Mac Notepad 3.0.2

Taking notes and keeping tack of them must be addicting; here’s another fine product to practice your craving

Reviewed by Harry {doc} Babad

Developer: Apimac http://www.apimac.com/notepad/ Support: Submit a question (ticket) from the website $20 USD Trial Period, open but the printing features are disabled and no more than 15 notes can be added. Plus those nagging startup windows…Yuk. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.2 or later, not universal binary. Release Date: August 33, 2006          Download Size: 12.5 MB Audience: All user levels Strengths — Mac Notepad helps you organize any piece of text you may want to keep on hand. Weaknesses — Nothing significant, but the product I now use allows me to work both with text, formatted test and graphics. The software was tested on a 1 GHz dual processor PowerPC G4 Macintosh with 2 GB DDR SDRAM running under OS X 10.4.8. Product and company names and logos in this review may be registered trademarks of their respective companies. Disclaimer: When briefly reviewing share-freeware I will often use the developer’s product, functions and features descriptions. All other comments are strictly my own and based on testing. Why need I rewrite the developer’s narratives, if they are clearly written?

Publisher’s Summary

Mac OS X is great but it still continues to lacks a note pad program into which you can freely paste and copy any piece of text you may want to be at hand. Mac Notepad lets you save and organize any piece of text you may want to be at hand: you can paste it in, drag it from other applications, drop it as a text file from the Finder or, of course, write it yourself.

Introduction

Once again, dear readers, my affair with notepad, ToDo and related products came to the forefront. A year ago I reviewed Apimac’s Mac Notepad and found it an interesting and useful, if not perfect program. After reading the developer’s descriptions of the improvements made to the product, I knew it was time to test it again.

Working With

Installing this application is simple. Open its .dmg, and drag it you’re your applications folder.

I’ve previously reviewed version 1.6 for macC July 2005 (3.5 macCs). In re-reading my earlier review, I was pleased to note that many of the issues I had with the program have been fixed, but as you will read further in this review, I turned up a new can-of-worms the made using the product awkward. Not fatal flaws, bur certainly not as good as the product deserves.

Testing by Importing Notes From shadowClipboard — I put the product through its paces by copying about a (RTF) dozen formatted text items from shadowClipboard using the same categories I’ve previously created. Then I created and formatted a few notes just to test that aspect of the interface. After checking the appearance of the individual clippings, and doing a bit of reformatting, for esthetic reasons only, I was satisfied that I could add material easily to the product.

Using the Find Features — I then tried various variations of the Find feature (see below) to look for imbedded words in my baker’s dozen notes. Initially the Find function seemed not to work. However, after I, both rebuilt both the note collection index and database all features of the Find feature worked fine. You access the rebuild function in the products preferences pane; [I just struck out in frustration — updating both; so I don’t know which update did the job. [The product has no save command, but perhaps takes a while to integrate new material into its database and indices.]

Where the Stuff is Stored — The location of Notepad's data, useful should you want to backup your notes is

 the tope level of your hard drive > Users > <you> > Library > Application Support > Apimac/Notepad > Notepad File.

However, we at macC urge all of you to do routine full hard disk backups. Using tools like SuperDuper to create a bootable full backup will keep you out of major trouble when gremlins strike.

A handy recents (items) menu will help you keep track of your most recent edited notes. Notes can be edited at will: different by using your choice of fonts, styles and colors. Apimac developers have added a new Align text feature that I found useful, at least esthetically. . All of these formatting tools are available for tuning the text inside a note. If you need your stored text on paper, you can always print it.

I was pleased to find that I could assign a title and a category to each note. This allowed notes to be easily accessed by category from a popup menu, or by content simply typing the text to be found in a search field. [I don’t remember the earlier version I played with as having that feature.]

Do Easy And Advanced Searching — Mac Notepad gives you two search options, Easy Search or Regular Expression.

Easy Search will match any text you entered in the search field even in a not contiguous manner. For example "nice girl" will match "Mary is a nice girl" as well as "Berenice is a little girl".

