Taking notes is an important way for people to record information they want to retain. And many tools have been built to address many note-taking use-cases such as todo lists, team-wide knowledge-bases, or general-purpose notes.

But finding the right tool to visually organize study content remains quite an elusive task, especially for technical topics like STEM which rely on examples or references.

This problem led to a side project of mine that would become WingNotes, a two-column note-taking app designed to help organize study notes and make it easier to review your content. And now, I’m happy to release WingNotes for others to use and share a bit of what motivated me to build it.

Deconstructing Study Notes

Before taking a look at what current note-taking apps look like, let’s take a deconstruct what study notes typically consist of. By and large, study notes can be divided into two primary types of information:

Descriptions: text details that describe the topic of interest. This includes headers and paragraphs, but can also include bullets or numbered lists.

References: any supporting examples or media that correspond with a particular description. The most common examples include images, videos, code snippets, graphs/charts, citations, etc.

The ideal note-taking app for studying would organize these two components in a way that is easy to write and review.

The Current State of Note-taking Apps

Single-column Apps:

Most current note-taking apps like Evernote are pre-dominantly single-columned. That is, the note-editor can only hold information inside a single text area, with all content vertically stacked on top of one another.