A competitor, but unpolished

I’ve been a heavy user of nvalt and evernote. I have experimented with Microsoft’s OneNote. I have tried to shanghai Ulysses into serving as a note taker/organizer/filer, even though that’s not exactly its main purpose. I drifted into trying Notebooks, in spite of the high (excessive?) price, because 1) I’ve had trouble finding a satisfactory iOS app, 2) I’ve been getting a lot of annoying crashes from nvalt, which seems to no longer be in development and 3) I saw a lot of advantages to a notes application which makes proper use of directories.

The iOS app is stellar. I’m surprised it took me so long to find it, given all the inferior solutions I’ve worked with. The Mac app is seriously lacking in polish, as others have said (in some ways it simply doesn’t feel native, the full screen mode is awkward, I can’t find a keyboard shortcut for global search, etc.), but it’s also quite powerful. I’ve been using the iOS app exclusively and mixing the Mac app with Ulysses, replacing Evernote & nvAlt. The clean use of directories as notebooks (so obvious - and yet, nobody does it!) opens up the application beautifully, which is exactly what I was looking for.

If notebooks continues to gain in polish, it will have been a great investment. As it stands, I think it’s currently better for me than nvAlt and Evernote, despite the beautiful simplicity of the former and the great polish of the latter.

big_anemone about Notebooks - All Your Documents, Files and Tasks