Circus Ponies Notebook 2.0 Product Review

On Thursday, as I walked to the little refrigerator in our office to grab a soda, Holly, who was with Hapy and Carey going over new products, asked me if I’d write a review of Notebook. She knew that I’m one of the few people here who use it regularly, since I’m always saying how much I like it. So, here goes!

Originally, I used the Notebook 2.0 just as a basic note taking app, and to use as a phone log. The interface is designed as, obviously, a notebook. It’s easily customizable to suit individual taste, as a spiral, pad, or perfect notebook. But the more I worked with it, the more uses I found for it. Pages can be set up as text (in no particular format), outlines, or just plain lists. I communicate with a number of Small Dog’s vendors, customers and, of course, all of Small Dog’s employees. Notebook allows me to attach files (i.e. Excel, Word, photos, graphs, audio notes etc.) in their original format and relate them to conversations or projects right on the page with my notes. Having the ability to have weblinks, photos, and Address Book cards on the pages are also all great time saving features. Aside from the drag and drop method of adding images, Notebook also allows direct loading from digital cameras and scanners. And if you forget where you’ve put any particular file, it has a great Super-Find feature, similar to Tiger’s Spotlight, which allows you to find files by text, keywords or date created, among a few others.

The number of uses this software has are innumerable. It’s simple to use, easy to customize and is loaded with features to make organizing large projects stress free, and even fun.

Buy Notebook 2.0

Similar Posts

  • What Is the Archive Utility?

    A long-time Small Dog customer asked me about an item that fleetingly appeared in his dock. It was a generic-looking green icon with a zipper on it called Archive Utility, and when he used Spotlight to search for it, it was nowhere to be found.

    Many of the items you download and receive in your email are compressed files. File compression is nothing new, and is exactly what you think it is: when you compress a file, you make it smaller. This reduces bandwidth loads and expenses on the server side, and can help you save disk space on your computer. However, compressed files cannot be directly accessed; they must first be decompressed.

    Back in the days of twenty megabyte hard drives (my LC II had a 20 megabyte drive in the early nineties), file compression seemed more relevant for conservation of hard disk space. These days, it’s more often used to shrink email attachments and other downloads. Mac OS X always included a built-in compressor and decompressor. By right-clicking on any file or folder in the Finder and selecting “Compress” from the contextual (pop-down) menu, your Mac will create an archive in zip format.

    When you open a compressed file, Mac OS X launches an application called Archive Utility. Its sole purpose is to compress and decompress files. It’s located in /System/Library/CoreServices, and Spotlight doesn’t search there. If you poke around the /System/Library and /Library areas of your hard drive, there’s plenty to learn if you Google intelligently and use extreme caution when moving or deleting anything. Actually–don’t move or delete anything. Just explore and learn!

  • Print and Scan Setup in Snow Leopard

    Note: this article originally ran in Small Dog’s Tech Tails newsletter. Reprinted here because it’s very useful for Mac users in general. Mac…

  • Protecting Your Photographs

    Let me ask you a few questions: Do you have a digital camera? How many megapixels does your camera shoot? How many years and how many photos do you have on your computer? Now imagine this… tomorrow morning you wake up and turn your computer on. It boots slower than normal and all you see is a flashing question mark on a gray screen. Your heart drops and you start to think about all of the memories that made up your iPhoto library.

    The purpose of all this is to get you thinking about how many pictures you take every week and what would happen if one day you lost all of them. Could be 10 days or 10 years of photos; either way your losing all of those precious memories. Your best solution is to backup your files. The key to a true backup is to have your files in two places. My suggestion is to purchase a pair of identical external hard drives. Several hard drive units ranging from 250 gigabytes to 2 terabytes are becoming more and more affordable.

    Click here to see Small Dog’s selection of external hard drives.

    When you’re finished with your photo shoot, birthday party or vacation, store your photos on your computer and then back it up to your external hard drive. It may also be good to store your external hard drive in a different location than your computer and pull it out once a week to backup your new work. I like to go one step further and backup my backup. My setup includes my MacBook which is backed up onto an external hard drive which is then mirrored to a second external hard dive. This allows me to delete some photos off my MacBook to free up space while still leaving my photos on two different locations.

  • All Things Customized: Icons

    Though I resisted for a couple of months, I finally couldn’t stand it anymore: I had to customize the icons on my work…

  • Bamboo Fun!

    When you get your first Apple computer, you step into our realm knowing that you are purchasing one of the best creative machines…