Product Announcements – Alfons Schmid of Salzburg, Austria has released ‘Notebooks for Mac 2.0′, a major upgrade of his productivity application which has a strong focus on text processing and also allows users to manage task lists and organize files and documents in nested structures. This unique combination ensures an uninterrupted flow of ideas while collecting notes, creating documents, consulting supportive documentation or gathering ideas and breaking them down into tasks.
Notebooks for Mac 2.0 has been rebuilt from ground up to address the shortcomings of previous versions: it has become a native Mac application which perfectly integrates with the macOS system, and it matches the functional scope of its successful iOS counterpart. Notebooks 2.0 supports smart books, contexts tags and advanced document processing tools which are well known from “Notebooks for iPad and iPhone”, but it also adds additional features which are not yet available in Notebooks on iOS. This makes Notebooks for Mac 2.0 a more than equal sibling.
Notebooks for Mac 2.0 takes full advantage of being a desktop application and presents its contents in a familiar three-pane document browser with outline, document list and document view. It allows users to selectively hide the browser’s columns or open documents in separate windows and tabs. Windows provide an optional breadcrumbing navigation bar along the top which makes it easy to navigate to other documents without consulting the document browser. Support for history buttons, dark theme or distraction free modes are a given. – “Notebooks for Mac 2.0 is finally the application it should have been from the start. If feels like a Mac application, it is light weight despite its capabilities, and it supports the writer’s workflow in a very unobtrusive way” Alfons Schmid comments.
Notebooks, originally designed to do away with paper notes, has evolved into a powerful text processor. Users can create formatted documents with styles, attachments, tables, and checklists using WYSIWYG style editing, but they can also create formatted document from plain text using Markdown (Notebooks includes two Markdown flavors) or Fountain, a markup format for screen writers. For those who prefer working with plain text, Notebooks offers numerous assistive tools: indent and align lists, automatically insert closing characters for matched punctuation marks, emphasize the currently edited line and keep it centered on screen, display line numbers or highlight Markdown syntax are a few examples. They can be selectively disabled like many other features in Notebooks. – “A tool should support the writer as best as possible, but it should get out of the way, and ideally, the writer should not even be aware of it. This is what we try to achieve with Notebooks” the developer adds.
Writing aside, Notebooks is also meant as a place to store and organize documents and files of any type: email, PDF documents, web snippets, or any other reference material. Notebooks supports unlimited nested structures (books) to arrange documents by topic, subject, project or any personal preferences. This makes it easy to separate private notes from business documents, client data from journal entries, or a novel’s chapters from each other. – “Notebooks stores all its documents as regular files on the Mac’s file system. No complex import or export procedures are necessary, the user always remains in control and can access the documents even without Notebooks. This is in strong contrast to the numerous apps that lock the user’s documents away in databases”, Alfons Schmid remarks.
Task management is another one of Notebooks’ integrated building blocks. Any book in Notebooks can display its contents as a regular list of documents or as a list of tasks. With the flick of a switch a collection of notes or documents turns into a task list with options to assign due dates and alert times. Tasks can be marked as “in progress” and ticked off when completed. Like regular books, task lists may be nested, so users can split complex projects into smaller packages which are easy to manage. – “Note taking often goes hand in hand with task management: a quick note sparks off an idea, generates a handful of todos, and it is just natural to handle them directly in Notebooks rather than switching to another app.” the developer says.
With this unique combination, Notebooks has the potential to replace multiple separate apps:
* Word Processor for WYSIWYG editing
* Text Editor for processing plain text
* Markdown and Fountain composer (including an HTML to Markdown converter)
* Task Manager for managing simple or complex projects
* File Organizer for any type of documents
* PDF Converter
* eBook Creator
* Document Archive
So whether users want to draft or outline a business presentation, collect ideas for a novel or type a chapter of a short-story, save web pages for reading later, write an entry in a diary or journal, tick off tasks, or just capture notes and ideas on the go, Notebooks is the all-inclusive application that will effortlessly handle it all.
Notebook for Mac is available for $35.99 on the Mac App Store.
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