...is mentioned by users as successor to InfoSelect and Tornado notes from the DOS days:
http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/notefrog-professional/

Has anyone actually tried this program - and is it the way to "contain" info?

My continuing problem seems to be trying to get program that does it all.

Whiz Folders seems to be great for writing.

While Personal Brain is kind of neat for getting in lots of stuff, the lack of metadata, and the limited ability of its own notes to capture data, are off-putting.

I am trying the new beta Zoot 6 and Infoqube for managing info.

MyInfo has so much going for it, but frankly I was disappointed the new version fails to have hoist, or the ability to open more than one note at a time (a must for serious writing/research).

To its credit, Kinook, after a lot of people asked for it, was able to provide hoist in short order. But so far no multiple open notes.

As well, Kinook's inability to communicate with competence, whether in relation to Jan, or in terms of helping people use UR is off-putting.

ADM had so much potential, and still looks good to the competition. Why are Eric and Arne so quiet? Did Eric sell ADM to the Chinese?

I may be headed over to the Mac world in any event, in which case this madness begins all over again.

Any thoughts?

Daly

Daly de Gagne wrote:

While Personal Brain is kind of neat for getting in
lots of stuff, the lack of metadata, and the limited ability of its own notes to capture
data, are off-putting.

Because its cross platform, I'm trying this program out again. I agree that the metadata is a serious limitation. I'm going to eventually email the developer and ask about this, among many other things.

However, regarding the ability to capture data, the program has a feature that (I think) is fairly unique. It actually indexes the URLs. So, for instance, if you capture a web page by creating a URL attachment, it actually goes out and indexes the page for search.

I agree that this is, indeed, off putting because you have to actually click on the node to see the contents of the page in a web browser. However, this is only a minor inconvenience as long as the data is available and searchable.

An interesting twist, I thought.

The bad news is that it doesn't appear to index my gmail URLs. :(

I may be headed over to the Mac world in any event, in which case
this madness begins all over again.

Any thoughts?

Have fun. :)

Tom S.

Boy, that really does like a welcome combination of Tornado Notes and MemoryMate. And me with my MacBook......

JP

I am intrigued by Notefrog -- perhaps enough to register it today.

I am currently trialling the CintaNotes beta (http://cintanotes.com/ and the two programs obviously share many of the same aims. And although CintaNotes is free in beta, the RTF version will be shareware on release.

I must say I prefer the CintaNotes interface. I'm not a great fan of funky icons and non-standard interfaces. Why bother?

I also prefer the traditional approach to tags in CintaNotes as opposed to the wiki-style "stick-'em-anywhere-and-make-it-up-as-you-go-along" approach in NoteFrog.

But both products are going in the right direction, and I think both deserve support. I just wish a large software house with serious resources would throw some money at this product area. I understand there may not be huge profit in it -- it's hardly a mass market -- but it would be a prestige product that would earn good PR for the company that got it right.

Daly de Gagne wrote:

I may be headed over to the Mac world in any event, in which case
this madness begins all over again.

Any thoughts?

Daly,

About 16 months ago I bought a MacBook to supplement my personal computing. I still use a PC at work, and I expected that I'd spend about half my time between the PC at home and my MacBook. Well, I now use my MacBook almost exclusively for all my personal computing. But it isn't so much because the applications are better, but because the OS is so much more user-friendly than Windows.

In fact, I am still flailing around with several different PIM-type apps for the Mac. There are some very good ones, ones that are unique, but still none that I would consider that Holy Grail application in which I could put ALL my information. Ironically, however, shifting my focus from Windows to Mac has caused me to settle into a nice system for my office PC, where Zoot and OneNote form 90% of my information management workflow -- although I've still found a reason to buy a $10 license for Notefrog.

But back to the Mac. There are many admirable applications -- Curio, Notebook, VoodooPad, DevonThink, Tinderbox, to name a few. In truth, however, I have come to believe that the Windows world has a richer selection of more powerful tools than does the Mac world. And the Mac world is as plagued by start-and-stop developers who abandon their applications as is the PC world... if not more so.

All of which is not to say that you shouldn't change teams. I love my MacBook, and you won't find anything like Tinderbox or Curio in Windows (at least not yet, though the developer of Tinderbox has been claiming to be building a version for Windows for at least the past seven or eight years).

