Testimonials
“This is the only note-taking software I’ve been able to use comfortably for more than five minutes. Full-featured, stable, and, above all, transparent. Notae finally gets it right at a downright reasonable price.”
“Adrian L. D. Sampson”:http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/20405
“Notae is a minor stroke of brilliance.”
“Crucial”:http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/20405
What is Notae?
Notae is a full-featured and lightweight notebook with instant full-text searching and complete import and export functionality. It can even read your notes out to iTunes, and thus your iPod. It includes a Mac OS X Service to grab any text or file selection and keep it as a note. Its open document format (XML or SQLite) allows for other creative uses. Really, it’s TextEdit on performance-enhancing code.
As a notebook, Notae is centered around the data collection and organization processes. In any given note program the user performs any of five tasks:
For each of these five tasks, Notae has tools that make it a quick, easy, and powerful solution to your data-gathering and note collecting.
Import
Notae can import multiple file types into your notebooks and creates a new note with each one, preserving the title, creation date, and last modification date information with the new note. You can import a file in any of the following formats:
- plain text files
- RTF/RTFD
- Microsoft Word and WordML
- HTML
- Safari WebArchives
Point Notae towards a folder of files and it will recursively import the folder, finding anything it can read and adding it to the current notebook. Great for bringing in exports or old, saved documents into the collection.
Once you’ve imported your old web archives into Notae for storage and searching, you can also add new pages in one of two ways. The first is the clippings service whereby you can take the current selection in the active program and tell Notae to make a new note out of it. In Firefox or Safari, simply select the whole page and activate the service to create a new note in the background.
You can also use Notae’s URL import feature by dragging any link from Safari into the notes list in Notae and Notae will fetch the page, graphics and all, and save a new note. If you just have the URL, that’s fine; Notae has quick access to this feature with a keyboard shortcut (⌘⌥N) or from the File menu.
In fact, Notae loves your data so much that it will take it any way you can throw it at it. Drag text or files to the notes list or application icon in the dock and Notae will suck the data in automatically. Drag URLs and it will trigger an import. Notae’s all about zee drag-n-droppen.
A Service Tip
In System Preferences, under Keyboard and then Keyboard Shortcuts, create an “all applications” shortcut for “New Note With Selection” and give it any shortcut you wish. Now you can use any keystroke you wish to suck in data.
Edit
Notae supports all of the standard features of any good Mac OS X application: multiple fonts, colors, writing directions, tables, links, graphics, and named styles. You have the power of a full-featured word processor at your fingertips while in this lean, mean, note-taking machine.
Your fingers are typing, so why should they need to use the mouse? Notae was designed with that idea in mind, so your hands don’t have to stop typing — highlighting, strikethrough, kerning, baseline, size, and others are all available via keyboard shortcuts.
Done with that article? Saving that story? Lock your note and you will never accidentally change the content. Lock notes in a batch or one-by-one, or quickly unlock a note for a simple change before closing it up again. Oddly enough, not being able to edit a note is just as useful as the powerful editing Notae brings your unlocked notes.
Have a widescreen Mac? Rotate Notae’s editing view and you can keep all of your vertical real estate for editing and see even more of your list of notes. Win-win.
Classify
Once you have your data, how do you find it later? Sure, you can use Notae’s lightning-fast search to find the content of your notes, but what if you want to find a group of related items? Tag them. Notae uses the popular categorization technique of tags to allow you to create a folksonomy in your own documents. Working on a report for work? Just start typing: work, report, client:bob. Notae will break up what you type, creating categories or reusing existing ones as you go. No fuss. When you want to find your note again, simply search for the name of that tag and it will come right up.
Sometimes, however, even tags won’t do it. Sometimes you just need to write a note about your note, so Notae lets you do that as well. Every note has a comments field where you can leave notes to yourself such as where you were when you wrote the note or where you left off last. No need to keep search fodder in your note, use the comments area for keywords or descriptive phrases you know you’ll search on later.
Search
Notae screams through full-content searches of your notes. It can search through megabytes of information in an instant, no matter if the words are in the title, the content, the comments, or the tags. Notae will find your note in the midst of the chaff.
In addition, Notae makes sure Spotlight knows all about the contents of your notebooks and even pre-fills the search for you when a document is opened from Spotlight, just like Mail and Preview.
Export
Data in, data out, right? Who wants their data trapped inside a program forever? Notae can export your data to files for use in most any standard program using standard formats such as plain text, RTF, RTFD, Word DOC, WordML, and XHTML. Notae even exports your notes to AIFF using Text-To-Speech.
Building on that, Notae can tell iTunes to import those AIFF files and even encode them and can the huge AIFF. With this you can actually sync up audio versions of your notes with your iPod for review on the go, which is a great solution for memorizing information.
