Free Upgrade in March for the Most Integrated Organizer on the Planet
MWSF 2005, SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., January 11, 2005 – Circus Ponies Software, Inc. today announced NoteBook 2.0, the next major version of its award-winning NoteBook outlining and organizing software that will ship in March of this year. NoteBook 2.0 sets a new gold standard for getting organized on the Mac with more than 150 new features including groundbreaking integration with Apple’s iApps and iPod, a customizable Toolbar with exclusive Page Path navigation, major Voice Annotation and Clipping Services enhancements, new Point-and-Click Linking system, advanced HTML Export options, and dozens more cutting-edge note-taking and annotation features.
“With our first release of NoteBook, we raised the bar,” said Jayson Adams, vice president of technology at Circus Ponies Software. “With 2.0, we intend to change the rules.”
Groundbreaking Integration with Apple’s iApps
NoteBook 2.0 integrates directly with key Apple iApps to keep life in the digital hub super-organized. The new NoteBook Contact Sticker provides direct, menu-based access to Address Book contacts, iChat and Mail functions from within NoteBook, as well as many other common system features. Users can now set and manage iCal alarms for NoteBook Action Items without leaving NoteBook, while receiving these alarms wherever they are through Apple’s standard iCal and iPod delivery systems. AIM Buddy Status can also be viewed through the NoteBook Contact Sticker and chats can be initiated directly in iChat. Moreover, NoteBook outlines can now be downloaded to your iPod and viewed using native iPod-style browsing. Voice annotation recordings tied to your notes can be downloaded to iTunes playlists for convenient playback through iTunes or an iPod.
Customizable Toolbar
NoteBook 2.0 sports an elegant new Toolbar, with revolutionary Page Path navigation that shows at a glance where you are in a Notebook. Page Path navigation extends NoteBook’s acclaimed model of Super-Tab navigation , providing click-and-hold access to all pages contained in a given section. Users can click and hold a Divider Page name in the Toolbar’s Page Path to access any of that section’s pages. And they can also gain instant access to frequently used NoteBook commands through the customizable buttons and pull-down menus in the Toolbar.
Major Voice Annotation and Clipping Service Enhancements
Building on the success of 1.2, NoteBook 2.0 extends Voice Annotation and Clipping Services to a new level of convenience. Using the Toolbar, you can now record whole meetings or lectures as you take notes, complete with built-in tracking between notes and audio recordings. Playback and transfer to iTunes and iPod can be accomplished with simple built-in commands.
Clipping Services now provide automatic notation of source applications and SnapBack Stickers wherever possible. Clipping Services can also be assigned to specific cells in addition to specific pages. Contact Stickers are automatically assigned to clippings from Apple Mail when the sender is listed in your Address Book.
New Point-and-Click Linking System
NoteBook 2.0 features a rich linking framework that allows users to easily create links between and among NoteBook pages or cells, URLs, and e-mail addresses. Using NoteBook’s new Point-and-Click Linking system, users can now link cells or pages with other cells or pages in the same Notebook or across different Notebooks . At the same time, NoteBook 2.0 provides direct-click access to link destinations through its new customizable Link Stickers.
Advanced HTML Export Options
NoteBook 2.0 also includes numerous new HTML Export options that make it easy to create and publish rich Notebook web sites, including a Sidebar-style navigation menu in a left-side frame. These and many other HTML Export settings have now been consolidated in the new Export Pane of the Inspector.
An extended list of 2.0 highlights is contained in the Highlights Addendum at the end of this press release.
Pricing and Availability
NoteBook 2.0 will be available in March for $49.95 (US). All current and new customers of NoteBook 1.2 will receive the new version free upon release through online upgrade and registration. Watch the automatic “Check for a new version” feature in the Help menu for details.
NoteBook is available at The Circus Ponies Online Store ( www.circusponies.com/store ) and at retail through The Apple Store(R) online ( www.apple.com ), Apple’s retail stores, and Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $49.95 (US). Discounted educational pricing for qualified academic customers is available through Academic Superstore ( www.academicsuperstore.com ) and at the Circus Ponies Online Store. Family Pack pricing for three-user households is also available at The Circus Ponies Online Store for $99.95.
System Requirements
NoteBook 2.0 is designed to run on any Macintosh(R) computer with PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processors running Mac OS X v10.2 Jaguar or later with 256MB of RAM (or more) recommended.
About NoteBook
Circus Ponies NoteBook is the award-winning outlining and organizing software that lets Mac OS X users clip, organize, and share unstructured information from any source in any way they like. The program uses an easy-to-understand notebook interface to provide breakthrough media capture, multi-dimensional indexing, and inter-application clipping services. Circus Ponies NoteBook is being used and praised in the Education, SciTech, Legal, and Small Business markets worldwide.
