[My favorite series] Circus Ponies Notebook

I have been using Mac for one year, I am very satisfied with the performance and appearance Mac gave me. Because I believe in 『efficiency stands on good tools』, I am always looking for wonderful tools for some specific purposes. So, today is the premiere of My favorite series posts by starting from introducing the Notebook software developed by Circus Ponies

This software is the most elegant, beautiful, intuitive and useful notebook software I’ve ever tried. After I downloaded the trial version for several hours, I purchased an academic license. The following introduction starts from a briefing of interface, some issues I found and how I use it so far.

The UI

The first time you open Notebook, you can either start from a new one or choose a template by clicking the 『New from Starting Point』 option. I haven’t tried all of the templates, but I found out that using a whole new one is better for me. FYI: These templates are not customizable in this version, hopefully they will have this feature in the future.

This is how it looks if you choose 『Manage a project』 from the above window. As you can see, every notebook has its Contents page(I usually rename it as Table of Contents). There are several different kinds of pages provided by Notebook: Divider, Note, Writing and Cornell pages.

Divider page: A page which contains multiple Note pages and it only shows the outline of its Note pages just like the Table of Contents. A divider page can have nested divider pages. Moreover, you can rearrange the order of the containing pages in a divider page conveniently by just dragging the outline items up or down.

Note page: The primary page you will use to write your notes.
Writing page: As far as I can tell, it is identical to Note page…

Besides the Table of Contents page, there are two navigation alternatives which are Tabs and Content Cards. As shown on the pictures below, every Divider page will have a Tab once you created it, and you can quickly navigate to the page by clicking the corresponding Tab. Also, you can add a Tab for a Note page as well. Another option is the Content Card, as shown on the left one, it is just like the Table of Contents page.

Circus Ponies provides comprehensive manual for Notebook, so I will not discuss how to use it in this post but talk a little bit about the issues I confronted so far.

Some Issues

Because of the fact that Notebook does NOT support template customization(which should be a typical feature), I would suggest that you create a template Divider page once you created a new notebook. This is to get around the problem that we often need the same outline for a Divider page in a notebook. For example, you might want to create a notebook to store the web research for buying a DSLR. You can create a notebook, and add a Divider page named Canon EOS 1D Mark IV, and there are several Note pages in it such like Specification, Price, and etc. However, you definitely will search for multiple DSLRs, and traditionally you can just copy all the Note pages from the one you just created and paste it to the new Divider page. As a result, you could create a Template Divider page in the very beginning and copy/paste it to every Divider page you created. Nevertheless, this is not the ideal solution, it would be wonderful if we could just create a template page then apply it to the designated pages, and once the template page is modified, the corresponding pages will be automatically modified.

Generally, you should have only one notebook for a single category of events. For instance, you might not want to have dozens of notebook files for your DSLR search.

In terms of the file management of Notebook, once you created one, you just select the destination that you want to store it. Notebook does not have the ability of uniformed storage, whether this is an advantage or not totally depends on individuals(I like it BTW).

Based on the Circus Ponies forum, the Notebook for iPad is under development and will be published ASAP. One critical issue I can come up with is the synchronization, because Notebook does not manage the files but let users to decide the location of each file, it could be hard to synchronize them. However, I would pretty much like to see the iPad version of Notebook, so that I can go to the meeting without bringing my MBP 17″ which is really heavy. I can take notes using iPad and synchronize it to my laptop when I got home.

How I use it

Basically, you can use it as your traditional notebook, you can use it to make a plan, do some research, writing journals even creating a formal report(just as what Word does), and in a very organized way.

Right now I have three notebooks, one of them is keeping track of every activity I and my teammates perform for our project. I will record everything we do for the project including diagrams, documents, codes, and any files and comments. And I can easily know which phrase we are in, how many works are pending to do, I can even export an PDF or Word file when the client asks for a report(of course I need to revise it). And after the project is finished, I have this notebook so that I can go back to search for any specific ideas, diagrams or anything else I need to reference in the future.

I can imagine this software will be always running on my Mac because we always have something to record at all times.