MacBook experience...

Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Apr 29, 2008 at 08:45 PM

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

>6. There are some nice applications for the
>MacBook, but none that have really blown me away and made me think that, yes, this is
>lightyears ahead of what you can get on a PC. In fact, most of these programs are less
>powerful than some of the Windows applications I use—nothing comes close to Zoot
>(excepting Zoot’s lack of text formatting, of course). There is nothing I’ve found as
>powerful as WhizFolders Deluxe. But the interface on the Mac is easier to use… what I
>mean by that is, though I have admired the power and functionality of WhizFolders, I
>never use it because I found it too clunky and unintuitive (I know this is a subjective
>assessment, one not shared by everyone). So, even though some of the programs are not
>as feature-rich as their PC counterparts, I find them to be somewhat more
>user-friendly.
> >The software I’ve looked at includes the following
>titles:
> >Scrivener (writing)
>Journler (note taker, journaling, not
>mis-spelled)
>Mori (note taker)
>Yojimbo (info organizer)
>EagleFiler (info
>organizer)
>Curio (mind-mapper plus)
>Bento (scaled down version of
>FileMaker)
>Voodoo Pad Pro (wiki)
>OmniOutliner (outliner)
>Opal (outliner)
>Tao
>(outliner)
>NoteTaker (OneNote-style note taker)
> >So far I have bought licenses
>for Scrivener, NoteTaker, Yojimbo and Opal. My purchase of the NoteTaker license may
>have been premature, as I’ve found other note-taking applications may be superior
>(Journler, for instance).

Have you had the chance to compare Aquamind’s NoteTaker to CircusPonies Notebook? They started out as one project, and the two developers split. Since then they seem to have diverged further. NoteTaker is said to emphasize information management more than Notebook, which tries to be more of an outliner too. This is all hearsay, but at least one poster raved about CircusPonies Notebook.

Tao is supposed to be the most powerful pure outliner on the Mac; Omni the most popular and versatile; Opal might be the most facile, judging by its predecessor, Acta. I would be interested in your comparisons with MaxThink, NoteMap, and BrainStorm.

I recall one of your main concerns was finding an optimal writing environment. How does Scrivener compare to what’s available on Windows?