m not in the habit of promoting commercial software here. Open source? Fine. But I’m about to make an exception.
I ran across a program for Macintosh users that is probably going to be one of the few programs I open automatically at startup and keep running all day, every day. It is called NoteBook, and that’s exactly what it is and what it does. You can write in it, or drop ideas, clippings, pictures, URLs, movies, pictures, PDFs or anything else for that matter into it. And it helps you organize everything into topics, represented by notebook tabs. Behind the scenes, it is indexing everything in about every way imaginable, so retrieval is convenient.
It costs $30 for an academic license, and $50 for a regular license. There is a 30 day demo available from http://www.circusponies.com. It has my good housekeeping seal of approval. Sorry to folks with PCs– it is a Mac-only product.