The public beta for Notebooks for Mac 2 is available now

https://www.notebooksapp.com/NBMac2-public-beta/

Far behind modern markdown editors, still.

washere wrote:

Far behind modern markdown editors, still.

Yes. And it's much more than a markdown editor. Vs2 even imports Evernote ENEX files now.

Thanks for the heads up. Notebooks 2 for Mac looks like it has a lot of shiny new features. I'm eager to give it a try.

Steve Z.

washere wrote:

Far behind modern markdown editors, still.

Were you around back in the WordStar days, you too would have likely welcomed the WYSIWYG revolution, where you actually saw on the screen what was to be printed on the page.

Markdown is like a return to the bad old days and, to me, it is anything BUT "modern". It is ... mystifying.

Listerene wrote:

washere wrote:
Far behind modern markdown editors, still.

Were you around back in the WordStar days, you too would have likely
welcomed the WYSIWYG revolution, where you actually saw on the screen
what was to be printed on the page.

Markdown is like a return to the bad old days and, to me, it is anything
BUT "modern". It is ... mystifying.

I said modem editors for the format, not the format itself.

Second, some say less digital if done right (I repeat if done right) is more, are they right or you? I don't take sides. I'll sit on the fence and watch, munching popcorns.

Third, what matters is fast convenient output on multi platforms for many professionals short of time these days. Hence the MD success.

Fourth, many good old days gurus you like, have moved onto statics, which is mainly based on markdown. Advising any giant or small tech or content firm, no consultant is foolish enough to say avoid markdown. The migration is that way.

Fifth, take away markdown from this app as you wish, however archaic it's markdown features are compared to the best, what are you left with? I guess you can advise him to drop any future markdown features. Maybe as a file manager and mini word processor it would be better off as you suggest. Who knows, you might be right in this app's case.

washere wrote:

Far behind modern markdown editors, still.

... but it is not a markdown editor? it is a day planner that is aware of markdown syntax.

soypunk wrote:

washere wrote:
> Far behind modern markdown editors, still.

... but it is not a markdown editor? it is a day planner that is aware
of markdown syntax.

I guess I should say that it is not a day planner (briefly confused this with NotePlan -- which also a new Mac beta version 2 in the works) but a reference manager that is markdown aware. Notebooks has a lot of features for managing files, task related to those files, dealing with PDFs, etc - none of which need markdown.

That's a better description. Notebooks includes Markdown, along with many other super-flexible features, precisely because it aims to be as adaptable to users' needs as possible.

Personally, I like the Markdown feature and use it by preference. But I also like the fact that Notebooks uses HTML in its rich-text ("Formatted") documents - and that's more appropriate for some of my needs. Finally, I love the fact that Notebooks keeps all notes as separate files, so there's no tie-in. Ironically, that makes me much more willing to make a long-term commitment to Notebooks. It's not unlike the success authors such as Cory Doctorow have enjoyed by making DRM-free versions of their books/novels available for free download. By showing trust in "users" (in their case, readers), you actually build up profound and trusting relationships.

And Alfons is one of the nicest, most responsive developers it has been my privilege to correspond with. I'm currently using the Notebooks 2 beta, and he welcomes and appreciates any and all feedback.

Cheers!
Bill

... along with Pierre, of course ;-)

MadaboutDana wrote:

And Alfons is one of the nicest, most responsive developers it has been
my privilege to correspond with. I'm currently using the Notebooks 2
beta, and he welcomes and appreciates any and all feedback.

... and Andy, and plenty of other impressive individuals who regularly contribute to our beloved forum!

MadaboutDana wrote:

... along with Pierre, of course ;-)

MadaboutDana wrote:
>And Alfons is one of the nicest, most responsive developers it has been
>my privilege to correspond with. I'm currently using the Notebooks 2
>beta, and he welcomes and appreciates any and all feedback.

Dang, it's an exciting two-horse race between Notebooks 2 and the latest version of MacJournal (beta 2 of 7.0, released this month). They're both very attractive, very powerful, and quite similar.

And hopefully, both going to be available on a pay-once basis, i.e. no nasty subscriptions!

As someone mentioned elsewhere, MacJournal 7.0b2 is available from Dan Schimpf's blog at http://danschimpf.blogspot.com

Cheers!
Bill

Can anyone speak to the UIs of either app? When I tried out MacJournal a year or two ago I was struck by its dowdy, MacWrite--like user interface, which turned me off. (And that's saying something from someone who still uses EagleFiler!)

