Growly Notes 2 - now on Mac App Store

Posted by MadaboutDana
May 24, 2014 at 03:36 PM

Well, now my lovely MacBook Air has arrived

, I’ve been trying out all kinds of interesting note managers. Some of them will have to wait, because they’re rather expensive (I’m looking at you, OmniOutliner), but others have already been subjected to a bit of serious tyre-bashing.

NoteSuite is rather elegant on the Mac, but my unexpected favourite du jour is the amazingly modestly priced Growly Notes, which has been completely rewritten since it was being given away a few years ago. The new version is astonishingly cool and quick, with a great search function. Although it’s Mac only, it gives OneNote a run for its money - in particular, by offering a very nice ‘Print to Growly Notes’ feature that embeds PDFs in the actual page and then indexes them so the full-text search function can find them. I still have to test that out with foreign-language PDFs, mind you. NoteSuite also has a rather nice little widget-thingy that sits in the Mac menu bar and allows you to make quick notes, todos etc., but Growly Notes has a better search function.

Best of all, the very nice and responsive developer says he’s working away on the iPad version, which is very good news.

Other goodies I’m trying are Ulysses III (nice, very nice, although lack of table support is a little disappointing) and Scrivener, which is positively awesome (not to say overwhelming) on Mac. Notebooks on Mac is actually rather better than it is on PC (faster, for one thing), and Tree is as good as I hoped it would be. Others worth mentioning are Metanota Pro (rather elegant minimal version of Ulysses, I suppose you could call it), and Day One (I use this journal software on iPad, but the Mac version is very nice indeed, especially the little reminder feature, which positively encourages you to diarise your life!).

Then of course there’s Microsoft OneNote. I haven’t got round to downloading/comparing Outline yet (one of my favourite iPad apps), but probably will once my CRIMPing frenzy really takes hold. All the apps that come free with the MacBook are also pretty awesome - I hadn’t realised you get such a plethora of useful utilities, such as Notes, TextEdit, Grab and so on, not to mention the increasingly powerful iWork trio (the online versions of which have just been updated yet again; now much better than Google docs IMHO). You really don’t have to pay for very much at all if you don’t want to.