Question about NoteCase Pro and a thought on Schmid's Notebook

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Posted by Donovan
Dec 19, 2014 at 02:00 AM

Any users know if Notecase Pro uses online activation? I might like a license, but it would go on an air-gap computer. (Offline.) I’m impressed with it!

Abrupt topic switch…..

A note about Alfons Schmid’s Notebooks (Windows version)... http://www.notebooksapp.com
I am really getting addicted to this style. I like the choice between text, Markdown, Rich Text WYSIWYG, It’s really a slick little program. I haven’t tried the iPhone app, but from what I’ve read here the integration is pretty good. I love the folder structure versus a database, but can see both sides. Simply putting existing html folders in the Notebooks folder in Windows allows the files to show up as new notes. If this continues in development, I can see using it very aggressively (I’m a CRIMPer in a bad way.) One thing I DID notice with Schmid’s Notebooks is it’s a tad slow, but not a deal breaker. Anybody know the status of development? Or, as is the case with so many of these, non-development?

Posted by jaslar
Dec 19, 2014 at 05:11 AM

When you pay for a Notecase Pro license, the developer sends you a license “key” - a file. I bought a lifetime, multi-platform license - the software is that good, and the price is that reasonable. So then I put the file on Dropbox and a pen drive. Offline isn’t a problem.

It’s under very active development, and has been for years now.

Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 19, 2014 at 11:14 AM

While development on Notebooks has slowed down a tad, I think this is because Alfons is resting after the considerable labours involved in bringing the desktop versions to both Mac and Windows.

He’s very amiable, and quite happy to correspond by e-mail - very appreciative, in fact.

I love Notebooks, and use it for various things. The occasional slowness (in particular of note listings) is undoubtedly due to filename caching, because open it a few times and it speeds up dramatically. I have about two million words in my various Notebooks notebooks!

One of the things I particularly like about it is the fidelity of web page storage. You can copy a web page into Notebooks in the near-certainty that it will look almost exactly the same in Notebooks as it does on the web (with occasional exceptions, of course). It shares this feature with Quiver (on the Mac), and in fact the two apps can exchange data in a very satisfactory manner.

Another app (for Mac users) that interacts well with both of the above is Keep Everything, which has a rather cunning trick that has grown on me. Designed as a web page repository, Keep Everything automatically attempts to extract the content of web pages and display it in ‘article’ form. It keeps the entire web page (in web archive format), but displays the ‘article’ view by default. But that isn’t all. The ‘article’ view is editable - in Markdown format. So you can extract the main content of a web archive directly from the article by copying the Markdown code, create a new item as text only, and paste the Markdown code into it (it still displays as formatted text). Then you delete the original web archive, saving yourself several megabytes as a rule, but you preserve the content.

I’ve suggested to the developer that he ought to automate this process so people can ditch web archives (which take up a lot of space; even my preferred DEVONthink Pro format, one-page PDFs, take up a lot of space) while preserving the Markdown content. He’s agreed this would be desirable, and that he’s already been thinking about it.

I regularly extract articles from Keep Everything and paste them into Notebooks or Quiver. While DEVONthink is definitely the super-repository of all time, Notebooks and Quiver (and Keep Everything) consume far fewer system resources. And the search functions in Notebooks and Quiver are almost as good as DEVONthink’s (Keep Everything’s is a bit basic, and the developer has said he doesn’t intend to introduce search-term highlighting because it’s too complicated, which is why I use it as a staging app rather than a final repository).

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