The new versions of Notebooks (12 & 3) are here!

Posted by MadaboutDana
Jul 27, 2022 at 08:25 AM

It is difficult to decide on the merits of Keep It vs Notebooks, @Dellu – I confess I use both for different reasons.

I’d just point out, however, that Notebooks *does* have folders, although it calls them books, and you can have as many levels of subfolders as you like (they are directly reflected in the Notebooks file system – books = folders). Notebooks can also put its file repository anywhere you like (iCloud, Dropbox, your hard drive etc.), although Keep It’s recent integration with Finder has made up ground on this!

I’d also point out that Notebooks can view any number of different file formats, even if it doesn’t directly support them. If you create, for example, an RTFD file and save it to your Notebooks folder (which I just did, for interest), it’s perfectly readable in Notebooks – along with all its formatting. You can open it in an RTF editor if you wish. The same goes for Word and Numbers files – displayed with full formatting (and, I suspect, Excel or Pages files, but I haven’t experimented with those yet). Again, Notebooks will happily open these files in the relevant app, as required. I keep a lot of files in Notebooks even though I can’t edit them directly – not least because I can search them using Notebooks’s search function (of course Keep It does this very well, too).

Notebooks also has a couple of useful extras: the ability to turn an entire folder (“book”) into a PDF or eBook. It also has a backlink maintenance feature (which I haven’t used, but looks like a good idea to me!)

Finally, I have to say I find Notebooks a nicer writing environment – but that’s a personal thing, and in recent releases of Keep It, the editor is much improved.