A Note-Taking App for Mac OS X | Hacker News Reader

A Note-Taking App for Mac OS X

getxpad.com

11 pointsgrinich13 comments

I've recommended this on HN before. xPad is woefully lacking in some ways (e.g you can't even search your notes) but it gets some important basics very right, and as a result, find myself unable to part with it. To quote myself:

"The simple magic for me is that you can just Cmd-N and start typing, and then when you're done, Cmd-R to rename/title it. No saving, obviously, but also no shift-tab or clicking in a title field. There's also a services menu shortcut for clippings: Cmd-Shift-X.

Contrast with Yojimbo (and many others), where a new note defaults to the title field. You have to either press enter twice or tab three times just to get the cursor to the note field. Even the "Quick Input" panel asks you for a title and tags first."

Whether it is the best for you depends heavily on how you take notes, but if all you want is a simple frictionless notebook with RTFD pages, it's worth looking at.

When I said "best" this was what I meant. For me, it's the best blend of simplicity and functionality, essentially just being a text editor with a drawer organizer. In nearly all cases, my notes only require basic formatting and are short enough than they don't require searching.

For other uses, such as taking clippings, composing blogs posts, and keeping a journal, I'd wholeheartedly reccomend a more powerful app like those suggested in the comments, especially VoodooPad.

But now the title has been changed, hiding my blunder of a headline. Any ideas on how this happened?

I use VoodooPad, which is a very solid application, and to boot, it's written by an indie developer.

I prefer to take notes in Textile with TextMate. It's not hard to get the extra stuff, and then I can easily turn it in to HTML so it looks somewhat pretty. Then I can share my notes with other people as well. (I have TERRIBLE handwriting)

Best? Please explain.

Indeed, much of the feature list is comically facile, "create as many documents as you like... Documents can be sorted... rename documents, delete one or many, and export a single, multiple, or all your documents". None of the features are in any way unusual.

There may be good, notable things about it, but unfortunately they haven't communicated what they are to me.

I personally find that evernote is the best possible notes/ read "xyz" later setup. (and the backing up everything to a web account helps too :p). Its also great because I can store documents such as pdf or scans, such as copies of work agreements, and search them all later!

I just us the editor I like the most that I also code with.

I use Zotero with Minefield (Firefox). Works fine for me.

Zotero looks way cool- I'm going to check it out. I know you can view your notes online, but is there a Zotero iPhone/iPod Touch app that I could use to load my notes locally and edit them on my iPod Touch?

Not that I am aware of, but an iPhone app would be a great addition.

xpad is great, but i think it is no longer under development (which is why the author changed it from for pay to freeware).

I use ShoveBox, but then again, I'm biased.

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