Without much ado http://www.circusponies.com

Like, I believe, some others here, I have a nostalgic affection for CPN, and am sorry to see it go.

Yes, on the other hand I find a line like this one on the farewell page highly unprofessional.

"Best of luck with all the turd note-taking apps that are left."

So almost all users are stupid and get what they deserve?

I have licenses for CP because CP Notebook had something going for it but ended up using something else because I found the database backend less stable than Devonthink's and was not too thrilled about being forced into the notebook metaphor and using the mouse so much.

Not the end of the world for me.

Prion wrote:

Yes, on the other hand I find a line like this one on the farewell page
highly unprofessional.

On the linked page there is also a dig at Microsoft:

"Microsoft cloned NoteBook in the early 2000s to create the craptacular OneNote."

Sorry to see it go --

"gone to that great Alphabet company" -- a joke, or did Alphabet buy it, or have the devs hired on with Google's parent?

"Microsoft cloned NoteBook in the early 2000s to create the craptacular OneNote" -- really (the two hardly look related other than the metaphor)? or just another ironic joke?

Highly unprofessional indeed.

I would be sorry to see it go, except that CPN appears to have little regard for their customers. So good riddance.

Steve Z.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Highly unprofessional indeed.
I would be sorry to see it go, except that CPN appears to have little
regard for their customers. So good riddance.
>Steve Z.

_____________________

Oh I don't know. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt.
It looks to me as though the last person to turn out the lights at circusponies.com might have felt pretty bitterly about whatever had transpired, and hence the emotional parting shots in the face of a seemingly unfair and cruel fate. Who knows what might have been going on there, before the closure? I know what it feels like when one puts one's all into something that subsequently gets canned for reasons unrelated to one's own good efforts.
One often has no control over such situations. The canning of the UK's TSR-2 was an example of that sort of thing.

I'd never heard of Circus Ponies™ NoteBook™ before now - but that's because it's apparently a Mac-only app. and I haven't used Macs for years.
I looked over their website on the Wayback Machine, and it looks to be a pretty useful NoteBook/PIM, though possibly in a bit of a kludgy and archaic (under-developed) form. As a reluctant convert to OneNote, I can't see much similarty between the two things though, as was suggested.in the posts.
It seems a shame when an apparently good product with good potential is killed off for whatever reason.
If they had diversified and developed it to run on Windows, there might have been a quite different outcome. I wonder why that path was not taken? For developers, the Mac OS is a relatively limited market compared to the ubiquitous nature of the Windows OSes.
Hopefully we may yet see the NoteBook rise from the ashes, albeit in another form.

Slarti,

Notebook was a forked product, I believe, when the developer split with a partner, who went on to develop a very similar app called Notetaker:

http://www.aquaminds.com/

Notetaker did get something of a Windows version, which I tried and thought was very, very lightweight compared with the Mac version.

Anyway, Notetaker is at least still in business -- though development is super slow, if not suspended.

Steve Z.

Thanks Steve Z.

I absolutely loved the idea of the app, and bought my first Mac partly because of it.

The reality was a bit different and a little kludgey for me. Nowadays I like plain text files much more.

I guess it ended up feeling like the difference between making one of those fancy photo scrapbooks, vs. using something like Google Photos (utlitarian but effective.)

I bought Notetaker for Windows a few years ago. It failed to do one of the key things I bought it for. Trying to get that problem corrected was useless because no response from Aquaminds who appear to have abandoned their prouduct, and might as well be out of business. It is too bad because Notetaker is clever, and except for one issue is very good.

Perhaps with Circus Ponies gone, Aquaminds might wake up, see what they have, and get Notetaker for Windows into shape. I'd be willing to beta test because product concept is excellent, and it falls down in only one - albeit a major - area. No Windows program implements the notebook metaphor the way Notetaker does.

Daly


Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Slarti,

Notebook was a forked product, I believe, when the developer split with
a partner, who went on to develop a very similar app called Notetaker:

http://www.aquaminds.com/

Notetaker did get something of a Windows version, which I tried and
thought was very, very lightweight compared with the Mac version.

Anyway, Notetaker is at least still in business -- though development is
super slow, if not suspended.

Steve Z.

Not a Mac / iOS user now, but nevertheless sorry to see reduced the Outliner software space.

Here an account of the last sighing sounds before the end:
http://www.maclitigator.com/2015/12/06/circus-ponies-notebook-may-be-dying/

As a general observation, I found difficult to understand why a developer that regards his app so highly, does not offer it a second chance (and life) as Freeware. The story of the contended son and King Salomon judgment, does not teach enough to many developers - if you love your software, it is preferable to let it live in the hands of others that let it kill. Among other things, this would give some real competition to other similar apps against which the developer may fill bitter.

If you go to the Circus Ponies page, they removed the reference to turd note-taking apps. A smart decision, I'd say.

Steve Z.

