How it works
Notomaton revolves around short-form notes, the relationships between them, and Plugins which add different kinds of notes and overlay additional functionality.
Notes
Notes are short, and are not modelled after paper sheets nor physical journals/notebooks. Post-It notes would be the closest physical analogy.
The intent is that each note is small and captures a single thing; an idea, a task, a reference to come back to later. Capture lots of notes, but keep each one single-purpose.
This makes it easy to get started and get information into Notomaton; it can't help you organise what it doesn't know about.
The power then comes from how you access notes, how they relate to each other, and how you choose to organise them (if at all).
Plugins
Plugins extend basic notes, and add more functionality suitable for specific needs or situations.
Typically the basic notes can be used for jotting anything down and for free form capture of anythin you want - whereas Plugins allow for more structure and use-specific kinds of notes.
For example; Plugins may add new note types (e.g. "Journal Entry" with a title, content and a date), new Views (e.g. all Journal entries in chronological order) and/or other things as well.
Views
Views are one of the key ways of organizing and finding your notes. A view is essentially a filtered list of notes, shown either as a long list, a gallery or a calendar view.
Views can filter by note type, search criteria, tags, content, pretty much anything.
The basic plugin adds an "Everything" View by default, as well as "Saved links" and "Archive" views. Other plugins may also add Views automatically for their content (e.g. Tasks, Journal).
You can edit or customize any View, and of course create your own.
Tags
Tags (or "Labels") are a great way to organize content. Every note type allows for tags to be added to notes, and any number of tags can be added.
Use tags to categorise, e.g. by project or subject area - or just to help you remember what something was about.
For example, as creators of Notomaton we use it ourselves; common tags in the team are "notomaton" for things relating to the project, "dev" for software development topics, or "kids" for notes about the children.
Notomaton's search will use tags to give you better search results. Views can filter by tag too; so its easy to create multiple task lists for yourself with Views filtering by note type ("Task") and tag ("notomaton" or "school" or "kids").