Yet another new discovery

Posted by MadaboutDana
Jun 1, 2015 at 10:09 PM

... and this one’s a goodie. It’s a Mac app (Mac only, I’m afraid, not even iOS) by a Japanese developer, called HueNote.

It’s a text editor. But what makes it unusual is its extraordinary breadth of filtering functions. Notes can be kept in one or more libraries per file. Each note is shown as a preview, as large or as small as you like. Then there are a couple of reference lists you can pin on either side of the note editing area. The reference lists show ‘most recent notes’ or ‘starred notes’ by default, but can also show custom user lists of notes.

But there’s more. Notes can be assigned (a) colours, (b) tags, (c) icons and (d) comments (in info boxes). These can all be used as filters in the main (library) view, but there are also a couple of search functions: one a basic function that simply pulls up notes corresponding to (any) key term, without any highlighting or anything. The second is much more powerful, and pulls up a list of notes complete with a sublist of each hit term, in context - i.e. with surrounding text - plus the actual hit term highlighted (exactly like Adobe Acrobat).

Then there’s the editor pane. It can show individual notes, but it can also show notes side by side in columns (as many as you like), or above/below one another, or both. You can give notes individual fonts, although they are otherwise text only (i.e. no rich-text formatting).

Each note file can contain multiple libraries - I’m not sure what the limit is, but you can have quite a few! And each library can contain lots of notes. Files are stored in iCloud by default, so I’m hoping the developer is thinking in terms of an iOS app at some point in the future.

If there’s a weakness, it’s in the lack of import/export options. But the app’s still a version 1.0 release, so hopefully those will evolve.

It’s an extraordinary app. Very cheap, but amazingly powerful, and very good-looking in an ultra-minimalist sort of way. It’s the kind of thing you could use for just about anything at all. If it had Markdown support plus some import/export functionality, it would be totally unbeatable. The main app website is Japanese only, I’m afraid, but it does have instant Google translation for those non-Japanese speakers who want to explore. It’s at http://miraclehue.jp