I too will miss Circus Ponies NoteBook. It made for an excellent personal journal, over many years. It was one of the first programs on iOS that worked with rich text. The iOS app was rather slow and perhaps one of the most skeuomorphic ever created. Circus Ponies always had an undercurrent of pissing off their user base. When version 4 came out, they removed some features from previous versions, like Writing Pages. Apparently page types were too confusing for new users. Then it became apparent that page types weren't removed, but just hidden. Even then, Circus Ponies insisted that you needed to write them for the method of turning features back on, rather than simply posting the terminal commands. Sadly, their attitude towards their user base is reflected in the final message on their Web site, even after a bit of editing.

Notetaker, the other branch of the original NeXT program, also seems to be dead parrot-ware (somewhere between "pining for the fjords" and actually "nailed to the perch"). This double loss leaves a gaping hole in Mac outliners/notebooks. Curio remains as an option, in fact, an improvement over NoteBook, and one with a responsive developer whose attitude is the polar opposite to Circus Ponies. I am also experimenting with another option: combining OmniOutliner with a program like Together or DEVONthink. This way a number of OmniOutliner documents can be displayed (albeit, the QuickLook preview, which nonetheless does allow levels to be hidden or shown) and indexed, thus being searchable and able to be organized in a notebook like hierarchy. Clicking on an outline opens it in OmniOutliner for editing. I guess it takes more than the loss of a good old friend to get in the way of some quality CRIMPing.

VentureBeat is now report that Circus Ponies has been bought and shuttered by Google! Strange.

http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/06/google-acquires-and-shuts-down-notetaking-app-circus-ponies/

By contrast The Mac Observer reports:

"[UPDATE: January 6. Jayson contacted me and wrote: "The people reporting that we were purchased by Google have lost their minds a little. I understand why someone might connect the dots that way, but neither www.circusponies.com nor www.circusponies.xyz says anything about Alphabet owning us. I mostly just thought it would be funny for Circus Ponies to be the “C” in Alphabet. I am flattered that people would think that Circus Ponies was on par with Google and all the other multibillion sub-corporations Alphabet owns."]"

This gets odder by the moment!

Sort of a "Paul is dead" moment.

With jaw-dropping gall, the owner of Circus Ponies sent an email today to purchasers of the product (I am one) to announce "If you're using NoteBook 3 and want to keep running NoteBook for as long as you can, you'll need a copy of NoteBook 4. That's because NoteBook 4 is the only version of NoteBook that runs on OS X El Capitan."

So, we're invited to send him $20 via Paypal for a license and download for NoteBook 4. $20 for software that he flat out refuses to support.

Amazing.

I would save my $20 and invest $4.99 in Growly Notes.

While it is true that one should never invest in what a software may (or may not) become in the future but take it for what it does at the moment, the reverse is probably also true. One should not regard a software for what it once has been in the past.

Obviously the developer has lost the plot somehow just as I have lost my confidence in him. The reasons are unknown but nothing good is going to come out of it, there is nothing to see there.
Time to move on.

My issue is that I fall in love with software that is, to me, extremely functional, only to have it discontinued or sold to another entity that kills its or ignores it. The list includes ThinkTank, Grandview, Q&A, XyWrite, Agenda, Mori, Notetaker, Notebook, PC Outline, and Ecco Pro, to name a few. The solution, of course, is to use MS Word for everything. Gaaaa!

They do seem a bit bitter and rather unprofessional.

Of the 3 products that I have released in the last 11 years, one flopped and I released it for free ( nothing to do with productivity software: http://www.keywordfunnel.com ). And still no-one wants it! Dissapointing as that was I tried to treat the few people that bought it respectfully.

That's why my preference is now apps that use text files, or as close as possible. '.TXT' will never go out of style!

Jeffery wrote:

My issue is that I fall in love with software that is, to me, extremely
functional, only to have it discontinued or sold to another entity that
kills its or ignores it. The list includes ThinkTank, Grandview, Q&A,
XyWrite, Agenda, Mori, Notetaker, Notebook, PC Outline, and Ecco Pro, to
name a few. The solution, of course, is to use MS Word for everything.
Gaaaa!

Like MaxThink for MSDOS!

steveylang wrote:

That's why my preference is now apps that use text files, or as close as
possible. '.TXT' will never go out of style!

Jeffery wrote:
My issue is that I fall in love with software that is, to me, extremely
>functional, only to have it discontinued or sold to another entity that
>kills its or ignores it. The list includes ThinkTank, Grandview, Q&A,
>XyWrite, Agenda, Mori, Notetaker, Notebook, PC Outline, and Ecco Pro,
to
>name a few. The solution, of course, is to use MS Word for everything.
>Gaaaa!

steveylang wrote:

That's why my preference is now apps that use text files, or as close as
possible. '.TXT' will never go out of style!

I agree. Structured text formats, especially standard-based ones such as XML and JSON, are a much safer bet than proprietary binary formats.

However text based formats are less effecient for storage of binary information (e.g. sound and images), so may not be suitable for all applications.