Mac substitute for OneNote

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Posted by Jack Crawford
Mar 10, 2010 at 02:30 AM

My son has recently commenced a tertiary course requiring a macbook for film & image editing.

Up till now, he has been using OneNote fairly successfuly to organise himself and grab web images and text for research and the like.

Is there a native mac application that would be good replacement for OneNote - especially its notebook metaphor and web clipping?

TIA

Jack

Posted by Chris Thompson
Mar 10, 2010 at 02:49 AM

The three closest are:
- Circus Ponies Notebook
- ZenGobi Curio
- Aquaminds Notetaker

These are generally more full-featured than OneNote. If he uses the “take a picture of the web page” style of web clipping from OneNote, he’ll want to use the Mac “Grab” application in conjunction with any of these. All offer literal web clipping natively.

—Chris

Posted by Tom S.
Mar 10, 2010 at 01:13 PM

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 S.

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

Posted by Tom S.
Mar 11, 2010 at 08:24 PM

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

>I hope you don’t mind me
>butting in with my two cents on this

On the contrary. I very much appreciate it.

I’ve put in about a day with each application to get a feel.

> 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.

I would agree with this. I, also found the notebook metaphore to be limiting. After one day of use the thing already started to feel crowded with pages.

Still this application definitely has its strengths. I found the multidex to be interesting. Ponies seems to pick up quite a bit of metadata from the things you put in. For instance, if you clip an email into it, it will automatically search the address book looking for the proper contact. It associates the entry with the contact and gives it a sticker. That’s pretty well thought out and pretty handy. If there’s a problem associated with it, its that you can’t “see” what’s associated with the item without clicking on an icon on the page. For instance, as you pointed out, you can only see one keyword associated with the item. If you want to see them all, you have to right click. This keeps things from getting cluttered but it also keeps you from seeing everything at a glance.

The simplicity of the metaphor means that virtually anyone can look at the notebook as exported HTML or a pdf and get a good feel for how its organized, a definite plus if anything should happen and someone needs to figure out what the heck I’ve been doing without me.

Overall I was comfortable with the program and I liked it. As you pointed out, it just feels a bit limited.

>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.

There was a time about ten or so years ago when I would have jumped on this application and declared it no contest. But I think I must be getting old. Much to my surprise, when I looked at the website, the program looked complicated enough to make me seriously question whether it was worth downloading and trying. The tutorial videos demonstrated actions using four or five different frames on the screen, each showing something different. And there’s all this project management stuff that doesn’t interest me in the least bit.

It looked to me like trying to manage my data with this program was going to be like going hunting with a nuclear missile. Is it really worth building a silo, finding two expendable men with keys to initiate the launch sequence, and polluting the environment with nuclear waste to shoot a rabbit?

Instead of the program, I just downloaded the manual and started reading and I’m glad I did. The whole thing makes more sense to me now. Its like putting your information on a series of PowerPoint slides with preformed widgets to handle the data. I’m only using 30% of its capabilities but it looks good and, at times, feels good to use.

But I still have my doubts about it. Big programs like this with a huge number of (sometimes unnecessary) features that have been added on make me uncomfortable. They tend to have bugs that never get fixed and, instead, multiply because the developers are in such a hurry to add new things. This impression was quickly confirmed in this case. I only used the program for a couple hors before I started running into problems.

Highlighting a single paragraph in Safari and clipping sends a “text note” to the Scrapbook with no reference to the URL it came from and no way to get back to the page. Using a JavaScript applet to clip (supplied with the manual) does put in the URL but then you get the entire page. No highlighting relevant text and leaving the rest behind.

The real deal breaker was when I tried to use the JavaScript applet with Gmail. The web archive from the Java applet was of the Inbox listing, not the individual email, even though the URL when I clipped clearly points to the email and not to my Inbox. I deal too much with Gmail for this not to work.

The really good news was that when I sent the programer feed back, he got back to me almost immediately. This is, indeed, a bug in the program. Turns out the work around for both problems was copy and paste into the program. This carries the URL with it. Works with gmail as well. I can probably deal with the problem this way if its only webpages where I don’t want the whole thing. But its still inconvenient.

>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 prefer object based and I am, indeed, leaning toward Curio (I wasn’t until the developer got back to me so quickly. That was very encouraging.). But I can’t shake the feeling that I’m going to be dealing with bugs due to an unnecessary complexity in the design. I think I have a good handle on Notebook so I’ll just keep using Curio to see how many problems I run into.

Tom S.

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