iPad Mini and outlining

Posted by MadaboutDana
Nov 8, 2012 at 05:10 PM

I’m sorry to hear Notebooks didn’t work for you, but it’s very much horses for courses. I too went through a love-hate period with Notebooks, because it is a very sophisticated app with some idiosyncratic features. But once you explore it a bit you discover its true value - and for me, part of that is the immensely flexible interaction with the desktop. There are now PC and Mac clients, which automatically set themselves up with your Notebooks folder in Dropbox (if you’ve set one up). The things I like about Notebooks are:

a) the rich-text editor (simple but effective)
b) the HTML pages it produces (not unlike KeepNote!)
c) the fact you can copy and paste entire web pages (or bits of web pages) into the desktop version and have them rapidly synchronised and indexed on your iPad
d) the fact you can also insert web pages really easily on your iPad!
e) the very nice search function (you all know what a sucker I am for search); also the fact that it highlights search terms (unlike many other iOS apps)
f) the fact that you can, if you wish, use it as a task manager (setting due dates, with a calendar overview if you want it, etc.)
g) the support for tags (called ‘Contexts’ in Notebooks)

I confess I don’t really use the support for file attachments (although I gather it does, and also indexes the contents, which is impressive!).

Having said all that, I use lots of other notebooks and outliners as well. My current favourites include Cotton Notes (vastly improved since its launch), Awesome Notes HD (which is very beautiful and surprisingly versatile), Notability (which is very impressive but slightly irritating) and OneNote plus its - non-Microsoft - sibling Outline+

I think Nebulous is brilliant for pure text editing (and has a very good search function, too!). It’s by far the most flexible Dropbox-focused editor. But Daedalus is rather entertaining, too.

And finally, I keep playing with a true outliner called MindBits, which is education-focused but has some very extraordinary features. But it doesn’t have a search function, alas…

Finally, for anybody who likes wikis, there’s the very impressive TWMobile, which now syncs with Dropbox and allows you to import/export TiddlyWiki pages (and any other kind of HTML page, in fact; it can also unzip zipped files, so you can add TiddlyWiki extensions fairly easily).