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August 05, 2004

OP - What?

In his blog Fishbowl, Charles Miller describes what he sees as flaws of the current version of OPML. My experience with OPML is limited. I have been looking for a notebook application that would run on OS X and allow me to keep track of entries easily for a long time. Among other things, the extensive hoist- and search functions of Hog Bay Notebook were convincing me to give this application a try. So far it has been a very pleasant experience.

Here are a few unique features of Hog Bay Notebook:

  • The outline metaphor is used for nested documents

  • You use the bookmark drawer to quickly find nested entries

  • You can link from one document to another within it

  • You can use one notebook for all (which tends to get larger) or divide them by topic, which is something I'll have to look into sooner or later.

  • You can use it to create outlines for Information Architecture or similar things, just like with Omni Outliner, but Hog Bay Notebook is giving you more features

  • You can export to various formats such as {{link http://www.opml.org/ OPML}}

  • You can also assemble your entire notebook document in a RTFor Word file

  • You can use the cloning feature to create a template-kind of document and add information in different sections in different documents. Example: One moment you're randomly writing down notes for your next book in a Hog Bay Notebook document. Next you may write something else in a different notebook and you go "wait a minute, I could use this for my book too". So if you have the book-idea document cloned, your new text can be marked, and it will appear in the exact same way in the mother document. Multiple documents can update one. This is particular handy when you have multiple Notebook files – say one for programming and one for your company, and you want to have cloned documents in each one of them to be updated, so you don't have to do it manually in the second one.

  • You can enter Apple Script code within the document entries and they will execute when you work in a related document (clone). For an example, you start writing your book ideas and it becomes more, so you have a whole chapter now. Your Apple Script can take just the title of each chapter and create a content list automatically!

  • Hoisting will only show a selected part of your notebook. If you have a large notebook file with dozens of outlined entries, you can select a few, chose Hoisting from the menu and it will filter them out and not show any other entries

  • You can use this for various applications, like when you want to split up a notebook in two or three, or you want to create a bookmark just with the few hoisted entries.

    • Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 10:05 AM | TrackBack