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Old 09-08-2012, 05:29 PM   #46
CaptMurdock
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I tried Evernote a couple of years back, but I really didn't like its UI. I found Growly Notes for OS X; it's a great free-form notebook-type application. I spent considerable time porting over my journal of sixteen years...

After I got my iTouch, I looked for a note-taking app. At the moment I've settled on Noteledge, but I'm not entirely happy with it (e.g. the voice memo feature can't be ported over to the OS X platform). I can save text notes as PDF, send them to Dropbox and take it from there into Growly Notes. Not ideal, but workable.

I'm considering a second look at Evernote, but I'm no enthusiastic.
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Old 09-09-2012, 04:56 AM   #47
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Quote:
Originally Posted by FlorenceArt View Post

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).
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.
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Old 09-09-2012, 12:57 PM   #48
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Thank you for this very thorough review! I remember seeing the Circus Ponies app in the store, but there were some negative reviews about the app's stability if I remember correctly, and it was a bit expensive to just buy and have a look for myself. It does look interesting though.

This reminds me that I had planned to post more reviews here but I got lazy. I have been looking for an app to manage my work notes, which I don't like to keep in the same app as my personal notes. Plus the needs are a bit different. At work, I mostly need to be able to take notes quickly during meetings and search them later. Plus I need to keep track of the many things I need to do or follow up on.

After trying many, many apps that focus on meetings, some with very sophisticated functionalities and others more simple, I gave up (for now) and settled for a simple but beautiful app called Action Notes. This app only manages text notes. You can organize them in tabs (only 6 of them). Inside each note, you can mark some paragraphs as tasks and they will show up in a list on the side with a check box that you can tick when it's done. There is also a tool to view all open actions, and a search tool. It's not perfect and needs some improvements in the import/export area IMO, but for the moment it works for me. The main selling points are the beautiful interface, and the simplicity which means I'm always ready to type notes when needed. Many of the other apps I tried failed because there are so many screens and popups to go through, they are simply not usable in a meeting where I need to be able to type very quickly to capture what is being said and not lose anything.

Last edited by FlorenceArt; 09-10-2012 at 07:20 AM.
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Old 09-10-2012, 07:28 AM   #49
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I had a look at Circus Ponies Notebook, read a review here and even downloaded the demo version of the Mac App. I don't think this app is for me. It has a lot of things that I don't need, and I am afraid that the interface will be a hindrance for simple and quick note typing. In fact the review says it is comparable to Pages rather than to other note-taking apps. But for people who are trying to organize and index a lot of documents and material, it looks like an interesting app. Not cheap though, it's a shame they don't have a free evaluation version on the app store.
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Old 09-12-2012, 04:06 PM   #50
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Just received notice that the price of CourseNotes has dropped to 1.59€ (this would be $1.99, probably). I assume this is a temporary sale but the description on the store doesn't say. The app seems to have mostly good reviews, but I'm pretty sure I should NOT buy yet another note taking app. Sigh.
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Old 09-15-2012, 03:41 AM   #51
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Another one, if your tastes run that way, is iThoughts (iPhone)/iThoughtsHD (iPad).

It's a mind mapping note taker - graphic outlines - which is not for everyone. But it's quick to take notes, you can use the keyboard or your fingers to meove things around, include attachments, add tasks etc. No rich text formatting.

Fabulous range of output options, including text outlines. Share via email, Dropbox and so on. I use it a lot.
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Old 09-15-2012, 05:00 AM   #52
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This seems like a good thread for me to add my first post

I use Eaglefiler for taking notes / organising information on my mac, it doesn't store files in a database so apparently doesn't suffer the slowdown you get when using something like Together, (I've not got that much stored in it yet so I can't verify this personally).

For iPhone notes I use Elements and sync the Eaglefiler files folder via Dropbox. As I mostly use plain text with markdown I can edit files I've created in Eaglefiler in Elements.
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Old 09-16-2012, 02:12 PM   #53
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Quote:
Originally Posted by nick101 View Post
Another one, if your tastes run that way, is iThoughts (iPhone)/iThoughtsHD (iPad).

It's a mind mapping note taker - graphic outlines - which is not for everyone. But it's quick to take notes, you can use the keyboard or your fingers to meove things around, include attachments, add tasks etc. No rich text formatting.

Fabulous range of output options, including text outlines. Share via email, Dropbox and so on. I use it a lot.
Thanks for this review. I have read about iThoughts before, it does sound like a great tool.

Quote:
Originally Posted by m00min View Post
This seems like a good thread for me to add my first post

I use Eaglefiler for taking notes / organising information on my mac, it doesn't store files in a database so apparently doesn't suffer the slowdown you get when using something like Together, (I've not got that much stored in it yet so I can't verify this personally).

For iPhone notes I use Elements and sync the Eaglefiler files folder via Dropbox. As I mostly use plain text with markdown I can edit files I've created in Eaglefiler in Elements.
Thanks, and welcome to MR!
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Old 09-19-2012, 08:30 AM   #54
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Thanks for this thread.. really helpful...
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