Just as an exercise, here is what I would recommend for new Mac users:

1. Choose one of these two as a project organizer:

- Curio (www.zengobi.com). Creates a "notebook" of white boards on which you can combine built in outlines, text boxes and mindmaps, as well as pasting in PDFs, media files, and almost anything. Integrates well with Evernote too.
- Notebook (www.circusponies.com). A virtual notebook, relying heavily on outlining. Add sticky notes, media files, and other documents.

Both applications have good task management features, though Curio is probably stronger.

2. Choose one of these as your information dumbing ground and organizer:

- DevonThink (http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonthink/ Widely considered the most powerful information manager for Mac. Has functions to help you discover associations among your data. The UI isn't the friendliest, and it takes some work to uncover the power functions.
- Eaglefiler (http://c-command.com/eaglefiler/ Together (http://reinventedsoftware.com/together/ These two applications seem very similar to me and offer a lot of power, but without as much screen clutter as DT, though neither is as powerful, I believe, as DT.
- Yojimbo (http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/index.html An order of magnitude in power below any of the above applications, but cleaner and simpler. Does not seem to have received much development in the past year.

3. Choose one of these as your writing application:

- Scrivener (http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html Probably the most popular writing application on the Mac, at least from a creative standpoint. Handles both fiction and nonfiction projects. The interface still feels a bit clunky and cluttered to me and we're in month nine of the public beta for version 2.0.
- Storyist (http://www.storyist.com/ If you're writing only fiction, I would suggest looking strongly at this application, which feels like it has a better interface than Scrivener.

Of course there are scads of other options in all three of these categories, but these are the ones I have come to feel are the best options for the most part.

Steve Z.

Both NoteFrog and CintaNotes appear to be text only. Personally, even though I am retired, I prefer to be able to at a minimum paste graphics and tables.

I also was looking for a simple tool to memorize notes including graphics some time ago. I found azzcardfile to be a good compromise. I wonder why it is so rarely mentioned here; well, now I've done it :)

Steve, thanks for the overview.

I am curious why you did not mention the Omni group of products? Have they been outpaced by the other software you mentioned?

Thanks.

Daly

I sent a question to the deeloper of NoteFrog about an hour ago and already have his response:


NoteFrog response‏
From: htc (htconsulting@gmail.com)
Medium riskYou may not know this sender.Mark as safe|Mark as junk
Sent: Sun 8/30/09 10:57 AM
To:
Hi,

NoteFrog professional will save images, if the option to save images is selected (it's off by default). See the "options" menu.

Web pages are passed in different formats. They're passed as HTML in FireFox and Rich Text in IE. NoteFrog does not capture HTML at this time, but does capture Rich Text if the save as rich text option is selected in the options.

Does this answer your question?

Best regards,

Berry Taylor
NoteFrog developer
NoteFrog "Use it - don't lose it"

Daly de Gagne wrote:

Steve, thanks for the overview.

I am curious why you did not mention the Omni group of
products? Have they been outpaced by the other software you
mentioned?

Thanks.

Daly

Daly

Blithely following Steve Z. off-topic, I would endorse all he says about the Mac platform and Mac applications (with a slightly stronger recommendation of Scrivener of which I've been a perhaps tediously long-term fan - the developer has been very open about the timescale of his version 2.)

Personally, I also like the Omni products quite a lot. All of them are still maturing (with the possible exception of OmniGraffle, which on the Mac is almost certainly the best of the diagramming breed ? not that it has many competitors on the platform ? and may rival Visio on Windows.)

None of the other Omni applications is yet quite there ? but they're on the way. Omnifocus, as I'm sure you're aware, is one of the most sophisticated GTD-biased task managers on either platform, but is still developing, and OmniOutliner has a clean and clear UI but is less powerful than TAO. OmniPlan is rather a good project manager at the simpler end of the spectrum (especially for non-project managers), but is still lacking functionality compared with rivals.

