Notebook 3.0 Review

I completed my last blog post with a help of a little Mac app called Notebook by Circus Ponies Software. What is Notebook? The biggest problem with reviewing Notebook is describing what it does. Here's the basic description from the Circus Ponies website:

"is your desktop cluttered with files? Are you drowning in sticky notes? Boxes of note cards? 3-ring binders? Do you remember where to find that important web clipping? The brilliant idea or crucial instruction you scribbled on a piece of paper? Circus Ponies NoteBook is the award-winning application that helps Mac users manage all those bits of information that lack a good home. Whether it's the notes, clippings, and to dos of your life, or the e-mails, diagrams and spreadsheets of that important project, NoteBook helps you keep it all organized and accessible."

Basically if you need to gather, store and work with information than Notebook can help. I use it for so many things now it's hard to count. The list of things it does is stunning.

• draw diagrams and shapes
• voice annotation
• annotate PDFs
• Keep to do lists
• manage projects
• store clippings from email, web, or any other location

It's hard for me to do justice to what it can do. The best place to start is to watch the video tour on the website. If those videos don't peak your interest, than this program is not for you.

There is one word of caution. Notebook is well integrated in OSX's services menu and applications. That means that Notebook works seamlessly with Mail, Address Book and Safari. Want to save an address? you can just drag and drop the card from Address book. If you clip something from an email from Mail, the person's contact info is automatically added to the clipping. What if you don't use these applications? Well, Notebook still works and you will find a lot of uses for it. I love notebook so much that I went back to using some of them. I use Safari for web research because it's just so easy to clip information to notebook. (On a side note, this wouldn't be a problem if Firefox would be integrated with the services menu.) There is a bit of a learning curve for some of the advanced features, but the videos and community forums have lots of great information. Another great feature is the Multidex. It's an instant index of everything in your notebook:

"Find anything instantly using NoteBook's patented Multidex™, that locates information based on what you remember about it: a name or number, the date you entered it, a keyword you assigned, even any combination. Then share it all by creating PDFs or publishing your Notebooks to the web, including direct web export to your MobileMe account."

There are two niggling issues with notebook. One is being worked on. Notebook 3.0 was supposed to ship with support for tables. That was delayed. (You can still imbed a table from another application such as Numbers, however.) The other issue is the inability to currently make your own official templates. You can do it of course by making a template and then immediately using "save as" to give it a different name, thus saving the original. But the ability to save something as a template is a huge omission.

As you can tell by this post, I love Notebook and use it all the time. Watch the videos. I was hooked after watching them. There is a free time-limited demo available.