Circus Ponies NoteBook is a Swiss Army Knife of sorts. You can use it to manage projects and tasks. You can take notes with it, perform research, and track all the picayune tidbits of necessary information that never seem to get saved anywhere. It’s a very capable application, and its $29.95 student pricing ($49.95 for non-students) is more than reasonable.
There are two major factors that influence my opinion of NoteBook. The first is the fact that NoteBook rather slavishly follows the visual appearance of a physical notebook, down to wire binding, colored section tabs, and section dividers. Some of the trappings of a notebook can be removed or toned down, but the underlying design of how the application works is tied closely to this metaphor. For some people this may feel too forced, but many users will feel right at home.
The second determining factor for me is that NoteBook is truly a Swiss Army Knife application. It handles many sorts of tasks. Whether this matters to you or not is a matter of preference. I tend to prefer small, sharp tools that do a few things, but do them very well. There are plenty of people who prefer learning one or two key applications and using them for everything. Knowing where you fit on this continuum will help you evaluate my comments about NoteBook.
Interface
Not only does NoteBook mimic a physical notebook, it lets you determine with some latitude how your notebook will look. Accordingly, for the screenshots in this post I’ve messed with the rather involved interface settings in NoteBook so you can see how some of the options affect appearance.
The ability to tweak the look of my notebook to my heart’s content is nice, but I haven’t been able to create one in NoteBook that looks quite right. There’s just too much application chrome for my taste, and I can’t get over having to tilt my head to read page tabs.
Taking Notes
For note taking there are few applications that can match NoteBook’s depth. It features fast, easy hierarchical notetaking and gives you the ability to rearrange elements with keyboard shortcuts or drag and drop. You can also use basic shape and arrow tools to create diagrams, which can be quite handy for classes like Property (“Now, if B’s easement on Whiteacre is sold to C, does A still have access to Blackacre?). NoteBook gives you several colors of highlighter, plus colored reminder sticky flags and notes.
Your notes can be exported as TXT (readable by any application), RTF (readable by any word processor or text-handling application), or DOC (MS Word’s native format).
Time, Task, and Project Management
It is easy to create a task list in NoteBook, which makes managing to-do items a snap. NoteBook even pushes target dates to iCal, so the due dates you assign in NoteBook will show up in iCal.
While this ability to create tasks and tie them to iCal is impressive, I wish it were easier to create an initial project outline or to-do list then add subordinate pages as needed. This isn’t terribly necessary for day to day tasks, but for an involved project like a mock trial or planning the next issue of the law journal, the notebook metaphor seems limited. That said, I may be missing something. There are plenty of Mac-using lawyers who swear by NoteBook, so they’ve likely come up with clever ways to use it for sophisticated time and project management.
Research
NoteBook’s online research tools are slick. Let’s say you’re doing some initial online research for a paper, just trying to get a handle on whether the topic you’re considering is even worthy of discussion. You find a blog post, news article, or other page that you want to review later. In your browser, all you do is select the pertinent text, then control-click your, choose NoteBook from the menu that appears, and point it to the location in NoteBook where you want the text dumped. It’s fast, easy, and very powerful.
You can also grab URLs in similar fashion. When NoteBook brings in a clipping it also saves the source URL, so you’ll never find yourself wondering where it came from later.
Keeping Track of It All
As frustrated as I am by the limitations of the notebook metaphor, I really like using NoteBook’s auto-indexing feature, which Circus Ponies calls Multidex. It’s an excellent solution for those times when you have a vague inkling of what you’re looking for, but aren’t sure exactly what you called it or where you put it.
I’ve seen many implementations of keyword-based searching, but most of them rely on the user to manually create keywords. Multidex doesn’t make you do the heavy lifting; it’s always indexing everything you put into your notebook, so you can find even the smallest content chunks faster.
Conclusion
Circus Ponies NoteBook has plenty to offer. Its range of features and deft information-handling capabilities alone are worth the price tag. It even provides built-in voice memo recording, the ability to export pages to your iPod, and the means to export your notebook to a website, should you be so inclined. Circus Ponies has done an excellent job of providing relevant contextual help, so as you use the application, it tells you how it works.
On the other hand, the long list of NoteBook’s capabilities brings with it a rather extensive set of controls. The interface pays more attention to replicating a physical notebook than to elegant information display. For clean, unencumbered note taking I still find OmniOutliner superior, and for full-featured diagramming, OmniGraffle wins hands down. There are a variety of applications better suited to task management.
However (in true law school fashion), it is important to keep in mind my biases as you read this, and to remember that many law students and lawyers swear by NoteBook. Check out Scott Palmer’s excellent 2006 MLS writeup of NoteBook. The basic functionality of NoteBook hasn’t changed much since then, and Scott’s description of how he used NoteBook is a must read if you’re thinking of using it.
Circus Ponies offers a generous 30 day full-featured free trial download of NoteBook.
