Quote:
Originally Posted by FlorenceArt
NOTEBOOKS
(Not to be confused with Notebook, which I haven't tried - will post the links tonight from home because the firewall at work won't let me access them).
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I'll throw in some comments about Notebook (Circus Ponies Notebook,
www.circusponies.com).
Its similar in many respects to Notebooks, but with a much more graphic UI - looks like a physical (paper) notebook, with page turns etc. You can have multiple (separate) books, each with multiple sections. Sections are split with Divider pages, like a paper book, and you can have sections within sections. There are multiple paper and page styles.
There's a good outliner, with good control over text styles and drag-drop movement. You can embed other content (e.f. pdf, jpeg, doc etc), and open it from Notebook. You can create actions in outlines.
Some excellent additional features: voice notes, with the ability to annotate the voice notes with text notes; handwriting (no text recognition); shapes for diagramming (not up to the standards of OmniGraffle, but very useful).
The killer feature is the Multidex - everything in a notebook is indexed and you get a pre-populated index by category (e.g. text, actions by date - due, created etc -, attachments, discarded attachments, much more). It's a fabulous feature if you build big notebooks, like I do.
There's a Mac equivalent, and you can sync via Dropbox or iTunes; no Windows equivalent.
Current weaknesses: no export to PDF or mail. This is coming, but it's an obstacle. You can select and copy/paste into another editor or an email, but thats not great for communicating/sharing. No iPhone equivalent.
The UI is very graphic, and the feature set is very large; this makes it slow on the iPad 1. It's fine on the 2 and 3.
The general functional model is very similar to Notebooks; the outliner is better and I prefer the UI - it just makes more sense to me. But Notebooks is lighter on processor and memory (especially for the iPad 1) and has one major plus for users of Omnifocus - you can send content to OF as a taks.
I've used both extensively, and I prefer the Circus Ponies implementation. It's not perfect (the export thing is major), but it suits me. My notes tend to revolve around large projects - meeting notes, copies of documents, action lists - and I find CPN fits well. I use the Mac version at home, which helps too.