There are two main categories of Notepad replacements. The first category provides the same functionality as Notepad, but in a tabbed environment, allowing you to open multiple documents in a single window (in the same way as Firefox, Opera or IE7 internet browsers). Crimson Edit, PSPad and NoteTab are editors which fall into this category. UltraEdit and EditPlus are also contenders, although they are no longer Freeware.
My personal favourite in this category is Crimson Editor, although PSPad is useful for developing code and comparing documents.
The second category is note taking applications such as EverNote, KeyNote and TreePad. Despite the fact that KeyNote has not been developed since 2003, it is fine for simple note taking using a tree like structure to categorise your notes. It also offers better formatting options (numbered and bulleted lists) than Treepad. Treepad looks fresher as it is still being developed. However, its Lite version seems to be very limited, even being restricted to a single top-level node. EverNote has many more features, such as to do lists and checkboxes as well as the ability to categorise your notes in multiple categories. However, I found its clipping feature (which is is beta at the moment) to be very buggy. For example, copying the list of files in a directory resulted in multiple imstances of Explore opening up and it trying to run any executables it found.
If you get the error
Cannot save to EverNote base. FILE_SHARING_ERROR
followed by
Cannot create Web clip. Unspecified error
when using the Evernote WebClipper for Firefox extension, then make sure to close the EverNote window before clipping your web content and try again. This error existed in version 1.0.0.81
Alternatively, if you get the popup
Can't clip
and the error
You either didn't select anything or the application you are trying to clip from doesn't support copying information onto the system clipboard. Try screen capture instead.
when using the Universal Clipper, but you are able to paste the web clip by going to another application such as Wordpad and pasting it, then the problem is possibly that the Universal Clipper cannot locate the database. This is normally located in
My Documents\\My EverNote Files\\DataBases\\EverNote.enb
. This bug existed in v1.0.0.32.
Unfortunately I was unable to do much testing during the actual Beta period, but here are my results / comments
The speed is MUCH better than WH2.0, but still frustrating when you have to repeat operations unneccessarily.
Site Manager Performance (50.6kbps dial up)
Time to Display WH2.0 WH3.0 Improvement
Login 12 sec 7 sec 5 sec
Home Page 64 sec 20 sec 44 sec
Install Applications 108 sec 58 sec 50 sec
Email Users 31 sec 30 sec 1 sec
EMail Aliases 36 sec 22 sec 14 sec
Restart Account 34+23+33 sec 8+10 sec 72 sec
Domain Management 16 sec 13 sec 3 sec
Web Aliases 23 sec 18 sec 5 sec
- DNS Records - unable to add TXT record. unable to add domain specific record (example domain1.com IN NS ns1.twisted4life.com) as opposed to VPS generic (IN NS ns1.twisted4life.com.)
- Processor loading was very low and so we were unlikely to run into typical issues:
cat /proc/loadavg
0.10 0.06 0.01 1/562 3102
Compared to WH2.0 server:
4.41 7.17 9.75 1/1299 21365
- No Feedback SSH Frreze Issue - I managed to increase the loading on the server by running a
stress test. I was able to get the server to freeze quite easily. To summarize, the performance is much better than WH2.0 as it takes a higher load to cause problems, but is obviously not fully resolved. I am concerned that I was able to consume so much resource as a single user. Was this because I was running on a test server, or is it an inherent flaw in the system? Surely there is some way to limit a single users CPU time slice? I am not willing to run this stress test on a live server to check! I managed to get the availability down to 40% (60% downtime). One point to note is that I was able to disupt the whole server as the number of active processes dropped to 718 at one stage (from ~9300 before punishing the server)
cat /proc/loadavg
21.02 29.27 26.22 21/791 718
- Possible Future Feature User Manager - Remove principal domain name from banner
- Probable Future Feature Site Manager - The site manager ‘home page’ indicates that I have a dedicated IP
despiite the fact that the beta accounts have dynamically assigned IP addresses.
- Probable Future Feature Site Manager - Logging in to both Site Manager and Users Manager is not possible.
Results in redirection to https://wsl06001.west-datacenter.net/php/login/login_error_screen.php and told to sign on again. No link is provided to the login page -
this should be possible from the cookie.
- Probable Future Feature Domain Management - Tried adding a domain. Error message “Operation failed on server due to error: The domain newdomain.com is occupied.” not very clear. Should read something like “This domain is already hosted elsewhere on Westhost. Please delete that definition first”
- Probable Future Feature Domain Management - Does not create custom directory if it does not already exist.
- Probable Future Feature Sub-Domain Management - Does not create custom directory if it does not already exist.
- Accepted File Manager - Returned multiple (incorrect) results when searching for file httpd.conf
- Accepted Autoresponder - The autoresponder and Auto forwarder did not appear to work as neither service was enabled
- Created a new email user with the default settings
- Enabled email, ftp and autoresponder Quota-0 MB
- Signed in to user manager at http://www.wh3test091.whsites.net/users
- Selected Autoresponder and Auto Forwarder. Neither service is enabled.
Oops! They were working. It was just a very large, conspicuous red X and a very small, grey edit button. Suggested that button was enlarged and that text is changed to “Change settings”
- No Feedback Application Installation - When you install applications such as PHPMyAdmin from the Site Manager, there are usually links on the final page for Administration. However, these windows are a fixed size and not alterable. When I click on the links in Firefox, the application opens in a new tab of the same window, which makes them illegible. Also, since the address bar is hidden, most users will be unable to find out what URL they should use. This problem occurs on all pop ups from package installation. Suggest URL is shown beside hyperlink
- REJECTED Application Installation - Some installations request an email address. If this email address is pertinent to the domain and does not exist, then the user should be offerred the chance to create a new user or alias.
- Custom 404 Returns correct status code of 404 rather than 200
