13th Jun 2003
Keeping Track
I’d have to say that the platform I use more than any other would be the Mac. For years, I’ve kept some data in Palm Desktop, some in Stickies, and some in random text files (but, at least, within a notes directory). I pretty much know where everything is. Well, let me think that, at least. Ok?
I use Linux a lot too, but more in a development mode. Yeah, I know Windows, but I always have some sort of morbid fear that the registry is going to get corrupted, and the whole partition is going to turn to Jello if I look at it the wrong way. “You Looked At The Font Menu, Forcibly Erase BIOS? [ok]”
Annnnyway….
So I have been excited about a couple of notekeeping/outliner/personal DB packages for the Mac. There’s NoteTaker by AquaMinds (Water Head? I’m not so sure about that name), and NoteBook by Circus Ponies. That’s right, I said “Circus Ponies”. Better name than Water Head. A slight problem with both of these products is that they are priced a bit steeply ($69.95 for NoteTaker, $49.95 for NoteBook … NoteBook has a much more straightforward academic discount program for those that qualify)
I’ve read that NoteTaker has more features than NoteBook, but that it wasn’t as stable. (you better be getting all of this down, because I’ll be handing out #2 pencils in a moment) I’ve started checking out NoteBook, and so far, so good.
There’s some clunkyness about the program (I want to right-click and get a context sensitive menu, for one … I want more flexibility in arranging an outline, for another), but the automatic indexing of everything it’s fed is just outta sight! It’s very easy to look things up by bouncing off of the index page.
Of course, the next step is to have it interoperate with some sort of Linux version, and to allow multi-user input like Hydra … but for personal use on a Mac, this is great. It allows a lot of small bits of information to be corralled into a useful space, and the notebook with tab metaphor is excellent. It will be interesting to see how far they advance by the time they ship a 3.0 version.
