Aaaaand… I’ve succumbed to temptation. Not least because NoteTaker is the closest thing on macOS to RightNote, one of my very favourite Windows notetakers.

Well, I’m not sorry. There are still bugs (notably: the versioning function crashes the app and paralyses Finder, and also causes embedded web pages to behave oddly), but the concept is impressively ambitious. And contrary to earlier criticism, NoteTaker supports an astonishingly comprehensive list of macOS Services. No, it doesn’t have a “Share” button, but it does have a “Share” item in the context menu that pops up if you right-click on an entry or page (it also has a “Share” menu item, which allows you to copy page or entry URLs). And it generates entire websites from notebooks.

It has a good search function, supplemented by a unique indexing function (I’m not aware of any other information manager that has this feature). What’s more, the index doesn’t just support text, it also supports tags, files, dates and priorities (you can assign priorities to pages and entries).

In fact, the number of functions tucked away in NoteTaker is almost ridiculous, bearing comparison with MacJournal, but with much better outlining (folding in pages - yippee!!). And you can customise it extensively if you so wish. You can change fonts, show multiple columns, choose background images, etc. etc…. no, I’m not going to list all the options.

I’m genuinely impressed. Now to see how well it handles large quantities of information!

Cheers,
Bill

Tell yer wot, the import/export options are extensive. You have to read the User Guide to check out the full list, but it includes e.g. OPML, PDFs etc.

The one surprising thing missing from export is PDF. On the other hand, you can print to PDF, so I suppose that’s covered.

I'm not sure why it is perceived as being light on features. I think that reading through the user manual, as you have, should give a nice overview of what it can do. It has way more features than I need, and the program is relatively compact.

https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/e36b85_c97f3214243040779cc5de754dba7ce7.pdf

I agree - there’s loads of stuff in there; not always located in entirely logical places, but once you start sniffing around, internally quite consistent.

The one thing I’m slightly sad about is that while NoteTaker can happily absorb files of more or less any description (either as links or copies embedded in pages), it doesn’t index them. So while you can embed a PDF file, for example, and read it in NoteTaker, you can’t carry out searches on its content. You can import PDF content as text only.

However, I’m very much enjoying the process of discovering NoteTaker’s power. And its outlining features are superb, including the ability to shift entries around in the hierarchy (using the mouse, keyboard shortcuts, etc., both in the table of contents and on the page).

Jeffery Smith wrote:

I'm not sure why it is perceived as being light on features. I think
that reading through the user manual, as you have, should give a nice
overview of what it can do. It has way more features than I need, and
the program is relatively compact.

https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/e36b85_c97f3214243040779cc5de754dba7ce7.pdf

Having glanced through the documentation, it’s a pretty impressive app.

What would you recommend it for and where does it fit in to your workflow?

I have a lot of checklists in my workflow. An outliner list of faculty applying for promotion (heading of Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Professor. The children of those headings are the faculty names added as I receive applications. The list can be sorted by last name (sorts on the last word) And I put a checkmark to the left of their name if their application was approved. Later in the process, I copy that entire outline to a new outline for which faculty followed up by the deadline date with a packet. That outline is copied to a third with which faculty made it through the first committee, and so on.
I create flow charts in Omnigraffle for each curriculum in Nursing and Allied Health (about 30 flow charts). I check off which ones are completed, then a second copy allows me to check off which charts were approved by the 30 program directors, and so on.
The name of my Notetaker file is "Checklist Manifesto.ntx".
My biggest project to date was the implementation of web-based part-time teaching contracts. Learning the product, with its arcane screen names and arcane codes that go into arcane fields was only manageable by making numerous lists and searching them globally in NT. I have a few dozen web URLs that are clickable. The file is indexed (you create an index section), and that index has grouping for each word (listed by first letter), dates, tags, files, and priorities)
I'll never use all of the features. The only feature I would like them to consider is being able to define my outlining labels. I came up with a system of labels in GrandView. Omnioutliner can do that, but formatting in Omnioutline is a nightmare.

Jeffery Smith wrote:

Omnioutliner can do that, but
formatting in Omnioutline is a nightmare.

Agreed. But what, if anything are you doing outside the Mac? A Mac-only silo doesn't sit right in 2019 for most users. At least OO is cross-platform (even if it seems to be in maintenance mode now, purposefully slotted in an an unaffordable price for new users).

The only time I use windows is when making a Windows app via Filemaker Pro. I made the switch to Mac at the college when they put so many restrictions on the end-users that using Windows became a chore. Virtually every day, I would get a message that XXXX needed updating, but when I would try to update the app, I would get an error message that I don't have the permissions to do so. I was actually using both, side by side, for a while, but when my favorite windows outliner was killed off (that one for lawyers....can't remember the name), I just put the PC under the desk.

I see. Unfortunately, I find more and more that I want to access and edit my files with my iPhone or iPad, which is why I made the comparison to OmniOutliner. At this point most of my writing files apps are iOS/macOS cross-platform (Apple Notes, Ulysses, Scrivener, Notebooks), and that's the way most apps are going. In fact, with the announced Catalyst framework being put into place in the upcoming macOS Catalina, we're going to see lots of iPad apps being ported to the Mac beginning next year. (In fact this summer, Gameloft, Twitter and Atlassian already ported proof-of-concept apps to macOS.)

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/07/catalyst-deep-dive-the-future-of-mac-software-according-to-apple-and-devs/

This seems to be a short-to-medium-term method for porting to macOS (building new apps from the ground up with SwiftUI is the next-gen paradigm being promoted for new apps to be run on any Apple hardware), but it means that the much larger base of developers for iOS will be able to migrate apps with *relative* ease to macOS sooner than later, giving cross-platform apps even more of a boost.

I like the idea behind NoteTaker, and I liked it going back decades, but I don't know if I want to put my info inside a silo that cannot be gotten to on my iOS devices in any way.