Regular Expression is an advanced search method based on patterns, for example "nice|girl" will match either "nice try" and "pretty girl". More info on regular expression can be found on many websites such as the dedicated page of Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_Expression.

Other Package Features

Version 3 of Mac Notepad sports the brand new Iconize feature, just a click and your note pad becomes a handy and small window that stays on top of all the other windows so you can find it easily and get again it with a click.

A password check button lets you protect your personal notes with a password. If this option is selected, at the opening of Mac Notepad a password dialog box will be displayed. To gain access to the notes it will be necessary to enter the correct password. [I’ve been burned using such features so this aspect went untested.]

Upgrading from Older Versions — The developer provides a limited manual that provides information on upgrading older sets of notes.

Discomforts and More

This was a particularly frustrating re-review. It was an expectations thing! Although many of my earlier problems with the software were solved, in detailed testing — less than three hours, I found too many items that were inconvenient or cumbersome to use. Let me list the ways! As a result of my findings, I don’t know whether to laugh hysterically or cry.

No Undo Feature – I accidentally pasted unneeded material in a note but the tradition Command-Z undo was not available. So I had to scroll though the note deleting material by “cutting” it out.

27 Letters Limit in a Note Title or Category Name — Humbug!

I Can’t Color Code Categories — Am I missing something – this is such an obvious feature, common to many applications?

I Can’t Create More Than One Blank Note at a Time – The ability to create a batch of notes would be useful when I need to set up more than a single note from a complex source document.

I Can’t Select More Than One Note From a List Of Notes — This makes it awkward to assign or reassign categories as my needs change. What ever happened to the traditional grouping items in a list (or window) using Command-Click?

The Ability to Paste a Note’s Contents to an External Document is Awkward — I tried, in the absence of a detailed manual, a number of methods of trying to paste my notes into a MS word document. The only way that worked was to first sect all in a note > copy the document to the clipboard > paste the information into my MSW file. I could not drag and drop a note's contents from my notes list. Neither did any of the paste functions add material to my external document, the seemed only to function within the notes collection. Am I missing something?

Exporting Notes — I was initially delight that the new product has enhanced a note’s formatting. But also when I exported a formatted note, all I was able to export were the words as plain unformatted text, useless for most of my needs. After all, I’d gone to the trouble of formatting a note, and zap it was gone. I don’t know why the developer did not allow expo to RTF, but I sure miss such a feature. [Yes I know I can paste the note into a word processing document and keep the formatting intact, but that’s beside the point – awkward, awkward.

A Weak Manual – The lack of either a real help file and an incomplete manual make it difficult for user to learn the functions of the tools the developer has provided. For example what is a Tab function? What are the limits on the import and export functions? Enough! To make life easy for a user a manual need to explain all menu and preference items, especially where they are not completely compliant with Macintosh conventions.

A Lack of Ability to Create Link Inside of a Note — Duh, this is the first product I’ve recently tested that doesn’t allow one to designate properly formatted text (a URL or email address) as a functional link.

Spell Checker Needed — Again I must note that most other programs I’ve recently tested take advantage of Apple’s built-in spellchecker, something useful when you’re creating a note directly in Mac Notepad? For me such a feature is essential, since I type with two fingers, often hitting between the keys.

Conclusions

The good news – This is a better product than version 1.6.6. The developers have significantly enhanced its interface, and provide features that allow notes to be attractively formatted.

The Bad News — The are a large number of either undefined features or just plain awkward interface characteristics that make this product less pleasing to routinely use than I’d like. For now I’ll stick to shadowClipboard, which also allows me to store images. With all of my discovered shortcoming I must rate this product only 3.0 macCs. Either I liked versions 1.6.6 better or I’ve become a more detailed reviewer — readers take your choice.

Call for feedback: Have a favorite shareware app you like better than NotesPad? Let us know (and why) – email Harry with the product, website for downloading and the reasons you like it.