I came across this app today and immediately thought “why hasn’t merlin posted something like this on 43Folders?” And then a couple hours later, here it is. nice.

I’ll have to try it though. have only read about it thus far.

so I played with it a bit more . way cool.
to take one of your ideas a step further Merlin: I tried to type text into quicksilver, append to, notational velocity. alas, it doesn’t take it. you get the little ‘bong!’ that it isn’t allowed.
THAT would be totally ideal I think, for keeping your lists. at least for me since I don’t like a lot of little text files around.

Good catch, Nick. That’s actually for a reason that’s sort of cool, if a little limiting, I suppose. NV is all a self contained app that keeps your info locked up tight, and, like all the good ones, stores your password stuff in the OSX keychain.

It would be neat, to me, if this worked just a bit differently: if NV were just a functional front end to a directory of text files—if it retained almost all of the same functionality, but kept each note in its own separate text file. That would be golden for my particular workflow.

Whatcha think, Zachary? You up for a little Lazy Web? :)

Curses! Foiled again!

I’ve been playing with Tomboy on my work linux box and was planning on either porting it to OS X or writing something similar from scratch. Yet another itch that was scratched before I could get to it :).

Merlin only lives to annoy you, Mando. :-)

You can get SBook5 — the grownup version of Notational Velocity here:

http://www.sbook5.com/

It’s got a change of name [methinks for legal reasons] but the same engine underneath and it does a lot more.

Good link and great-looking app, Allan.

Why “grown up,” though? What’s your favorite feature or 2 as apart from NV?

yeah… i’ll add this to the list… i’ve also used mac journal, voodoo pad, and sticky brain. i’m just beginning to investigate gtd but have been trying out all of these note/text apps for 2-3 years and i’ve yet to settle on one i like.

one thing i’ve not seen mentioned in relation to gtd: filemaker pro. anyone using it for tracking tasks and projects?

The author adamantly says “… the user need never lay hands on a pointing device” but to delete a note you have to use the before-mentioned device twice: to select the note and… to click on the Delete button (Cmd-D doesn’t work).

Of course you can suppress the warning on deletion and… never delete any note — but find some reusable titles because you cannot rename them either :)

But the usability is mainly very well thought — I wish more apps were that cool and simple.

Sbook has been around since Nextstep. I don’t think it has any relation to NV. I don’t remember how it stores its information- probably not plain text.

The idea of figuring out what kind of information you’re entering and formatting/sorting it accordingly is pretty nice, but Sbook is a far from killer implementation.

Sbook looks cool, but, if I understand correctly, it is an address app for the most part. I don’t think I’d use it for storing notes.

while it is fast and snappy, i’m not sure of the purpose or long term value unless you just like to write short notes and search for them. if notes could be tagged that might be useful - so that you can start to put your notes into a framework. if they could then be ordered you’d be able to structure a document. anyway, i’d like to see someone using it for a real purpose..

gemp:

To rename a note: command-R double-click it Notes -> Change Description

To delete a note: command-delete (the backspace delete) Notes -> Delete Note

More mouselessness: Help -> Keyboard and Mouse Shortcuts

Hmm. Too bad NV is totally borked in a Japanese (and probably other China/Japan/Korea) environment.

As users of CJK languages face the need to enter thousands of different characters on a keyboard with only 100 or so keys, we use a small program called “input methods” to first enter the phonetic representation of the kanji characters we need, hit space, then choose the right kanji from a candidate list of homonymous characters. All while doing this, the text I just typed is essentially in limbo: it resides in the input method’s buffer, but has not been typed onto the text field yet. Only after I hit return for the second time does the text get “released” into the field.

As NV seems to track individual keystrokes in the search/create field, when I try to type Japanese text into the field, the keystrokes - which hasn’t been “released” from limbo yet - erroneously registers, rendering NV basically unusable. (iTunes, BTW, properly waits until the text has been finalized, before using it for incremental searching.)

The input method turns out to cause trouble in many other keyboard-based apps, including Quicksilver and AutoPairs. TypeIt4Me also cannot be used in CJK, because TypeIt4Me itself is another input method program, mutually exclusive with the CJK input methods.

Interesting app - very reminiscent of Brad Rhodes’ “remembrance agent” (from about ten years ago, but still around, works within emacs in a similar way. Didn’t have this locked-encrypted-database nonsense (“great, one more way for me to lose data” - after StickyBrain, no more closed-format databases) and was targetted at wearable use (augmented memory) more than scrapbook keeping (though looking at the comments above, that’s as much about how the user sees the app, as what the app actually does, blind-men-and-elephant style…)

Oddly, Notational Velocity’s search is a substring, not a set of keywords; in a world that equates search with google, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense…

I just tried out NV a couple of days ago, and am still giving it a shot, but for me, it doesn’t compare with Voodoo Pad. I do wish I could do NV-type searches on my own little desktop wiki, and have things stored all nice and neatly in one single file.

Oh, and I do with that I could append text from QS directly to either. That would be killer app functionality as far as I’m concerned.

There is a new link for NV:

Notational Velocity

You shall know us by our Notational Velocity - An interesting OS X note taking application. As stated on 43 Folders, “All Notational Velocity does is record little notes, but it does that in a way that is completely elegant, intuitive, and incrementa…

Starting again with the Polish

It’s been a long whilst since I’ve done any work learning Polish. I’ve been so busy that it’s been months since I last looked at my books. That does, unfortunately, mean I’ve forgotten much of what I learnt earlier in the year. Not so useful.

…