Mac substitute for OneNote

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Mar 10, 2010 at 08:55 PM

Tom S. wrote:
>Hi, Chris.
> >Your post is timely. I’ve been pretty happy with Personal Brain and, in
>fact, bought it because its cross platform. But I’m spending 90% of my time on the Mac
>now a days and I’m thinking it might be nice to have something more integrated with the
>environment (read “I’m starting to get the itch to change things up”).
> >I like the
>look of these programs and will look into them. Do you particularly recommend any of
>these three?

Tom,

I hope you don’t mind me butting in with my two cents on this. I have experience with Curio and Circus Ponies Notebook. Both are excellent applications, and which might prove best for you will depend upon how you’d like to use it.

Notebook is primarily outline based, though you can have free-writing pages and add some graphics. The notebook metaphore, in my opinion, is somewhat limiting. It doesn’t show you the overview of your information very efficiently—which is why it relies on the multidex (and automatically generated index). Clipping from other applications is pretty good, but you need to set up pages in the notebook to receive those clips.

Curio is more visual and versatile. You can add almost anything to your pages, including notes synced with Evernote. Ironically, though Notebook looks more like a notebook, I think Curio acts more like one. While the application has the ability to add outlines, index cards and mind maps to a page, none of those features are likely to make you turn cartwheels—that is, they are fairly rudimentary. Still, not many, if any, applications provide the ability to use all those tools on the same page of information.

Both Notebook and Curio have fairly strong task management features, though I would give the nod to Curio.

Overall, I’d say that if you prefer an application that is more word-based, than object-based, choose Notebook. If not, then Curio is overall a stronger application in my opinion.

I’m sure Chris can improve on these thoughts with his own insights.

Steve