About Circus Ponies
Circus Ponies Software was founded in 2003 by Jayson Adams and Elizabeth Statmore as an artisan software house to create best-of-breed apps that surprise and delight users with their beauty and usefulness. To that end, the company produces software exclusively for Mac OS X. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Circus Ponies, the Circus Ponies logo, NoteBook, and the NoteBook logos and icons are trademarks of Circus Ponies Software, Inc. All other brand names mentioned are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
Circus Ponies NoteBook User Testimonials
Quote Addendum
NoteBook in IT
I use NoteBook for everything. I use it for private things. I use it for my projects. I use it for my studies. I use it for my research. I use to document experiments. I use it to share information. I use it as data repository. I use it as an HTML editor….
Prior to NoteBook I stored all my project files in a hierarchy of directories. Searching involved educated guesses and heavy use of “grep” and “co”. Now I store everything in NoteBook. This has two major advantages. Firstly, thanks to the search and indexing features of NoteBook I quickly find information. Secondly, I can easily backup single projects because everything is stored in NoteBook. No more broken links causing partial backups.
Markus Boeing
IT Consultant
Brest, Germany
NoteBook in Education
Notebook is the app I use most often on my PowerBook. There isn’t a more functional or elegant solution for keeping notes on the Mac. It’s the app I turn to when I have an idea, a to-do, or a paper to write. If you use outlines, NoteBook is the way to go.
Ira Fuchs
VP for Research in IT, Andrew Mellon Foundation
Senior Technology Advisor to the President, Princeton University
I use NoteBook primarily for teaching. Each course is a Notebook and contains lessons, quizzes, essay topics, syllabi, readings from the web, and websites students should navigate to. I also use it strategically to present information in class and help guide discussions.
In the near future, I will use NoteBook to develop two book proposals and rough drafts of the books. One book will be a textbook on cross-cultural human development. Each Page Divider will be a chapter and each page will be a section in the book. The book will contain a lot of graphics and many links to other websites. I want the textbook to tell a story and not just be a collection of sidebars and chart junk. I am hoping that NoteBook will help me develop a narrative (not an encyclopedia). I am toying with the idea of making this an Open Source textbook where other people can contribute to the project. This would not necessarily be a “wiki” project but it would be highly collaborative.
The second book project will be an ethnography (anthropological report) on my 10 years of fieldwork in the Caribbean. Similar structure as above but fewer graphics and links.
Eric Durbrow, Ph.D.
College Professor
NoteBook has made my work much more transparent. I use it for surprisingly different tasks. On a daily basis, I update a Notebook to keep track of the versions, corrections and updates to the Clay Sanskrit Library volumes. I even drop entire PDFs of the volumes into the pages, adding yet another level of backup.
At first I had used NoteBook simply to drag images of manuscripts into the same document as the etexts and add all sorts of annotation and critical markup. The full Unicode support and the ability to export to OPML are very useful for me, since with a couple of AppleScripts this can be converted to the simple TeX markup I needed to typeset professional quality output.
http://www.circusponies.com/products/Somadeva/index.html
Now, I find I use it more and more to build Indexes, Bibliographies and Glossaries for the work I do – here the automatic indexing feature is unmatched.
I am currently compiling references for the third volume (forthcoming) of a dictionary of Hindu Tantric terminology, a project which I joined this summer. For this, NoteBook has proven itself invaluable; I can share my entries with my colleagues by posting an UTF-8 HTML file to my homepage.
Somadeva Vasudeva, DPhil (Oxon)
Editor, Clay Sanskrit Library
Oxford, England
I’m one of only a couple of Mac-heads in my cohort, but while they have all been struggling with OneNote or EndNote on the PC for their research journals, I have just loved my NoteBook. I was showing a friend the other day–I simply opened a new Notebook, typed a sentence on a new page, and showed her all the ways it was instantly, automagically indexed.
Brilliant!
I start my Thesis writing next month, so NoteBook is already my daily companion. Thanks for your great product and great service.
Lisa Read
Masters Degree candidate
Royal Roads University (Canada)
NoteBook in Legal
With NoteBook and a projector attached as an extended desktop through my 12″ PowerBook, my whole trial can be available for display to the jury. This makes a much better impression than having counsel table covered with notebooks and paper. No fumbling through binders and exhibit folders. No trying to center documents on an Elmo. I can even show video deposition excerpts to the jury with just one click and a drag to the left. No more fumbling with the VCR.
I am so impressed with this program it alone seems to justify our firm’s recent move to Macs. We’ve bought licenses for everyone to use and contribute to Notebooks stored on the server.
