Question at large: About Notecase Pro

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Posted by Cassius
May 9, 2013 at 05:41 AM

I am winnowing my stable of PIMs. I have NoteCase Pro, but have never used it.

Here’s the question: Does NoteCase Pro have any unusual features that makes it worth keeping?

Thanks for the help.

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
May 9, 2013 at 01:27 PM

Unusual features: yes.

- Multi-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows and more; Android under serious development.
- Multi-format: it has a few of its own, but can also work very happily with many standard/third-party popular formats, from OPML, to MindManager. It’s actually quite handy from ‘translating’ between formats, even if you are not going to actually work with them in NC Pro itself.
- Strong task management features: e.g. you can switch between a flat list of pending tasks and the tree to bring them into context
- Scriptable: one of the very few programmable outliners (off the top of my head I can’t actually think of another)

Do they make it worth keeping? Depends on whether you’d use them.

Posted by Carrot
May 12, 2013 at 05:25 AM

Cassius wrote:
>Here’s the question: Does NoteCase Pro have any unusual features that
>makes it worth keeping?

If you might want to delete it or give up on it, it it possible to re-sell the license to someone else? I don’t suppose that is allowed by license agreements is it?

I’ve been intrigued by NoteCase Pro for a few years and tried it about 3 years ago. But I found that Keepnote seemed to offer nearly all of the features of NoteCase Pro, and I’d rather be using Open-source than an proprietary system. I’ll happily pay for a open-source software,—I just do not want to see the product fade into oblivion after I spend years of my time using it to organize my research and data. But NoteCase Pro seems to have developed quite a bit over the last 2 years, while KeepNote seems to have stagnated. I have no idea why.. .Keepnote is brilliant and well-designed and was well on its way to becoming a very powerful tool for Linux users.

Posted by jaslar
May 12, 2013 at 03:11 PM

Notecase Pro has become the dashboard of my work life: project management, journal, drafting of complex documents, notes. I think it’s continued development, swift responsiveness of the author, and ability to ingest a lot of other formats are indeed unique.

Posted by Marbux
May 12, 2013 at 05:24 PM

>Here’s the question: Does NoteCase Pro have any unusual features that
>makes it worth keeping?

That depends on your needs. NC Pro is unusually versatile and extensible.

Full disclosure: I assist in writing the NC Pro Help file as a volunteer.

1. List mode is the major feature setting it apart from other outliners. With list mode, you are not confined to the hierarchical organization of a document but can via scripts or search produce a flat list view of nodes (in memory only) that are responsive to some criteria. Combined with a wide variety of node metadata types from tags to custom metadata, this gives NC Pro much of the power of a relational database manager. For a quick preview, if you have it installed, open the Help file, make sure that the Tags Pane is activated, and double-click on a tag. All nodes that share that tag will be listed. Similar tricks can be executed with the unusually powerful search features if the “fill result to list” option is checked.

2. Node clones. As anyone who works with an outliner knows, the universe of topics does not always divide cleanly into hierarchical relationships. One node may need to be located under multiple parent nodes. NC Pro solves this riddle with node clones. Editing either the original or any of its clones propagates the same changes to all through the magic of transclusion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion

3. Exensibility. NC Pro embeds the popular and easy to learn Lua scripting engine. Currently, the app has over 300 APIs exported to Lua for extending the program. I’ve personally developed over 400 scripts for NC Pro. NC Pro can process Lua scripts that are:

—Stand-alone UTF-8 plain text script files, which are loaded and executed by NoteCase Pro;

—Embedded scripts, i.e. scripts embedded in NoteCase Pro documents, enabling multiple scripts to be stored in the same document and also enabling highly modular scripts; or

—Part of plugins, which are basically embedded script documents following some special format rules. NoteCase Pro provides a networked plugin distribution system, through which plugins can be downloaded and installed, updated, or removed. The networked distribution system enables any plugin author to have their plugins distributed.

Scripts can be launched by menu items, by activation of toolbar icons, by keyboard shortcuts, by keyboard entry of abbreviations, automatically upon occurrence of program events, by other scripts, or via the NoteCase Pro command line.

While there is no requirement that script-writers do so, it is the custom of the NC Pro script writers’ community to place all scripts in the public domain pursuant to the CC0 universal waiver of copyrights and neighboring rights. http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

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