OneNote for Mac?
So I got a MacBook Pro 17″ for my birthday last year. It’s a wonderful machine. I love it.
When I first got it though I mostly ran Windows on it via Parallels. OSX mostly was used to run Safari and iTunes. The development software, word processing, etc. were all Windows, because those were the programs I already owned and know.
As I’ve had the Mac though, I find more and more excuses to use OSX rather than Windows. More and more of the software I’m using is now Mac based, mostly because running under the VM, while acceptable performance, isn’t as good as running natively under OSX. Also, I’ve started some Mac development in earnest, so I find myself in OSX for that too. (My scheme compiler now builds and runs under Mac OSX and Windows).
To carry my workflow over to OSX, I’ve purchased Microsoft Office for Mac. Word and Excel for OSX are wonderful. Also, I run Aquamacs for programming and general text editing. One program that I miss sorely though is OneNote 2007. I spent the better part of this weekend searching for a good alternative.
First, a little more about how I work with OneNote. I use it to make notes for projects, usually a section per project. The notes are highly unstructured, but usually work to one subject per note. Once a particular note has grown large enough, or I have more than a few notes about a subject, I start another page with that subject and collect the notes on that page. Sometimes I’ll coalesce the notes into an outline to better organize a page if it gets enough text on it. I don’t import movies, but images are not uncommon. I put in a lot of links within text notes to other web pages. I love the ability to write notes anywhere on the page. The note manipulation is great; it’s easy to move notes around and they just expand naturally. Outlines just work when you type them in. Tables can be embedded within a note, and I take chunks from web pages that I read and paste them directly as their own notes, or inside existing notes.
As a sample, here’s a note page about my D&D campaign. (The heroes have already played this scenario, so this is not new to them.)
You can see the kind of random placement of notes. I like this ability, a lot.
So I want to use something similar native to OSX. A simple search on Google and Bing revealed lots of contenders:
Evernote
SOHO Notes
Circus Ponies Notebook
Word 2008 Notebook View
TiddlyWiki
Emacs Org Mode
Scrivener
Curio
There were others I’m sure, but these are what I’ve looked at over the last month, and most of them just this weekend. (Yeah, I didn’t have to work this weekend!)
Evernote – A great note taking product. It’s greatest strength is that it is available everywhere, including the web, Windows, Mac and iPhone. Search notes with keywords. Unfortunately it’s greatest strength is probably it’s greatest weakness too. Because it’s so cross platform, I suppose they really skimped on the formatting. It’s not very easy to do things within their editor. The included sample note looks cool, but I never could find out how they did it. I really like the free form note taking on a page in OneNote, and the base item to work with in Evernote is the note itself, not notes on a page. In short, it’s not for me.
SOHO Notes – After playing with it for a few minutes, it came across to me as a better version of Evernote, without that platform versatility (though there is an iPhone version of sorts) but better formatting options. It has the note centricity though, that for others is probably just fine, but OneNote seems to be ‘page centric’, meaning that individual notes can be placed arbitrarily on the page. Again, not really what I want.
Circus Ponies Notebook – Upon loading this, I thought I had found the true OneNote for Mac. Great piece of software, looks good, and I love the notebook metaphor. It has the free floating text, which I love, but their implementation leaves me wanting, especially wanting to move text around (OneNote has the thicker top borders that make it a snap, and a single click to edit makes it really easy, whereas Notebook requires a double click – what can I say, I’m picky). Their sticky notes are almost good too, but not quite there. I love the contents page and how it automatically updates. Unfortunately the outline mode isn’t free form. In other words, I can’t place an outline anywhere on a page, there can only be one per page. Last, the price is a little higher than other packages. At $49, it’s probably worth it, but Evernote is free, Emacs is free, and the other packages are $39. Not a deal breaker, but worth noting.
Word 2008 Notebook View – Built into Microsoft Word 2008 is a little mode known as Notebook View. It’s similar to Circus Ponies Notebook, though not as fully customizable. No free floating text, but it has outlines where I want them. I can include text boxes for the free floating text, but I have to manually resize them, they don’t just grow as you type. It has tables, and tables can be made to do some text separation, but aren’t quite right either, compared to OneNote. Still, lots of features, such as tables of contents, all the Word formatting is available, and the organization ease that Notebook and Scrivener have by just moving notebook tabs around. And Word is generally compatible with just about everything. (Or is it that everything is compatible with Word?) Price is high compared to the others, but I already have it, well, because it’s Word.
TiddlyWiki – I tried this a while ago, and liked it for general Wiki stuff, but it’s not nearly as user-friendly as any other package in here, including the Emacs Org Mode. It’s a great idea, and it certainly has its adherents, but it’s not for me.
Emacs Org Mode – It’s amazing what can be done in Emacs. Org mode ups the ante for any text based editting, but the formatting within Emacs is not what I’d like. The outlining is superb, and, believe it or not, the table engine is probably second only to Word’s or OneNote’s. I actually keep my general ToDo lists in Emacs Org Mode since it’s a text file that can be passed around alot. But for general note taking, it’s lacking compared to just about any other offering. Only text can be manipulated, which is a good thing in many ways, but I want a little more.
Scrivener – Awesome writing tool for writers. I am using it for writing the book that goes with my Scheme compiler. Don’t ask how that’s coming. 
And even when I’m doing a document for something, like a technical spec for work or a teaching lesson, I use Scrivener to organize thoughts. You might say that Scrivener is the second phase of my personal writing process. I use OneNote for research and just a dumping ground for URLs and notes. When I’m ready to actually put text in, I write it in Scrivener, which then I use to organize the final layout and then print. I take the resulting Word document and add formatting in Word of course. But for general note dumping, Scrivener isn’t my tool of choice, though I feel maybe it could be.
Curio – I went back through my web searches and found several references to it. It seems pretty cool. I like the idea of the mind maps (though I didn’t try them out), and I like the general utility. The biggest difference seems to be that in OneNote, each entry is like a mini-Word document. You can embed outlines, text, graphics, and hyperlinks, among other things, in each little note, then move those notes around freely. In Curio, each item is one type (a list is a list, a picture is only a picture), so you can’t (at least as far as I can tell) write a note and embed graphics in it. Instead, the best I could find was that I could write a note and put a graphic near it and then group them. Not a bad idea, though I would miss writing lists inside a text note. The last thing is again the price. For $99, it’d probably be worth it if I used the mind map or if the note formatting engine were a little more like OneNote’s.
I also tried a couple of other products that seemed to be clones of others on this list already. If you know of something not listed here that I could try, I’m at least open to downloading it and trying it out for a few minutes.
From the research I’ve done this weekend, I think Circus Ponies Notebook is the closest I can come to. However, the few limitations it has makes me believe that I’ll just use Word 2008 Notebook View or Emacs Org Mode until such time I can find something else. Also, I smell a great opportunity here for Mac software. Something like OneNote (with even OneNote compatibility) would probably sell like hotcakes. Too bad I’m so busy with other things.
