Forum Posts Feed
MacBook experience...
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Apr 30, 2008 at 12:44 AM
Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>Have you had the chance
>to compare Aquamind’s NoteTaker to CircusPonies Notebook? They started out as one
>project, and the two developers split. Since then they seem to have diverged further.
>NoteTaker is said to emphasize information management more than Notebook, which
>tries to be more of an outliner too. This is all hearsay, but at least one poster raved
>about CircusPonies Notebook.
>
>Tao is supposed to be the most powerful pure outliner
>on the Mac; Omni the most popular and versatile; Opal might be the most facile, judging
>by its predecessor, Acta. I would be interested in your comparisons with MaxThink,
>NoteMap, and BrainStorm.
>
>I recall one of your main concerns was finding an optimal
>writing environment. How does Scrivener compare to what’s available on Windows?
I didn’t spend much time reviewing Notebook, because NoteTaker seemed to have more active development. NoteTaker is all about lists and outlines, too. Like OneNote, each list element can have its own attributes. NoteTaker is definitely not nearly as powerful as OneNote. In fact, I’ve been a little disappointed with it. One feature it has (and it may share this with Notebook—I’m not sure) is that it automatically builds indices of the words in your notebooks for quick reference.
I had read that OmniOutliner handles inline text better than Tao, so I didn’t spend much time looking at the latter, and I’m still reviewing OO. The inline text and fully customizable columns give it a leg up on Brainstorm, NoteMap and MaxThink. Though the things you can do with Brainstorm, you can’t do nearly as readily in OO. Also, MaxThink is more powerful in its “thinking” functions—its ability to quickly view your entries in various ways and reorganize them. Now, I use the word “quickly” advisedly, since I feel MaxThink’s interface is antiquated and nonintuitive, so that I never did get “quick” at it.
OmniOutliner is the closest thing I’ve seen to GrandView—although it lacks some of GVs features, notably its calendar function. It also isn’t as keyboard friendly—at least I haven’t found it to be so as yet.
But I’m still trying it out.
Steve
Posted by jamesofford
Apr 30, 2008 at 02:47 AM
Still using my MacBook and loving it.
I didn’t try all of the different software that has been discussed. I have tried Yojimbo, Devonthink Pro, and Eaglefiler. I bought licenses for Devonthink and Eaglefiler, but most of the time I spend in an info organizer I spend in Devonthink. The user interface is a bit clunky, but I like the easy way I can get info in and out of it. One thing that Devonthink doesn’t allow you to do is have more than one database open at a time. I keep a single database called Incoming open, and everything gets put in there. I then have different groups within that database to which I split things up later. If I had my druthers, I would have the incoming database and then other databases depending on subject. I am hoping that the next major revision of the program will allow this.
On trackpads and mice-I don’t like trackpads much at all. Very soon after I bought my MacBook I bought a bluetooth Mighty Mouse from Apple. It is very nice. It is small, and I can toss it in my bag with my computer. And I particularly like the fact that you can program it easily. I have the scroll knob(it is really too small to call a wheel)programmed to bring up Expose, and it also has a left and right mouse button. Very nice, and as Jerry Pournelle would say “Highly recommended. ”
Posted by David Dunham
Apr 30, 2008 at 04:01 AM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>I had read that OmniOutliner handles inline text better than Tao, so I
>didn’t spend much time looking at the latter, and I’m still reviewing OO. The inline
>text and fully customizable columns give it a leg up on Brainstorm, NoteMap and
>MaxThink.
What do you mean by “inline text?” I’ll bet almost all the Mac products are using the same text engine (NSTextView). Sure, they can customize it slightly (OO and Opal do slightly different things when you drag in an image or movie file), but I wouldn’t expect huge differences.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Apr 30, 2008 at 11:19 AM
David Dunham wrote:
>What do you mean by “inline text?” I’ll bet almost all the
>Mac products are using the same text engine (NSTextView). Sure, they can customize it
>slightly (OO and Opal do slightly different things when you drag in an image or movie
>file), but I wouldn’t expect huge differences.
By ‘inline text” I mean that text which is associated with an item heading, but not the heading itself—when that text can also appear in the outline. Okay, that was confusing. Let me try again. In Windows, most of the outliners we discuss are two-pane outliners. You create a heading in the tree pane and the content of the heading in the editor pane. When the content text can appear in the tree pane, we call it inline text. That’s not to confuse sub headings as inline text. Sub heads are separate ideas. The best outliner of all-time, in my opinion, was GrandView and it handled inline text beautifully.
I probably haven’t explained this very well, but you can see a screen shot showing inline text (OmniOutliner refers to it as “inline notes”) at http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner/
Steve Z.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
May 5, 2008 at 05:42 PM
Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>Have you had the chance
>to compare Aquamind’s NoteTaker to CircusPonies Notebook? They started out as one
>project, and the two developers split. Since then they seem to have diverged further.
>NoteTaker is said to emphasize information management more than Notebook, which
>tries to be more of an outliner too. This is all hearsay, but at least one poster raved
>about CircusPonies Notebook.
Stephen,
Notebook looks set for a major upgrade (see this page: http://www.circusponies.com/notebook30.html). These additional functions will put it way ahead of NoteTaker, in my opinion, and approaching OneNote in power.
By the way, I have ended up buying DevonThink afterall. Its features really blow away the competition. One thing it appears to lack—unless I’ve missed it (entirely possible)—is cross-database searching. If indeed missing, this is a major drawback and one that puts it behind several Windows information managers (UR, MyInfo to name two).
I really like my MacBook, and the operating system is so much nicer to use than Windows. But I don’t think the software applications are as sophisticated as much of what I use on Windows. There are exceptions, of course. DevonThink’s AI functions are powerful and not to be found in Windows. Scrivener’s GUI and overall functionality is unique to Macs. And most of the Mac software seem to use OS X’s nice editor—so almost all of the applications have the same editing fuctions, including a full array of extended selection features. This is very helpful… I find it very distracting to have to remember if triple-clicking in an application will or will not select the whole paragraph, for instance.
Steve Z.