NoteTaker has announced their intentions to enter the Windows market, and this choice may reflect that strategy.
(Scott Love worked on MORE.) No other modern outliner in the Mac world uses these plus and minus labels, but they are common in the Windows world. It uses the Aqua-fied “plus-labels” we described in a previous column that originated in the command-line world and was brought to the Mac by MORE. NoteTaker on the other hand has taken a wholly different tack.
(But check out my first official review-of a non-outliner application-elsewhere in this edition of ATPM.) Instead, we’ll focus on the outlining functions of these multipurpose applications and try to dig deeply enough into their philosophies to help you see if one can be Your Particular Outliner. I do not intend to give a complete review here those tend to be death marches of feature counting and list comparison. It is doubly strange with these two that have so much to offer. Incidentally, I find it absolutely goofy that outliners in general do not deliver their documentation in their own format. On the other hand, AquaMinds has a flood of complete, impressive, and effective documentation, videos (for $80) and tutorials, but no public support forum at all! In my experience, this was the case early in the game, but NoteBook’s feature set is now in the same ballpark and NoteTaker’s unpolished quirks seem to have abated.Īnother difference: Circus Ponies has pretty dreadful documentation (no index or search!) but a great, friendly support forum that involves the developers: feedback is direct and honest and suggestions and bugs are dealt with speedily. That wisdom also holds that while NoteTaker’s features always work, they sometimes seem comparatively slapdash and carry minor glitches such as redraw problems until the next update. User opinion seems to have established that NoteTaker has more frequent updates and more features, while NoteBook takes more care to be elegant and complete in executing features. I think this is the case, because under the similar skins are two different religions. Presumably they differed on fundamental aspects of the notebook and the philosophies behind it. But consider that these two developers quarrelled severely enough to get a divorce. Most prospective users might think this indicates that the products are as similar as they initially appear.
Jayson Adams is the man behind Circus Ponies NoteBook Scott Love heads AquaMinds and NoteTaker.īoth seem to have kept the rights to the original NoteBook code and certainly some NeXT code has been brought forward, but I suspect it to be a small portion in each case. At some point, the two principals left and started their own companies, those we see here. There are other superficial similarities as well.Ī particular background is always mentioned in this context: once upon a time there was a much admired NeXT notebook outliner called “NoteBook,” from Millennium Software. Both have stamps/marks, text highlighters, labels, and support multimedia and advanced clipping.
They both present as multipage spiral notebooks with cover, table of contents, section dividers with section contents and tabs, “regular” pages, and several types of index pages at the back. These two tools, NoteBook and NoteTaker, superficially look like twins. How that imagination moves is largely dependent on the tools used and-most importantly-the philosophy behind them. The idea is that your typical Mac user has a clever imagination that wants to spin up great stuff. This forced me into a period of introspection about outlining possibilities and tools, the results of which grew into ATPO. I had to upgrade, but to which app? And for what use? Moving part of my life into an application is a heavy commitment, and I was already in love elsewhere. I am a heavy outliner and use several programs intensively. I admit that I got into the business of writing ATPO precisely because I was confronted with these two applications. Both are on a fast track development-wise and would be good candidates for partners for the future, but they are different enough in their underlying philosophies that they will find distinctly different user bases. Both push the user interface and feature envelope into new territory in slightly different ways, and they compete against each other. Both of these give their own joy depending on how your mind is sculpted.