Colleagues, earlier today, Alfons Schmid, has just released version 12 for iOS and iPadOS, and version 3 for MacOS, of his renowned Notebooks application.

I've just installed both versions and the impression couldn't be more exhilarating: now it's all about enjoying and investigating the new features it contains.

The post is open for any kind of comments...

Of course this has happened because I’ve spent the past week getting out of Craft and going all-in on Logseq. This was after I considered the previous version of a notebooks and rejected it.

Now it has back links and all the stuff all the cool apps have now.

I’m working hard to pretend the app doesn’t exist, and reminding myself that I really like Logseq.

Heh heh heh – that's what I was trying to do with NotePlan for quite a long time, before crawling back on hands and knees.

Now I'm playing with backlinks in Notebooks – they work best in markdown notes; rich-text notes only include them in the "Doc Info" dialog box (which is a bit of a shame). But they're brilliant in markdown!

Otherwise: looks like a nice, interesting upgrade. I haven't explored every aspect yet, but Happy CRIMPing awaits!

I've tried to love LoqSeq, but it's just... well, it's just not me. Doesn't prevent me from occasionally playing with it, however.

Drewster wrote:

Of course this has happened because I’ve spent the past week
getting out of Craft and going all-in on Logseq. This was after I
considered the previous version of a notebooks and rejected it.

Now it has back links and all the stuff all the cool apps have now.

I’m working hard to pretend the app doesn’t exist, and
reminding myself that I really like Logseq.

I've just discovered a really neat feature in Notebooks – at least, I wasn't previously aware of it.

In markdown notes, apart from being able to create standard wikilinks (using double brackets [[ ]]), you can also create wikilinks with a different name using standard markdown syntax, i.e. [different name](link to note).

This is extremely convenient!

MadaboutDana wrote:

Now I'm playing with backlinks in Notebooks – they work best
in markdown notes; rich-text notes only include them in the "Doc Info"
dialog box (which is a bit of a shame).

Does Notebooks support rtf? I thought it supports only markdown and html.

Dellu wrote:

Does Notebooks support rtf? I thought it supports only markdown and
html.

No, it doesn't. Rich text is stored in HTML files.

For anyone who has Keep it, I think Keep It is slightly better in some areas. The major downside of Notebooks for me was the lack of RTF support. The following is the comparison I did a while ago (posted in this forum).


**Keep It: **

Formats: rtf, markdown, plaintext

Reasons why KeepIt is superior to Notebooks (Alfons Schmid’s Notebooks):

1) Native rtf support: format of of Notebooks are html, markdown and plain text
2) The float window: the floating window is very useful for me.
3) metadata: KI allows assigning not just tags, but also Spotlight comments directly wihtin the app.
4) Better organization tools:
- Bundles
- Labels
- Folders—-these are reflected to finder: others are internal to the application
- Saved searches
5) universal tags: tags assigned in KI are finder tags: will be visible to Finder and DT.



**Notebooks:**
Formats: html, markdown and plain text

Areas where Notebooks appears supperior to KeepIt:

1) Contexts: tags:
#noun (or @noun) within a document tags the document with the word "noun".
- even a new character can be assigned for this.
- But, these tags are not finder tags

2) Tasks:
- it has internal task manager: and very useful for writing because can be assigned on any of the notes; and will popup seprately
- tasks can be defined using speical characters; just like tags.

For example, if use + sign, all lines after this sign will be considered as tasks.


- - supports opening in new tabs and windows.
- supports [[linked]] style of linking
- WebDav server to sync with ipad: local network.

It is difficult to decide on the merits of Keep It vs Notebooks, @Dellu – I confess I use both for different reasons.

I'd just point out, however, that Notebooks *does* have folders, although it calls them books, and you can have as many levels of subfolders as you like (they are directly reflected in the Notebooks file system – books = folders). Notebooks can also put its file repository anywhere you like (iCloud, Dropbox, your hard drive etc.), although Keep It's recent integration with Finder has made up ground on this!