Kern Lewis, Founding Partner
Foreman, Lewis & Hutchison
Grapevine, Texas 76051
www.warriorsforjustice.com
Inside and outside the courtroom, I use NoteBook to track my cases and projects, what I want to accomplish and what I’ve already done. NoteBook lets me organize cases by issues, by witness or document involved with them, or even by legal principle related to them. All my witness outlines have keys to appropriate exhibits and even jury instructions set up for a smooth trial presentation.
It is impossible to lose information in NoteBook and equally impossible to count the ways I can create hidden, unobtrusive structures that don’t get in the way of my reading my notes.
This is a practice tool that I would not want to be without.
Stephen Chakwin
Trial Attorney
New York City
NoteBook in Broadcasting and Entertainment
NoteBook is now open on my desktop all the time. It has become one of the indispensable tools in my everyday Mac use!/p>
Shawn King
Host/Executive Producer, Your Mac Life
www.yourmaclife.com
After being blown away by NoteBook at Macworld Expo last year, I bought five copies for friends because I knew that they would steal mine.
Thanks for making my life easier. I hope that you don’t mind that I charged my friends double for the software.
Comedian
Los Angeles, CA
A marvelous time-saver!
Steve O’Brien
Radio Personality
WCBS New York
NoteBook in SciTech
“Scientific and technical managers use a broad array of data sources to keep their projects in order and NoteBook gives them a clean, intuitive means to do so,” said Patrick Hickey, Director of Computing Systems and Operations at Perlegen Sciences, a genetic research company in Mountain View, California. “NoteBook is the clear leader in terms of inter-application integration and ease of use.”
Patrick Hickey
Director of Computing Systems & Operations
Perlegen Sciences
Mountain View, CA
NoteBook for Personal Productivity
I’ve been using NoteBook as a holding bin for research and thoughts related to a foundation client I’m pursuing. There’s a pretty decent amount of dump-and-stir at the earliest stages of a new business pursuit where hard research and “hey kids, let’s put on a show” concepting need to spend some time in proximity to each other in order to begin hatching some real plans. NoteBook captures all of that stuff in the form I found out. Clipping services and media frames let me drag and drop stuff from wherever I find it.
At home, I use it to keep track of a growing reading list and as a repository for Blog topics and starts that don’t warrant publishing.
Web Webster
Advertising & PR Account Executive
Nashville, TN
“I’d be lost without my NoteBook!” said Julia Ann Ellingson, a graphic designer in Santa Cruz. “In the past, I’ve had Post-it notes and stickies all over my desktop. NoteBook straightened out my barrage of thoughts into a couple of great Notebooks with everything indexed — words, dates entered, URLs, stickers. It’s an anal-retentive person’s dream.”
Julia Ann Ellingson
Graphic Designer
Santa Cruz, CA
NoteBook in Genealogy
I use my Genealogy Notebook to gather family history data, especially while traveling. My Notebook is divided into different Family sections and when I find an image or document — or when someone e-mails me a photo I need, such as a cemetery photo –I clip it into the appropriate page of my Genealogy Notebook and add my own notation. I also track applications for genealogy groups I may want to join in a separate section. It’s a great resource for all aspects of Family History.
Anne Costello
Diablo Valley MUG, Genealogy SIG member
What’s New in NoteBook 2.0
The new version of NoteBook provides over 150 new features, enhancements, and innovations, concentrated in six areas: (1) integration with Apple’s iApps; (2) note-taking and annotation; (3) new clipping tools and options; (4) improved search and navigation; (5) enhanced media management; and (6) new styling tools. The release also includes performance and printing improvements, a comprehensive new online help system, along with various bug fixes and minor enhancements.
Highlights of the new NoteBook 2.0 release are as follows:
Groundbreaking Integration with Apple’s iApps
Integration with Apple’s Address Book, iCal, iPod, iTunes, iChat, Mail, and Safari to keep your digital hub organized.
