Spotlight, the Finder, and the Frustration of Losing Things on Your Mac

What was the worst experience you had looking for something on your Mac? Whatever you were looking for, you probably knew it was there somewhere—perhaps you had recently opened it—but you just could not find it. Maybe you looked through the same folders and subfolders several times. Maybe you dug through the files scattered across your desktop. Maybe you even got so desperate that you turned to Spotlight, OS X’s built-in search tool that’s pretty useless if you’ve collected even a modest amount of information. And in the end, maybe you just gave up.

When everything is organized, you can use your brain to logically figure out where something is stored. When everything is searchable, the computer can help you find what you’re looking for. The Mac’s Finder and Spotlight give you the worst of both of these worlds. We created NoteBook, the premier Mac notebook app, so you never have to rely on the Finder or Spotlight again.

With NoteBook you store your information in electronic notebooks that look like the paper ones you’ve used all your life. The pages in a Notebook can hold everything the Finder can, and more: text, documents, folders, tables of data, links. And the flexible structure of NoteBook pages and dividers, plus the built-in outliner, make it easy to organize information in ways that are at best awkward in the Finder. You can use that organization to quickly find things when you need them.

But you can also use NoteBook’s search capabilities to find things just as quickly. Every Notebook has a set of pages at the back, collectively called the Multidex, that helps you find a note by whatever you remember about it: a name it featured, a number it mentioned, the JPEG it contained, the date you added it, and so on. It’s like a super database that works the way your brain does, only there’s no setup. And it beats the pants off of Spotlight, which forces you to dig through hundreds of search results.

No matter how you look for something in NoteBook, by organization or search, you can find it quickly. That’s why so many Mac users rely on NoteBook to store and organize their information.