Using PpcSoft iKnow for research:
- HTC Desire (Android phone)

Here is an example showing how you can use PpcSoft iKnow for research.

Let's say you're looking for a new phone, and have set your eyes on the HTC Desire Android phone. You may begin by creating a new note 'HTC Desire' and capture a picture of the phone (for inspiration :-). You may of course call the note 'my phone' if you haven't really decided yet, or 'research phone' or simply 'research'. Use whatever you find most natural to you so you'll be able to find it again later (you can always rename it later).

(Click to see details)

If you look closely at the statusbar, you'll notice that the link to the image is actually a hyperlink to the homepage of the product.

Capture Web pages

So how do you capture an image and create a hyperlink at the same time ?

First you go to the web page and capture it (shortcut Alt+C). In this example, you only capture 1 page, but you can change the number of captured pages in the 'Options' tab. Notice that the heading says 'Paste Web link' to indicate that PpcSoft iKnow recognizes the captured item as a web page (you may capture any document as images).
	Also notice that the URL is shown in the lower left corner to indicate that a hyperlink will be created as well as the image. Use your mouse to select the part of the image you want (default is the whole image). Click 'Crop image' to remove unnecessary parts of the image.
You will now see the selected part only. You can crop the image further until you're happy with the result. Enter a name for the image/link, and you're done !

Continue your research by capturing links and/or web pages with useful information.

Moving your mouse over a captured web page will show a quick preview as you can see to the right. This makes it easier to recognize different web pages. If you need to go to the source to read more, simply click the link and it will open in your default browser.

If you add a lot of web pages, the image browser (Alt+B) may be useful to get a quick overview and to find the web page you're looking for.

In the example below (left) you see all the images in the note, and in the example to the right you see the selected image (click preview to select).

Please note in the example to the right that the URL is shown below the image, and this URL can be clicked to open the web page.

More tips

- You can capture web pages from Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome without any extra plugins or downloads. It works with all the browsers and all versions (no out-of-date plugins etc).

- The capture is a screenshot, not text. If you captured all the text from all "interesting" web pages, the full-text search quality and usefulness would be significantly reduced. If you want parts of the text from a web page to be searchable in iKnow, simply select, copy and paste it into iKnow.

- You don't have to capture the web pages; you can simply copy the URLs (as you can see in the example above) if you don't need a screenshot.

- Once you've completed your research, you may edit the note to add other useful information (like useful tips for using the phone, purchase date, warranty information, serial number etc).

- The web captures are stored independently, so you can copy the hyperlink to many other notes, and they will all show the same image automatically. This also means that if you capture the same web page again later, you will overwrite the existing image (you'll get a warning about this in the capture dialog).

- As the web pages are stored independently, you can have a hundred captured images in every note (even in 100,000 notes) without affecting the performance. The main limit is the storage space on your hard drive (and each individual note).