Stay Organized

Does this desktop look familiar? It probably does, because you might find something interesting on the web and save it in a file. Or jot an important note in a sticky. Or flag an e-mail that contains an action item. Do these things a few times and pretty soon your entire computer looks like this desktop. That’s because there’s no good way to keep these snippets of information organized.

If you’re managing a project you hit the same problem, because a project is made up of snippets of information. A project may include some notes you’ve made, some e-mails from a colleague, a spreadsheet with related information, and there’s no good way to organize it all. You could use the Finder to keep everything in one place, but at best it’s an unorganized list.

Circus Ponies NoteBook solves the problem of managing these snippets that don’t have a good home. NoteBook’s documents look like paper notebooks — with pages, tabs and sections — just like the notebooks you’ve used all your life, so they are instantly familiar. And Notebooks are very flexible. Want a Notebook with a single long page of notes? No problem. Need a Notebook with multiple sections and subsections to organize your clients? That’s easy. Unlike other note-taking software, NoteBook works the way you do.

NoteBook combines the notebook metaphor with outlines, which are perfect for managing lists. They are especially good for managing hierarchical lists (a list with subitems), making it easy to organize any amount of detail and then instantly hide it all with a click.

Notebooks can contain text, documents, images, movies, whatever you need to keep together and organized. Add action items to your notes, assign them due dates, publish them to your iCal calendar and phone. Even link to contacts in your Address Book, to put their information just a click away. So when three o’clock rolls around, flip to your client’s page, use the contact link to pull up her number, fill the page with notes from the call, and add checkboxes and due dates to the action items that come out of your conversation. With everything in one place, staying organized is almost automatic.

Speaking of taking notes, NoteBook is the perfect tool for doing that — read more….

Take It With You

At some point you’ll probably need to share the information stored in your Notebooks. NoteBook makes it easy. If the other person uses a Mac you can send them a “page bundle” — one or more pages from a Notebook that they can open in their copy of NoteBook on their Mac.

If the other person doesn’t have NoteBook, you can create a PDF version of any Notebook for viewing on any computer, or use NoteBook’s instant web publishing to convert it to a website for anywhere access.

Now imagine being on the go with all of this information literally at your fingertips. That’s Circus Ponies NoteBook for iPad. Read more…

Find It All Instantly

Notebooks are designed to store large amounts of information (to the limit of your hard drive, actually), which begs the question: how do you find a specific note in all of that information?

Any note-taking app you can think of, and even technologies like Spotlight, supports simple text searching, but when lots of notes contain the words you’re looking for, those tools become useless. Even worse, what if you can’t recall a word the note contains? Which isn’t unusual, because our brains recall information in many different ways, not just by words. For example you might only recall that you entered the note last Thursday. Given that our brains don’t recall information only by text, our searching systems shouldn’t either.

That’s the idea behind NoteBook’s Multidex™, which helps you find notes by what little bit you remember about them. Each time you add or change a note, NoteBook indexes not only the note’s text, but also all of its attributes, things like when the note was changed, what Keywords you assigned to it, which attachments it contains, and more. This information forms the basis of the Multidex, a set of pages at the back of every Notebook that helps you locate information by what little bit you remember about it.

The Multidex’s Text page, for example, lists all of the words in use in your Notebook. So if you remember that a note contains the word urgent, click “urgent” on the Text page and see all of the notes that contain it. If you only remember that you added it last Thursday, visit the Creation Dates page to see a list of everything you added on that day. Look for names on the Capitalized Words page. Look for numbers on the Numbers page. And so on. No matter which way you might recall a note, NoteBook has a way for you to find it with just a few clicks. It’s so amazing, it’s patented.

You can also search across multiple attributes at once using NoteBook’s Super Find. If you remember that the note you want contains the word urgent, and that you entered it last Thursday, you can use Super Find to locate exactly the notes that match.

How about sharing? — read more….

Take Great Notes

As you might imagine from its name, NoteBook is great for taking notes . If you’re in a meeting or lecture, NoteBook’s voice annotation feature guarantees you’ll never miss a detail. Click the speaker icon next to any note to start playback from the point in the recording you began taking that note. Or send your voice annotations to your iTunes music library and from there to your iPod or iPhone, to review the recording while in the car, jogging, wherever is convenient.

Words aren’t always enough to capture an idea, so NoteBook lets you add diagrams, flow charts and sketches to any page. Build your diagrams using NoteBook’s pre-built collection of shapes and line styles, or use your mouse or tablet stylus to sketch. If you’re using a tablet, NoteBook varies the line thickness based on the pressure you apply to the stylus. It can even convert your tablet writing to text, using OS X’s InkWell technology.

You can even take notes right on top of your PDF class notes or lecture slides. When you drop the PDF on your Notebook and choose the annotate option, NoteBook adds each PDF page as a separate page in the Notebook. From there you can add text notes, create diagrams, circle important points, and generate a new PDF that includes all of your mark-up. Your PDF and mark-up stay organized within your school notebook.

If part of your note-taking involves research, with NoteBook you can easily “clip” selections from web pages and other apps straight into your Notebooks, without leaving the app you’re working in. Just configure one or more pages for clipping, and then start researching, reading your mail, or whatever. When you see something related to your research, select it and clip it to store it in that page. If you clip from a web page, NoteBook saves the URL with the clipping, so that you can easily return to that page at any time. Then review, edit and annotate your clippings when you’re ready to work with your research.

But with all that information, how do you find a particular note when you’re not sure where it is? The answer is the Multidex™ — read more….

The Best App For Taking Notes On Your Mac

The Best App For Organizing All Your Important Stuff On Your Mac