- NEW – Works with Address Book
- Use NoteBook and Address Book together to get more from your Address Book
- Add Address Book entries to your notes for instant integration with contact info
- New NoteBook Contact Stickers provide direct access to your Address Book and offer menus for common functions
- Add an Address Book contact as a link inside a NoteBook cell
- Dynamic access to Address Book keeps NoteBook contacts up-to-date
- NEW – Works with iCal
- NoteBook and iCal together to get more from your iCal
- Set and manage iCal alarms in NoteBook to track NoteBook Action Items
- Receive NoteBook Action Item alarms through iCal or on your iPod
- Keep track of completed, due today, overdue, and high-priority commitments
- NEW – Works with iPod
- Use NoteBook with your iPod to get more from your iPod
- Export pages and notes to your iPod
- View your outlines using native iPod-style browsing
- Get alarms for NoteBook Action Items via the iPod calendar alarms feature
- Download voice annotation recordings to iTunes and iPod
- NEW – Works with iTunes
- Use NoteBook with iTunes to get more from your iTunes
- Download advanced Voice Annotation recordings from your notes to your iTunes and iPod playlists
- Works with iChat
- Use NoteBook with iChat to get more from your iChat
- View AIM availability of Buddies from the NoteBook Contact Sticker menu
- Initiate chats with AIM Buddies from the NoteBook Contact Sticker menu
- NEW – Works with Apple Mail
- Use NoteBook with Mail to get more from Mail
- Capture the date, sender, and subject line of Clipped Apple Mail messages
- Reply to Sender of Clipped Apple Mail messages through the NoteBook Clipping Sticker menu
- Automatically address New Messages in your default e-mail program through the NoteBook Contact Sticker menu
- Works with Safari
- Enhanced clipping sticker
- New automatic SnapBack Sticker returns you to the clipping’s source URL
Powerful Note-Taking and Annotation Tools
- NEW – New customizable Toolbar provides instant access to frequently used NoteBook commands
- NEW – Page path tracking and navigation through the Toolbar
- NEW – - NoteBook Toolbar
- instant access to frequently used commands
- new page path tracking and navigation
- NEW – Linking Framework
- create links between NoteBook pages or cells
- powerful, easy-to-use Linking tools, including new NoteBook Link Stickers and SnapBack Stickers
- navigate link sources and destinations using the Link Sticker’s contextual menu
- 7 choices of Link Sticker colors
- new SnapBack stickers returs you to a clipping source or link source with one click
- NEW – Voice Annotation Tools
- record meetings or lectures while you take notes, with tracking between notes and audio recordings
- start, stop, and manage playback of recordings using the NoteBook Toolbar
- record to any audio input device attached to your computer
- automatically mark your recordings with playback points tied to the notes you took at that time
- use new Voice Annotation Stickers to:
- view the date and exact time in a recording when you created a new cell
- begin playback from that point in the recording
- access a menu of other options
- download your meeting or lecture recordings to iTunes for easy playback and transfer to your iPod
New Clipping Tools and Enhancements
- NEW – assign Clipping Services to specific cells (in addition to specific pages)
- NEW – automatic notation of the source program for each clipping
- NEW – automatic “Clipped from [ApplicationName]” keyword
- NEW – automatic SnapBack Sticker for web clipping cells returns you instantly to that clipping’s URL
- NEW – automatic Contact Sticker assigned to clippings from Apple Mail sent by people in your Address Book
- NEW – automatic notation of sender, date, and subject line for clippings from Apple Mail, plus auto-reply feature
- NEW – assistive technology preference speaks the work “Clipping” when NoteBook receives a new clipping
- NEW – give Clipping Services any title you like
- ENHANCED – Clipping Sticker tracks the source application by name
IMPROVED Search and Navigation Tools
- NEW – Contents Card
- displays a complete Table of Contents for at-a-glance navigation/access to any page
- flips over/out from the left-hand side of your Notebook’s binding (like a bound-in card)
- can be viewed from anywhere in your Notebook
- can be shown, hidden, or resized at will
- allows user highlighting of key pages with any of the seven customizable NoteBook Highlighters
- NEW – SnapBack Sticker
- provides a link to a clipping’s source file in the Finder (when clipping from other Cocoa apps)
- provides an instant return path to the URL of a web clipping from Safari or Internet Explorer
- ENHANCED – Index Pages
- NEW – Due Dates index page for tracking and managing all cells with a status check box and a due date
- NEW – customizable sorting of any index page
- NEW – save your Favorite Sorts for instant auto-sorting of index pages
- NEW – remove or add back the Index Section
- NEW – delete unwanted index pages
- ENHANCED – index pages are now custom-configurable
- ENHANCED – Super-Find now allows searches for checked or unchecked action items
Media Management, Import/Export, and Styling Enhancements
- ENHANCED – Media Frames
- NEW – Media Frames now offer rotation “knobs” on image corners
- NEW – easier option-drag scaling of images
- NEW – floating transparent tool palette for images in Media Frames
- NEW – link Media Frame images or attachments to web addresses, cells, or pages
- NEW – custom configure a Media Frame’s HTML Export options
- ENHANCED – customizable Media Frame line borders
- ENHANCED – HTML Export
- NEW – export Notebooks to the web with a left frame sidebar menu for quick navigation (like NoteBook’s own Help system)
- ENHANCED – NoteBook Styling Options
- NEW – choose custom colors for the paper lines and the margin line
- NEW – Divider Page styles and custom appearance choices
- NEW – “Perfect binding” style (i.e., without the spiral rings)
- NEW – custom Template Pages
- NEW – more built-in paper styles, including Quadrille ruled, Engineering, and Plain with red margin line
- IMPROVED – customizable line spacing
Plus numerous other bug fixes and enhancements
Press Contacts:
Elizabeth Statmore
Circus Ponies Software
press@circusponies.com
415.695.3100