I have the current Notebooks app on Mac/iOS and I'm not thrilled with the interfaces there either, so I was hoping for a fresh coat of pixels there too.

Yes, I know what you mean - both gave the impression of being slightly old-fashioned, especially as other neat apps came out.

Well, the Notebooks 2 beta certainly looks more Mac-like - and above all, behaves more Mac-like, being much more responsive and providing more customisation options.

And while the latest MacJournal 7 beta is quite similar to the previous version, it's been cleaned up and slimmed down. It's always been a much more complex app than Notebooks, of course, so there's an awful lot of "stuff" (much of it unique to MacJournal). But you can customise it to remove the vast number of menubar buttons, for example, and again, it feels more responsive and cleaner to me, at least. The most overwhelming part of MacJournal is the range of things you can do with it, from customising the info bar at the top of each record to viewing entries in a timeline, calendar or map, creating blog entries to building smart journals, using markdown to setting passwords, creating tags, due dates, and so on and so forth.

But then, Notebooks also has unexpected extras, like the to-do functionality. In the end, both apps are excellent repositories for all kinds of data, and are not actually difficult to use. If i compare them with, for example, the excellent but somewhat erratic Scrivener, which can keep surprising you even after you've spent a lot of time exploring its many facets, they are both significantly easier to use. Both of them now allow you to edit records in separate windows. MacJournal has an outstanding search function that highlights text in more or less any kind of record, including PDFs. No doubt the same functionality will be coming to Notebooks (PDF search doesn't work very well at the moment; it finds the records, but doesn't allow you to search inside them). I intend to patronise both, not least in the hope that MacJournal for iOS will also be updated in the near future (Notebooks for iOS is already very sophisticated).

In summary, then, I'd say that they've both been streamlined, and while they're still relatively "traditional" in appearance, are more pleasant to use than before.

It's all very exciting!

Cheers,
Bill

Thanks Bill. I might take a look at MJ as a Day One replacement after it comes out. I've got nothing against subscriptions but I don't take advantage of most of Day One's features besides Mac/iOS sync (with encryption), multiple journals, and the occasional image insertion.

It still drives me a little nuts that Day One searches will lead you to journal entries but you still can't find *within* individual entries and have to manually scan for what you're looking for.

Yes, this is a big failing in a wide variety of otherwise perfectly competent apps. It's one of the very strong points of both MacJournal and Notebooks – both of them immediately highlight hits in individual entries as part of a cross-document search (MacJ even does that in PDFs, and it's on Alfons's roadmap). There are other apps that do this, of course (Keep It springs to mind), but for journalling purposes, you can't really go wrong with MacJ. The timeline feature is an unexpected bonus.

satis wrote:

It still drives me a little nuts that Day One searches will lead you to
journal entries but you still can't find *within* individual entries and
have to manually scan for what you're looking for.

Since MacJournal came up in this thread I will mention that I recently posted about why I have gone back to MJ as my primary digital notebook:

https://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2019/02/18/macjournal-still-the-best-notebook-for-macos/

Steve Z.

MJ is now at b3.

So far, Notebooks 2 looks like a dressed up version of more-of-the-same -- not very exciting. MJ is also pretty much unchanged -- except the good news that Schimpf is now interested in it again. It's a much better journal than Notebooks can be.

MadaboutDana wrote:

Dang, it's an exciting two-horse race between Notebooks 2 and the latest
version of MacJournal (beta 2 of 7.0, released this month). They're both
very attractive, very powerful, and quite similar.

And hopefully, both going to be available on a pay-once basis, i.e. no
nasty subscriptions!

As someone mentioned elsewhere, MacJournal 7.0b2 is available from Dan
Schimpf's blog at http://danschimpf.blogspot.com

Cheers!
Bill

I'm getting curious about MJ. The beta is rather buggy, but hey, it's a beta. Someone (perhaps in this thread, I can't recall) pointed out something I'd never noticed: when you search in Day One, it does NOT highlight results! That's crazy! Why would I even bother?

I'm thinking about using MJ for my digital journaling needs, especially since it seems a LOT more flexible at its core.

Paul Korm wrote:

MJ is now at b3.

So far, Notebooks 2 looks like a dressed up version of more-of-the-same
-- not very exciting. MJ is also pretty much unchanged -- except the
good news that Schimpf is now interested in it again. It's a much
better journal than Notebooks can be.

JakeBernsteinWA wrote:

I'm getting curious about MJ. The beta is rather buggy, but hey, it's a
beta. Someone (perhaps in this thread, I can't recall) pointed out
something I'd never noticed: when you search in Day One, it does NOT
highlight results! That's crazy! Why would I even bother?

