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Yet another new discovery
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Posted by MadaboutDana
Jun 1, 2015 at 10:09 PM
... and this one’s a goodie. It’s a Mac app (Mac only, I’m afraid, not even iOS) by a Japanese developer, called HueNote.
It’s a text editor. But what makes it unusual is its extraordinary breadth of filtering functions. Notes can be kept in one or more libraries per file. Each note is shown as a preview, as large or as small as you like. Then there are a couple of reference lists you can pin on either side of the note editing area. The reference lists show ‘most recent notes’ or ‘starred notes’ by default, but can also show custom user lists of notes.
But there’s more. Notes can be assigned (a) colours, (b) tags, (c) icons and (d) comments (in info boxes). These can all be used as filters in the main (library) view, but there are also a couple of search functions: one a basic function that simply pulls up notes corresponding to (any) key term, without any highlighting or anything. The second is much more powerful, and pulls up a list of notes complete with a sublist of each hit term, in context - i.e. with surrounding text - plus the actual hit term highlighted (exactly like Adobe Acrobat).
Then there’s the editor pane. It can show individual notes, but it can also show notes side by side in columns (as many as you like), or above/below one another, or both. You can give notes individual fonts, although they are otherwise text only (i.e. no rich-text formatting).
Each note file can contain multiple libraries - I’m not sure what the limit is, but you can have quite a few! And each library can contain lots of notes. Files are stored in iCloud by default, so I’m hoping the developer is thinking in terms of an iOS app at some point in the future.
If there’s a weakness, it’s in the lack of import/export options. But the app’s still a version 1.0 release, so hopefully those will evolve.
It’s an extraordinary app. Very cheap, but amazingly powerful, and very good-looking in an ultra-minimalist sort of way. It’s the kind of thing you could use for just about anything at all. If it had Markdown support plus some import/export functionality, it would be totally unbeatable. The main app website is Japanese only, I’m afraid, but it does have instant Google translation for those non-Japanese speakers who want to explore. It’s at http://miraclehue.jp
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jun 1, 2015 at 10:12 PM
Sorry, I made a mistake in my description: you don’t have multiple libraries in a single note file, you have multiple workspaces, which give you different views of the same library. All the different features effectively amount to one thing: a vast number of different ways of filtering your notes by a wide variety of criteria.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jun 1, 2015 at 10:15 PM
Oh, and I made another mistake. I’ve just discovered the app does indeed support rich-text formatting, as per Apple’s basic TextEdit. I think the notes are stored as HTML or some kind of XML subset. So if you paste in text from a Word file or a web page, the formatting (and links) are preserved. Makes it even more useful! Good grief!
Posted by steveylang
Jun 1, 2015 at 11:06 PM
This looks really interesting! I guess a free lite version is coming, I will be sure to give it a spin-
I wish there was some sort of portability or access through iOS, when an app doesn’t have that then it’s got to be that much better for me…
Thanks,
Steve
Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 22, 2020 at 12:27 PM
In view of all the enthusiasm about Zettelkasten, I’ve been re-exploring some of the most interesting note-takers I’ve found over the last few years.
And I’ve rediscovered an app (macOS only, I’m afraid) I’d totally forgotten about. Although it hasn’t been updated for several years, it runs absolutely fine under the latest macOS 11.0 Big Sur release.
As a way of managing and reviewing multiple notes, it has some really unusual but useful features. I explained them briefly in my first post on the app, and made one mistake: notes do, in fact, support basic rich-text formatting, which is convenient (bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, colours etc., although not – as far as I can tell – bullet points, horizontal lines etc.).
The main unusual features: you can keep a LOT of notes in a single file (so ideal for Zettelkasten), and view them in a workspace that can consist of multiple columns with multiple notes in each column. The full list of notes appears in a Library bar on the left; by clicking on a note, you can position it in the workspace layout on the right. You can have the same note open multiple times – in the same workspace or in different workspaces. This means you can have multiple views of the same long, scrolling note, for example.
But you can also have multiple workspaces, each with a different view of your collection of notes – very useful if you’re researching something specific but want to keep certain items of information in a given relationship to each other. There’s much more to enjoy (including multiple options for tagging/marking notes, making lists of favourites that can be loaded in separate navigation bars, etc.).
I’d urge Mac users to take a look, even if the developer has lost interest. The fact that it still runs on Big Sur (unlike many other earlier apps) suggests it’s using some really basic macOS components in a fairly standard way.
Parallel note-taking structures is something that interests me more and more as I start to develop some densely populated Zettelkasten repositories. Viewing one’s information in interrelated ways is always difficult (hence the popularity of mind/concept-mapping apps); something like HueNote offers another interesting option.
Cheers,
Bill