Yet another new discovery

Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 22, 2020 at 12:27 PM

In view of all the enthusiasm about Zettelkasten, I’ve been re-exploring some of the most interesting note-takers I’ve found over the last few years.

And I’ve rediscovered an app (macOS only, I’m afraid) I’d totally forgotten about. Although it hasn’t been updated for several years, it runs absolutely fine under the latest macOS 11.0 Big Sur release.

As a way of managing and reviewing multiple notes, it has some really unusual but useful features. I explained them briefly in my first post on the app, and made one mistake: notes do, in fact, support basic rich-text formatting, which is convenient (bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, colours etc., although not – as far as I can tell – bullet points, horizontal lines etc.).

The main unusual features: you can keep a LOT of notes in a single file (so ideal for Zettelkasten), and view them in a workspace that can consist of multiple columns with multiple notes in each column. The full list of notes appears in a Library bar on the left; by clicking on a note, you can position it in the workspace layout on the right. You can have the same note open multiple times – in the same workspace or in different workspaces. This means you can have multiple views of the same long, scrolling note, for example.

But you can also have multiple workspaces, each with a different view of your collection of notes – very useful if you’re researching something specific but want to keep certain items of information in a given relationship to each other. There’s much more to enjoy (including multiple options for tagging/marking notes, making lists of favourites that can be loaded in separate navigation bars, etc.).

I’d urge Mac users to take a look, even if the developer has lost interest. The fact that it still runs on Big Sur (unlike many other earlier apps) suggests it’s using some really basic macOS components in a fairly standard way.

Parallel note-taking structures is something that interests me more and more as I start to develop some densely populated Zettelkasten repositories. Viewing one’s information in interrelated ways is always difficult (hence the popularity of mind/concept-mapping apps); something like HueNote offers another interesting option.

Cheers,
Bill