Mac Oultiners

Posted by Wes Perdue
Aug 31, 2009 at 07:10 PM

Daly,

I feel compelled to defend Evernote on the Mac. I started with Evernote 3 on the PC, and brought it with me when I got my Mac in March 08. I much prefer using Evernote on the Mac, and I continue to use in on both platforms daily, for both work and personal notes.

Re DevonThink vs Together vs OO. I have all three, and continue to use DT and OO. I don’t see any overlap in how they’re used. I see DT as an incredibly robust document repository for documents of any type, from web snippets/web pages to internally created RTFs to scanned docs and PDFs. Superb tool for archiving and information retrieval.

I use OO for outlines. As you said, it’s very easy to get started with simple outlines. I graduated to multi-column outlines recently. I also use it to draft longer documents, since I like to start with outlines.

I bought Together more than a year ago when I ran out of trial time, but I abandoned it for DT, as DT allowed multiple windows and Together didn’t at the time. I’m not sure whether it does now.

I’ve a few asides on stuff I’ve seen mentioned here over the weekend. I use Curio for project management, and find it quite useful. I use OmniFocus to manage both work and personal tasks, both on my Mac and iPhone. It’s a phenomenal tool.

Tinderbox is another tool any CRIMPer should take a long look at when moving to the Mac. It’s a phenomenal tool, but has a bit of a learning curve. I think of it as the Mac equivalent of Zoot; it’s an incredibly powerful text tool, and it can be used for many of the items we’ve discussed here this weekend. It rivals DT in archiving and retrieval; it rivals OO in single-column outlines. Its map view is a great and unique visualization tool. If you get interested in TB, read Bernstein’s The Tinderbox Way; it lends great insight into how the tool was designed to be used. I’ve had it many months and read the book, and I’m still just barely scratching the surface.

VoodooPad could be considered a lite ConnectedText. While VoodooPad may be the best personal wiki on the Mac, I’ve not yet found any tool that is equivalent to ConnectedText. I continue to look.

Yojimbo comes free with Tinderbox; I use it as a very light clipboard manager. However, I’ve not yet found anything approaching ClipMate, which I love, and miss on the Mac.

The Mac platform has a marvelous, free text editor in TextWrangler. It just revved to 3.0, and inherited the powerful search tool from its big brother BBEdit. TW is a phenomenal value.

Finally, I wanted to mention NovaMind. I brainstorm into this tool, and I use it often in presentations. It’s another phenomenal tool that I find unrivaled and indispensable. I often use it in conjunction with OO and TB when organizing my thoughts.

Regards,
Wes