But the key thing about Omni it seems to me -- relating to something else that Steve wrote ? concerns its organisation. It's a corporation, not a one-man band. As such, it's not of course an 800-lb MS-style gorilla, nor even a Steve Jobs orang-utang, more a 25-lb woolly monkey... But it does have a number of employees, they appear to be full-time, their profile is lively and friendly towards their customers, and they continue to churn out betas and upgrades on a regular basis. So there's a strong sense of permanence about them and the development of their products which seems to inspire confidence in users.

In this user anyway.

H

Daly de Gagne wrote:

Steve, thanks for the overview.

I am curious why you did not mention the Omni group of
products? Have they been outpaced by the other software you
mentioned?

Daly,

The only one of the Omni products I'm really familiar with is OmniOutline, which I own. Frankly, I have been disappointed in this product -- or perhaps I should say I'm disappointed with what I've been able to get out of it. True it offers fully functional customizable columns. But I find it very slow to use. Really, to me, it feels like a clunky spreadsheet more than an outliner, even though it certainly has hierarchical levels. All in all I have just never warmed up to OO, so I didn't even think about it when I was making my list.

BTW, I wasn't including the concept of project or day planning in that list either. There are a number of cool task management products for the Mac, but I really never use that type of product myself, so didn't want to comment on them.

Steve Z.

Daly,

I didn't mean to sound down on Scrivener, but I have been playing with Storyist since its new release a couple of weeks ago and do find it "airier" than Scrivener, if you sense what I mean by that. But Storyist is strictly for fiction, and Scrivener is great, so unless you're only writing fiction, Scrivener is the better choice.

For the record, if Hugh says something about the Mac world that differs from what I say, trust Hugh. I do. He's been very helpful on this forum and at the Literature and Latte (Scrivener) forum when I've had questions, and very generous with his knowledge.

Steve Z.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Daly de Gagne wrote:
>Steve, thanks for the overview.
>
>I am curious why you did
not mention the Omni group of
>products? Have they been outpaced by the other
software you
>mentioned?
>

Daly,

The only one of the Omni products I'm really
familiar with is OmniOutline, which I own. Frankly, I have been disappointed in this
product -- or perhaps I should say I'm disappointed with what I've been able to get out
of it. True it offers fully functional customizable columns. But I find it very slow to
use. Really, to me, it feels like a clunky spreadsheet more than an outliner, even
though it certainly has hierarchical levels. All in all I have just never warmed up to
OO, so I didn't even think about it when I was making my list.

BTW, I wasn't including
the concept of project or day planning in that list either. There are a number of cool
task management products for the Mac, but I really never use that type of product
myself, so didn't want to comment on them.

Steve Z.

Interesting to read, given that the only reason I'm tempted to get a Mac is for OO, since really, I don't think there's a single Windows equivalent besides Ecco (and can Ecco even do hoisting? If it does, I can't find it...) From what I've seen of it, it does everything I want an outliner to do (I'm talking about writing outlines here, I'd rather use something else for task management anyway...)

Of course, I snap back to reality and realize that buying a whole new computer for one piece of software isn't really worth it...but damn. Sometimes the grass looks awfully greener.

ShatteredMindofBob,

In regards to Omni Outliner, I am describing my own experience, and I am pretty finicky with software. You may try OO and love it. It's got all the functions you can hope for. When I bought it, I was hoping for something that would remind me of the old DOS program GrandView, and perhaps it is just that OO doesn't live up to that high standard that makes me less than enthusiastic. I was also disappointed in how the inline text works... that was a big part of what made GV so excellent.

As for buying a new computer for one application, I did that when I bought my Mac... I wanted to run Scrivener... and I discovered that there are a lot of other reasons to enjoy a Mac.

Steve Z.

Since I've been guilty of taking this thread off topic, I thought I'd bring it back around. I decided to spend the $10 to get a Notefrog license for use at the office where I live on a Windows PC. "Frog" seems like an apt name for the application, because it is one of the uglier looking pieces of software I've seen in a while, but I like the looks of the functions -- having several flat files of free form information that can be quickly filtered is appealing. Still the interface looks like it is a refugee from Windows 3.0!

Steve Z.

I want to thank everyone who joined me in going off topic and discussing the range of outlining and information management products for the MAC.

This tangent is one I want to continue because it may be possible for me to get a Mac in the near future.

So I will start a thread called Mac Outliners.

Again, many thanks.

Daly