Circus Ponies suddenly ceased business

Posted by mprazoff
Jan 6, 2016 at 11:44 PM

I too will miss Circus Ponies NoteBook. It made for an excellent personal journal, over many years. It was one of the first programs on iOS that worked with rich text. The iOS app was rather slow and perhaps one of the most skeuomorphic ever created. Circus Ponies always had an undercurrent of pissing off their user base. When version 4 came out, they removed some features from previous versions, like Writing Pages. Apparently page types were too confusing for new users. Then it became apparent that page types weren’t removed, but just hidden. Even then, Circus Ponies insisted that you needed to write them for the method of turning features back on, rather than simply posting the terminal commands. Sadly, their attitude towards their user base is reflected in the final message on their Web site, even after a bit of editing.

Notetaker, the other branch of the original NeXT program, also seems to be dead parrot-ware (somewhere between “pining for the fjords” and actually “nailed to the perch”). This double loss leaves a gaping hole in Mac outliners/notebooks. Curio remains as an option, in fact, an improvement over NoteBook, and one with a responsive developer whose attitude is the polar opposite to Circus Ponies. I am also experimenting with another option: combining OmniOutliner with a program like Together or DEVONthink. This way a number of OmniOutliner documents can be displayed (albeit, the QuickLook preview, which nonetheless does allow levels to be hidden or shown) and indexed, thus being searchable and able to be organized in a notebook like hierarchy. Clicking on an outline opens it in OmniOutliner for editing. I guess it takes more than the loss of a good old friend to get in the way of some quality CRIMPing.