Your Mac does a lot of cool things straight out of the box: You can edit movies and make music, or turn to more mundane tasks like surfing the web and checking email. A tool for organizing scraps of digital information, however, isn’t built into the iLife suite--although it probably should be. And so the daftly named Green & Slimy has released Thoughts, an information manager designed to serve as a catch-all for your digital scraps, enabling you to store, search, and organize them in useful ways.
You can mix graphics, tables, and formatted text together in your Thoughts pages.
Thoughts is a freeform affair that you can use for a variety of purposes, such as setting up to-do lists, taking meeting notes, writing story outlines, drafting blog entries, researching info on the web, organizing bookmarks, storing snippets of code, and even digital scrapbooking. How you use Thoughts is largely up to you--its interface is more blank slate than organizational dogma.
The software uses a book as its basic metaphor. Books rest on a virtual shelf, where you can store as many books as necessary to organize your information. You can use one book to manage to-do lists, for example, and another to keep track of webpage bookmarks. Individual books can contain any number of pages, and built-in editing tools let you adjust font, style, and size attributes; create lists using a variety of styles; and even make tables and copy (or drag and drop) images into place.
Separate notebooks keep your thoughts organized.
We were able to easily embed hyperlinks, links to local files, and other pages in a book. Thoughts also exports to RTF, PDF, Word, and ODT (OpenDocument) formats for easy data portability. Books are automatically saved as you work, and a built-in search feature quickly drills down to the specific information you’re looking for.
Thoughts makes data entry easy, but once our thoughts have been entered, we’d like more to actually do with them. Indeed, the software isn’t nearly as robust as more mature idea-management apps available for the Mac. We’d like to see better integration of iCal and Address Book information, built-in backup support (though Thoughts does work on iDisk and the ever-popular Dropbox), and support for audio and video annotation, to name a few.
Thoughts helps you organize, find, and share ideas in a format that’s easy to understand and a breeze to work with. But Thoughts is still very much a 1.0 release, lacking features present in other more robust apps for to-do lists and data organization.
Thoughts
COMPANY: Green & Slimy
CONTACT: www.thoughtsapp.com
PRICE: $32.75 (converted from 24 euros at press time)
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.5.6 or later
Simple interface. Easy-to-use editing tools.
Lacks robust feature set.
