Circus Ponies Notebook: Take Control of Your Notes

Posted by Weston Wheeler on 08/13/07 in Education, Home & Personal, Productivity, Utilities

Circus Ponies Logo Notebook is the Circus Ponies’ flagship application. They claim this app can organize your life. I have tested this claim, and in the following review I will discuss how Notebook does just that.

For years I have been wanting to use a computer in class to take notes, but every application I use ends up becoming too cluttered, or I end up with a giant mess of poorly organized text files. Every Mac user has his/her own note-taking app of choice. Some love xPad, others love Scrivener, and even more just stick to the tried and tested Microsoft Office for this task. While I have tested each of these, I was really getting frustrated with the lack of a decent note-taking app in OS X.

I have used Notebook since the day I bought it. From the moment I first opened it, I have been kicking myself for not finding this tool earlier. It really is a student’s best friend. At its base Notebook is a full-featured text editor with support for multiple fonts, Unicode, attachments and ruler settings.

Circus Ponies Screenshot

CPN is very versatile - it can be used as a note-taking app, to-do list, or a simple organizer. Many users will love the sheer simplicity, but underneath there is a lot of features that make this app really quite powerful. On the surface the GUI looks just like a notebook, that takes notes with pages and tabs, but take a look inside the preferences and you will see the amount of customizing and formating you can actually do with this app.

Circus Ponies Screenshot

In my opinion, the best features of Notebook are the collapsible notes and bullet points, but one of the things that really makes this tool out-shine the competitors is its ability to pair your notes with their context: Responding to a professors email can be linked to the original email, or picking up your sister from a recital can be linked to an address book entry etc. Also a built-in spell checker and word completion tool makes your notes come out right the first time, error free.

You can try Notebook 2.1 free for 30 days and then get a full license for $49.95, a student license for $29.95 or a Family Pack for $99.95.

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4 Comment(s)

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Steve said on

August 13th, 2007 at 12:08 pm

Good review, insofar as it goes. I do not find one-off reviews such as this particularly useful. My preference would be to know how, in this case, an application compares to it’s competition.

Terry said on

August 13th, 2007 at 1:55 pm

Speaking of comparisons… I have tried Circus Ponies Notebook and many other info organizers. I have, after considerable testing, settled on Journler. It is flexible, well designed, stable and very useful. I use it all the time and now I can’t imagine living without it. Journler it’s free for personal use?

Steven Owens said on

August 13th, 2007 at 10:24 pm

Good overview of the program, but it seems as if there are tons of programs that do similar things…I think a comparison article is in order! I actually prefer OmniOutliner Pro.

Erich D said on

August 15th, 2007 at 3:23 am

Notebook has quite few other great fetures that really do set it apart form the normal “note” app — more info can be found in the great ScrrenCast online episode on it:

http://www.screencastsonline.com/sco/Shows/files/SCO0096-cpnotebook.html

A couple of th efeatures that set it part for me:
- poweful index feature, independnet of Spotlight
- easy clippings service and linages between items
- great auto-sorting of items
- Web page export that preserves each distinct Notebook

Oh, and the ability to have multiple “notebooks” without having to use RooSwitch.

Scrivener could be used as a note app, but it’s much more in line with Avenir and Jer’s Novel Writer - a creative writer’s best resource. Actualy pretty good in conjunction with Circus Ponies Notebook.