That was me. Yes, it's VERY annoying, especially since I often go back and search calorie counts for my food journal.

Why bother though? Because Day One can do so much else - everything from pulling in social media posts, to taking note of location data and weather for journal entries, to smoothly incorporating photos, audio and video. It has Safari and Chrome browser extensions. And templates. And it now does dictation as well as transcriptions.

So I've been holding on, with the understanding that the app is being regularly updated, and hopefully they'll get their search up to snuff (the same way they overhauled their editor last year so you no longer had to click an EDIT button after selecting an entry).

DayOne also has a ton of other special features that MJ won't ever have related to being a web service and having an API.

I also like Day One's ability to pop up prompts at various times of the day.

Ah well, back to pondering. A CRIMPer's task is never done!

satis wrote:

JakeBernsteinWA wrote:
> I'm getting curious about MJ. The beta is rather buggy, but hey, it's
a
>beta. Someone (perhaps in this thread, I can't recall) pointed out
>something I'd never noticed: when you search in Day One, it does NOT
>highlight results! That's crazy! Why would I even bother?

That was me. Yes, it's VERY annoying, especially since I often go back
and search calorie counts for my food journal.

Why bother though? Because Day One can do so much else - everything from
pulling in social media posts, to taking note of location data and
weather for journal entries, to smoothly incorporating photos, audio and
video. It has Safari and Chrome browser extensions. And templates. And
it now does dictation as well as transcriptions.

So I've been holding on, with the understanding that the app is being
regularly updated, and hopefully they'll get their search up to snuff
(the same way they overhauled their editor last year so you no longer
had to click an EDIT button after selecting an entry).

Thanks for this excellent (and compelling) review, Steve. I gave MJ and look and don't see how to edit notes in an external editor. Can you point us to that feature? — Beck

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Since MacJournal came up in this thread I will mention that I recently
posted about why I have gone back to MJ as my primary digital notebook:

https://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2019/02/18/macjournal-still-the-best-notebook-for-macos/

Steve Z.

Hi, Beck,

With the entry you want to edit selected, drop down the ENTRY menu. You'll see an option for "Edit in Other Application." When you select that, a list of possible editors on your computer appears and you can pick the one you want to use. I have only tried this with ByWord as the external editor, and it worked fine.

Steve

Beck wrote:

Thanks for this excellent (and compelling) review, Steve. I gave MJ and
look and don't see how to edit notes in an external editor. Can you
point us to that feature? — Beck

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
Since MacJournal came up in this thread I will mention that I recently
>posted about why I have gone back to MJ as my primary digital notebook:
>
>https://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2019/02/18/macjournal-still-the-best-notebook-for-macos/
>
>Steve Z.

satis wrote:

JakeBernsteinWA wrote:
>Someone (perhaps in this thread, I can't recall) pointed out
>something I'd never noticed: when you search in Day One, it does NOT
>highlight results! That's crazy! Why would I even bother?

That was me. Yes, it's VERY annoying, especially since I often go back
and search calorie counts for my food journal.

[SNIP]

So I've been holding on, with the understanding that the app is being
regularly updated, and hopefully they'll get their search up to snuff
(the same way they overhauled their editor last year so you no longer
had to click an EDIT button after selecting an entry).

Aaaaaand.... the latest version of Day One, just out, lets you search inside notes themselves.

Finally!

Except it doesn't highlight results until you do a 2nd search inside the note. So if I'm searching my food journal for piccata I'll get a list of notes containing it, but then I need to manually a 2nd search inside each note for the term.

So, finally implemented, but primitively. I'll give it a C+ for now, and see if the implementation improves over time (as it seems to with this dev).

Just noticed the same thing!

In fact, the new UI is also quite nice on macOS too. I'm impressed by MJ, but the beta has so many bugs it's hard to trust it. Day One has a VASTLY superior iOS experience and that is absolutely critical for a journaling app. For now, I'm keeping my Day One sub and will see how MJ evolves.

satis wrote:

satis wrote:

>
Aaaaaand.... the latest version of Day One, just out, lets you search
inside notes themselves.

Finally!

Except it doesn't highlight results until you do a 2nd search inside the
note. So if I'm searching my food journal for piccata I'll get a list of
notes containing it, but then I need to manually a 2nd search inside
each note for the term.

So, finally implemented, but primitively. I'll give it a C+ for now, and
see if the implementation improves over time (as it seems to with this
dev).