Do you ever have trouble retrieving information on your Mac when you need it? Most of us get tons of e‑mail and surf dozens (or hundreds) of web sites every week. We also play—and work—in social-media sites where our friends and colleagues bombard us with quotations, links, images, audio and video files, and more. Lots of this information is interesting, and plenty of it is useful—if you can ever find it again later.
There are a lot of software products available to help you organize information, but Circus Ponies™ Software’s NoteBook is one of the most powerful tools we’ve encountered. It uses the visual metaphor of a notebook, complete with ruled pages, tabbed dividers, and a wire spiral, among many other options, to collect and manage notes and materials for a task, a class, a trip, or any other kind of project you need to organize. Its feature-rich interface can be customized with outlines, drawings, sticky notes, flags, to-do lists, and custom toolbars. Note pages can include text, photos, audio and video clips, URLs, or just about any other kind of content you’re likely to run into.
But the real power of NoteBook is in the way it makes use of the Mac OS’s indexing and Services features. Every NoteBook file contains a Multidex™, an interactive index of all the text, links, keywords, highlighted words, capitalized words, numbers, etc., in the file. The Multidex is created automatically, updated on the fly whenever you add content to the file, and is Spotlight-searchable.
Another powerful feature is NoteBook’s use of Mac Services: set up a clipping service inside your NoteBook file, and then you can “clip” data from any other Services-aware application on your Mac directly into the NoteBook file with one menu click, even when the NoteBook app isn’t open. With this feature, you can set up a NoteBook file for each of your ongoing projects, then collect relevant e-mails, web pages, text, graphics, or other information whenever and wherever you find it.
NoteBook has too many cool features to cover in a brief review, but Circus Ponies’ web site has a terrific set of short video overviews to introduce you to the product. NoteBook sells for $49.95 and is also available in a discounted family pack and an academic license.
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