Mac: Notebook vs Notetaker

Posted by Ken
Jan 27, 2011 at 10:36 PM

I am a big fan of Circus Ponies’ notebook app for one and only one reason: the ease of creating bullet-list outlines. For whatever reason, my head thinks in hierarchical lists. NB works in bullet-list format by default (probably a settable preference but I never have), and tab, shift-tab, return, and other keystrokes do exactly what they should (indent, outdent, new list item, etc). You can expand or collapse individual lists, you can move an entire hierarchy around easily, and you can format/highlight/place notes anywhere.

Most other things in Notebook are less than satisfying. The multidex is slow and cumbersome, the contents pages are awful and there is no way to organize other than the linear notebook/divider/page metaphor, and other things (todo items) are much less useful than they could be. And, after months of waiting, we finally got an iPad app—unusably bad for $30.

The only other tool I know of that works that well with outlines is OmniOutliner, which doesn’t have an iPad version at all. I’ve tried MacJournal, but it’s got a normal text editor, not an outliner, so that’s no use.DevonThink is expensive, and looks interesting but I’m not going to waste time learning it since it doesn’t have an outliner either (unless I haven’t found it). Any other possibilities I haven’t thought of?