It's the Intermission
A Creative Coffee Break

One of my ongoing projects is an historical play I plan to write. The subject requires a lot of research. I do so love to induldge myself with research. The story involves some complicated and little known material from San Francisco, circa 1830-1860. I’ve been reading and collecting material for several years.Quite a bit of material I’ve transfered to PDF files. Some of the material, however, remains in books. Some of the materials are JPEGs, a few RTF and Word documents, and even an Excel spreadsheet or two.

I have struggled with a convenient way to catalog my research. More accurately,  even with OS X’s Spotlight feature, I have not been able to easily call up a given computer document on command. Even with organizing them into digital folders. The books and paper are easy. They’re sitting on a bookshelf or in a file folder. The computer documents are numerous, and, in and of themselves, useful. However, I end up scouring through several before I find the one I’m looking for, wasting a lot of time.

I’ve tried on many software solutions. One that has worked, for a handful of years, has been StickyBrain, now known as SOHO Notes (Commercial, $39.95). I’ve used this program as a dumping ground for free form notes, and it’s easy to find those notes when I need them. I wish the “Get Info” button did not produce a pop-up screen. I’d like this info to be displayed along the side of the browser. Particularly when I’m looking at images or PDFs. Such is my major complaint about SOHO Notes. And that I prefer the old name, StickyBrain. Nothing has come close to replacing it for me, until…

I came across Papers. I love the interface, which allows me to see entire lists of PDF, as well as other files, by title. Papers is for people, uh, scientists, working with scientific papers.It’s a Mac only product and costs $39. As I’m a scientist only in my imagination, Papers may not survive it’s 30 day trial on my laptop. And as for free form notes, SOHO is still my baby.

I’ve tried out a lot of progams, many of which are perfectly good note organizers.  Some even use “mind maps.” As visual as I am in my thinking, the mind maps just overwhelm me. Many programs remind me too much of SOHO Notes to replace it. Below, you’ll find the short list of what I’ve tried. All of the software works on OS X. Note that I don’t care about WinDoze. All of them have demo or trial versions available. The list is in no particular order.  Check ‘em out and decide for yourself, because my idiosyncrasies, surely, are not yours. I’ll be sticking (*ahem*) with SOHO Notes for now.

• DevonThink Pro – allows PDFs, image files, Word and RTF files. Everything I needed. Just didn’t like the “look” of it. Commercial,$79.95. $39.95 for Devonthink Personal..
• NoteList – Basic notetaking app. Text files, images, free form. Shareware, $20.
• NoteMind - PDFs, Images, other files. Could only add one file at
  a time, as far as I could tell, which I found annoyiing. All notes defaulted to “untitled” and required hand editing. Mind maps I could actually understand. Shareware, $20.
• KIT (Keep It Together) – Nice product, handles all types of files. Reminded me a lot of SOHO Notes, which if I didn’t already have, I might have stuck with KIT. I used the company’s RSS Feeder software for a long time, which I liked, too. Shareware, $24.95.
• CopyWrite- Nice interface. Too basic for my needs; text files only. Considers itself a tool for writers.Exports to RTF. Shareware, $24.99.
• Mori – Basic. Easy to use. A lot of people I know swear by this program. Shareware, $39.95.
• Yep – I really wanted Yep to save me. Sadly, tracks PDF only. Indexes all the PDFs it can find. Be prepared to have it take over, while it indexes, the very first time you run the app. Shareware, $34.
• Yojimbo - Imports text files, and PDFs. Does not import image files, although allows drag and drop of images into notes. Solid product, by the company that brought us one of my favorite apps, Too much like SOHO Notes. BBEdit. (I use that for html editing.) Commercial, $39.
• MyNotes - Basic notetaking. Text files. Allows drag and drop image files, although the user is cautioned these will impede performance. Not very robust. Shareware, $19.95.
• NovaMind- Mind mapping software. Commercial, lots of different options, starting at $49 for the Express version. There’s a NovaMind Screenwriter for $119.
• DocumentWallet – This is a nifty note organizer I nearly forgot about. Shareware, $29.95. Jeez, for ten bucks more, you can buy SOHO Notes.
• Journier – Excellent! Donation-ware for personal use.

Shareware has gone up a lot in price! I don’t know why some of these aren’t classified as commercial packages, (according to listings on VersionTracker), except perhaps they are one person shops?

For more a more notebook type interface, I still use Aquaminds Notetaker (Commercial, $69.95). While Notetaker will hold all kinds of files (images, webpages, pdfs, on and on), I don’t use all that power. I use it for each project to keep a random notes about the play, detailed information on each play act as I write along, character biographies, and the play outlines. For these specific kinds of notes, the notebook interface delights me. For intense research on a play topic, I always go back to SOHO Notes. Go figure.

A good alternative to Notetaker are Circus Ponies’ NoteBook (Commercial,$49.95).

I gotta say, neither SOHO Notes or Notetaker cost me a lot when I initially signed on for them.

I’ve played a little with reference/bibliographic software. such as BibDesk (freeware), BookEnds ($99), and EndNote ($299), Sente ($89.95).  I don’t need such specialized software. I just can’t help looking. Although RefSaver (Shareware $20) would suit my tiny need for a reference formatting program. Reference Miner (freeware), which searches the Library of Congress, PubMed, and Amazon, has made its way to my dock.

Once you’re done with all the demos and trials you can stand, a great way to get rid of these applications, once and for all, is AppZapper. It’s $12.95 with free updates for life. Can’t beat that. I found this at MacWorld a couple of years ago, and Appzapper‘s power and ease of use keep my laptop free of the ghosts many applications leave behind.