Cure the Mac Note-taking Boogie Woogie Blues

My Mac is cluttered with notes, snippets, photos, images, links, and folders full of stuff so old they need to be thrown away (but I’m afraid there’s something valuable in there). Jeffrey says I need a note taking app. There must be a hundred of them.

NoteBook Or NoteTaker?

Let me tell you that I have notes on everything, every meeting, every activity, dating back about 20 years or so. And, they’re not all digital. Some are spiral-bound notebooks. Some are on my Mac. Some, I don’t know where they are.

This week, at Jeffrey’s suggestion to start at the top and work down, I’m trying out two massive note taking machines; NoteTaker and NoteBook.

These are two beastly note taking apps cut from the same cloth.

NoteTaker

This one is more notes and ideas and outlines, and also uses the spiral notebook interface with custom tabs. It doubles as a planner with to-do lists. It’s a journal.

Media elements can be dropped into NoteTaker at any spot.

There’s are options to sketch notes, add graphics anywhere, create custom notebook layouts and designs, and share notebooks with others. Since NoteTaker runs on Mac, Windows and Linux PCs, and has both a server and express version, it’s aimed at business, organizations, and academia.

NoteBook

Of the two, NoteBook is my favorite. So far. It’s similar in many respects. NoteBook has the traditional notebook interface, which is useful as a journal, notes, outliner, and collector.

Collector? It holds everything. Action items, notes, due dates, iCal sync, Address Book, videos, audio, snippets, photos. Think of NoteBook as a spiral notebook that holds everything digital.

Here’s what has me leaning toward NoteBook and not NoteTaker. The iPad version.

It took about 30-minutes for me to figure out that this is the future of note taking. It’s not my Mac, though having NoteBook on the Mac has advantages.

NoteBook on the iPad is what the iPad is all about. The visual is exactly what you see. A graphic, muscle-bound note taking dynamo.

You control almost every function. Fonts and attachments. Outlines and free form notes. There’s even voice annotation (I would love to have video annotation, too).

Hello? PDF markup. That’s worth gold. Here’s the caveat, and why my search remains in progress.

Both these apps are beasts. Complex beasts. You won’t tame either within a week (though the iPad version of NoteBook is very friendly) because the feature set is enormous. Both have try-before-you-buy options, so you can dig into each for a few weeks. Neither is inexpensive. Both are capable. NoteBook is more friendly than NoteTaker, and if it had an iPhone version, I’d be sold in a minute.