I'd also point out that Notebooks can view any number of different file formats, even if it doesn't directly support them. If you create, for example, an RTFD file and save it to your Notebooks folder (which I just did, for interest), it's perfectly readable in Notebooks – along with all its formatting. You can open it in an RTF editor if you wish. The same goes for Word and Numbers files – displayed with full formatting (and, I suspect, Excel or Pages files, but I haven't experimented with those yet). Again, Notebooks will happily open these files in the relevant app, as required. I keep a lot of files in Notebooks even though I can't edit them directly – not least because I can search them using Notebooks's search function (of course Keep It does this very well, too).

Notebooks also has a couple of useful extras: the ability to turn an entire folder ("book") into a PDF or eBook. It also has a backlink maintenance feature (which I haven't used, but looks like a good idea to me!)

Finally, I have to say I find Notebooks a nicer writing environment – but that's a personal thing, and in recent releases of Keep It, the editor is much improved.

@MadaboutDana

Thank you for the good points.

- It is nice that you like it. Yes, Notebooks views a number of file formats. But, I cannot edit them. That is a deal breaker for me. I just like it when I am able to directly edit them--at least the most common ones such as RTF and Doc.

Can somebody confirm that my memory is correct, in that Notebooks doesn’t support the concept of an automatically generated “daily note”?

Does this remain the case with the latest version?

You're right – it doesn't.

Although I use systems that do (NotePlan, Craft), I have to say that I'm not a great fan of auto-generated daily notes, especially when the app "assumes" you want to start there.

It is, after all, easy enough to create them. But Notebooks doesn't have a calendar view at all, as it happens, which could – depending on your needs – be seen as a weakness, especially if you use it for task management.

However, it's worth pointing out that hugely popular task management apps like Things 3.0 don't have a calendar view either!

Drewster wrote:

Can somebody confirm that my memory is correct, in that Notebooks
doesn’t support the concept of an automatically generated
“daily note”?

Does this remain the case with the latest version?

I admire the fact that this is a free upgrade for users of version 2 (Mac app). Old school!

I like the app quite a bit, and its very fast to read files and edit them. Version 3 is better looking, and I've changed it to Dark Mode with custom fonts for lists.

But small quirky things annoy me. For example, if I drag a file into the app it moves the file into the Notebooks app folder, but if I drag it out of the app it merely creates an alias to the file which remains in Notebooks.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

I admire the fact that this is a free upgrade for users of version 2
(Mac app). Old school!

I agree. And I'd love to get an upgraded Notebooks for Windows - even if it's a paid upgrade.
When I asked Alfons when an upgrade for Windows will be available, he said he was still considering it. But: thinking, not doing :-(

Brief review/update posted yesterday:

http://bicycleforyourmind.com/notebooks_3

I'm newly impressed with what Notebooks has become. I have been searching for an app that is a less bloated version of Scrivener to use when I am writing an academic paper or book (long-form writing). I played around with Notebooks again when the developer Alfons Schmid made some big changes.

At the time the app was first released, I failed to understand all the features, due in part to some of the pull-down menus being weirdly named. This lead me to think that some features I was after were not there. So, I abandoned the app.

For instance, I found I needed to make the text was inputting larger in appearance. I saw that I could make the fonts bigger in the Format menu. But I didn't want to make the FONTS larger, just the text appear larger on the screen without changing the actual font size. I only today realized that this is actually what this menu is referring to.

This time around I persisted and I am totally in awe of the app for long-form writing. The Mac version is clean visually and very fast. (I only use macOS and iOS so I don't know what the Windows version is like). The lack of bloat does not mean a lack of powerful features. I thought I would be stuck with a bloated Scrivener, or Novellus without an iOS version. Notebooks is looking to become a solid partner.

By the way, I remember filling out a survey for the developer of Scrivener a couple of years ago with the hint that a less bloated version would be developed. I have not been able to find any further information about this. Mmm ...