If you’re going crazy saving bookmarks or copying and pasting Web research into Word docs, NoteBook will help keep you sane.

 

It may be the information age, but have you figured out what to do with all that information - scattered emails, sticky notes, browser bookmarks, desktop documents, and even random slips of paper? With NoteBook, you can file that information in one place using a familiar interface: the spiral notebook.

 

NoteBook is a digital organizer for recording notes, storing files, creating to-dos, and clipping bits of text from emails or webpages, all of which can be organized into sections using tabbed divider pages. Notebooks can include several types of pages, such as plain note-taking pages and an Outlining Page that organizes everything hierarchically, creating new bullet points when you press Return and nesting information under disclosure triangles. You can drag and drop bullet points to change the hierarchy, and you can drag in any file you want to store there, such as photos or Word docs. (Pictures can be scaled, tilted, or adorned with photo corners.) If you want to create to-do items, you can add checkboxes and due dates to any line.

 

NoteBook can also save clippings, which is crazy useful for Web research. Simply highlight some content in the Safari browser, then use either the Safari > Services or the contextual menu to save that snippet to any clippings-enabled page in your notebook. NoteBook will automatically grab that content, along with the URL, complete with a scissor-snipping sound. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work with apps that don’t support the Services menu or contextual menu plug-ins, such as Entourage and Firefox.

 

Each notebook entry has annotations, information that helps you search for content. For example, there are annotations for creation dates, due dates, and keywords (such as attachment, image, or clipped). NoteBook automatically creates an index for each type of annotation, as well as for things like major words, attachments, and all URLs in the document (grouped by domain name). You can use these indexes to locate something specific, or employ the Super-Find function for searches involving multiple criteria.

 

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NoteBook indexes all of your content for easy searching.

 

Other perks: NoteBook does voice annotations, so if you take notes while recording, you can start playback from any new bullet point. The app also comes with numerous templates (recipes, research papers, trial prep, and more), and you can save notebooks as PDFs or export them to the Web.

 

A few little things bugged us, though. You can’t drag and drop to change the order of tabs; instead, you have to reshuffle things through the Contents or divider pages. If you’re in a cell and you select a picture and then press Delete, it erases the whole cell rather than just the photo; and if you have multiple pictures in a cell, you can only get the text to wrap around one. The pages have dog-eared corners: Clicking the fold flips the page, but to go back, you have to click to the right of the fold (trust us, it’s not obvious).

 

The bottom line. NoteBook is a great way to organize projects, papers, vacation research, and anything that requires managing information from multiple sources. If you can live with a few minor quirks and the time it takes to get organized in the first place, this is a fabulously straightforward way to do it.

 

COMPANY: Circus Ponies

CONTACT: www.circusponies.com

PRICE: $49.95 standard license, $29.95 academic license, $99.95 family pack license

REQUIREMENTS: G3 or later or Intel processor, Mac OS 10.3.9 or later, 256MB RAM

Creates automatic outlines. Stores photos and documents. Lets you clip content from webpages. Universal binary.

Some unintuitive controls and interface issues. Clippings don’t work with certain apps. A few crashes.