Question at large: About Notecase Pro

Posted by Marbux
May 12, 2013 at 05:24 PM

>Here’s the question: Does NoteCase Pro have any unusual features that
>makes it worth keeping?

That depends on your needs. NC Pro is unusually versatile and extensible.

Full disclosure: I assist in writing the NC Pro Help file as a volunteer.

1. List mode is the major feature setting it apart from other outliners. With list mode, you are not confined to the hierarchical organization of a document but can via scripts or search produce a flat list view of nodes (in memory only) that are responsive to some criteria. Combined with a wide variety of node metadata types from tags to custom metadata, this gives NC Pro much of the power of a relational database manager. For a quick preview, if you have it installed, open the Help file, make sure that the Tags Pane is activated, and double-click on a tag. All nodes that share that tag will be listed. Similar tricks can be executed with the unusually powerful search features if the “fill result to list” option is checked.

2. Node clones. As anyone who works with an outliner knows, the universe of topics does not always divide cleanly into hierarchical relationships. One node may need to be located under multiple parent nodes. NC Pro solves this riddle with node clones. Editing either the original or any of its clones propagates the same changes to all through the magic of transclusion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion

3. Exensibility. NC Pro embeds the popular and easy to learn Lua scripting engine. Currently, the app has over 300 APIs exported to Lua for extending the program. I’ve personally developed over 400 scripts for NC Pro. NC Pro can process Lua scripts that are:

—Stand-alone UTF-8 plain text script files, which are loaded and executed by NoteCase Pro;

—Embedded scripts, i.e. scripts embedded in NoteCase Pro documents, enabling multiple scripts to be stored in the same document and also enabling highly modular scripts; or

—Part of plugins, which are basically embedded script documents following some special format rules. NoteCase Pro provides a networked plugin distribution system, through which plugins can be downloaded and installed, updated, or removed. The networked distribution system enables any plugin author to have their plugins distributed.

Scripts can be launched by menu items, by activation of toolbar icons, by keyboard shortcuts, by keyboard entry of abbreviations, automatically upon occurrence of program events, by other scripts, or via the NoteCase Pro command line.

While there is no requirement that script-writers do so, it is the custom of the NC Pro script writers’ community to place all scripts in the public domain pursuant to the CC0 universal waiver of copyrights and neighboring rights. http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/