SOHO Notes Review: Organize Everything!
- Extensive sync/backup features
- 11 types of notes to choose from
Anyone whose ever used a computer to take notes knows how frustrating it can be to have hundreds of Word documents or TextEdit files. You want something quick, but with enough flexibility to link in other files like PDFs and websites. Then inevitably you go to look for notes a week later, you can’t remember where you put them on your drive, and so the treasure hunt begins. Well note-takers, the treasure hunt has ended.
The main window is uncluttered, yet powerful.
Meet SOHO Notes, the anything and everything note-taking app. Put notes into folders and sub-folders, label them, encrypt them, scan them in, record and link audio files as notes, set alarms, define your own forms for quick notes, sync your notes with MobileMe, write them in full screen: the list goes on and on.
Power users are likely going to want to start out by heading up to the Preferences panel, where they’ll be met with appearance tweaks, shortcuts, blog publishing settings, MobileMe and iPod syncing options, backup settings, security, and more. SOHO Notes features a basic text editor with standard rich-text formatting options very similar to TextEdit. Each note’s title is highlighted by a bold navy blue title bar that really helps distinguish between different notes.
One of the pre-built forms is for software serial numbers
The app has an integrated web browser to allow web research to be done from inside the note taking area, and web archives can be saved to pull webpages down to the app. Notes can be viewed full screen, in tabs, and inline with the app.
Naturally everything is searchable inside the application, and SOHO Notes also fully integrates with Spotlight to make locating notes incredibly easy. Smart folders as well as custom folders can be made inside the app to help quickly sort the notes. The app also integrates quite nicely with iPhoto, Address Book, Mail, and iCal.
SOHO Notes functions in both single-user and multi-user environments. SOHO Notes allows remote databases to be accessed over a network, allowing for employees to share meeting notes and other company documents. Users can be assigned read/write privileges to certain folders and access a number of encrypted databases on a server.
The Database Manager helps users create and access shared databases
The amount of features is quite frankly staggering (way too many to list here, though we’ve tried), but the application feels very manageable and intuitive. A single-user license sells for $39.99, with a family pack for $69.99. SOHO Notes can also be purchased inside of the SOHO Organizer suite. Chronos has really done it with SOHO Notes. Its a clean, un-cluttered app, with an extraordinary amount of power. SOHO Notes is only compatible with Leopard.
I can no longer consider apps like these unless they have iPhone and cloud components. Evernote allows me to get to my notes from a Mac, a PC, a web browser, and iPhone.
I keep trying Soho Notes, but it never does anything for me. I want to be able to work in a space, not have a glorified finder replacement.
Zengobi’s Curio wins, hands down. As to Soho’s non-note features, I’d rather use Yojimbo or EagleFiler.
I’ve been using SOHO Notes since it was called StickyBrain. It has matured significantly over the years and can be used to store, index, and retrieve almost any type of file. I’ve used Curio, Yojimbo, DEVON, and a slew of others — none have proved satisfactory. I keep coming back to this app from Chronos. It is feature rich and just plain works.
I agree with Rick about the iPhone connection, and for some reason I’ve had this Notebook app stop working for me and kept me from getting at my data. Had to go back and forth with the support folks, but the issue was never resolved.
That’s another reason Curio wins for me… it syncs with Evernote.
Someone help me, please. I’m trying to find note software that’s as simple as MyNotes, but that syncs with iPhones. I’ve contacted the MyNotes developer, but he seems to have no plans for an iPhone app.
My problem with Evernote is how strict it is — if you make a new notebook and populate it with a few entries, you cannot manually rearrange the order of the entries within that notebook!!! That seems absolutely insane to me — organizational software that will not allow you to organize anything? Come one!
In Evernote, if I create a notebook with entries called “Monday”, “Tuesday”, “Wednesday”, etc., I cannot manually put them in whatever order I want. I would have to SORT them alphabetically, by date created, etc.
This is a pain in the butt, and I’d love a simple notes program that worked like MyNotes but that was better supported by the developer and that allowed me to organize my content INTUITIVELY and organically. Any ideas?
@ Rick Roberts – I agree that the lack of iPhone app is definitely a strike against the app in this day in age, however with a little extra effort it’s quite easy to get everything onto your phone. SOHO Notes does sync with MobileMe, iCal, and iPods. If you’re a MobileMe subscriber getting the content to your iPhone isn’t difficult. Another alternative could be to publish all of the notes to a Blog on a service of your choice, and then access it from mobile Safari, or through RSS.
In general, I see note-taking as a personal preference. SOHO works well for me, and the tasks I need it to perform. I’m an iPod touch user who spends most of their day in a non-Wi-Fi zone, so the iPhone app isn’t critical for me. The desktop application is pretty awesome though!
If you’re looking for a note-taking program with a different spin, check out my app, Pear Note ( http://www.usefulfruit.com/pearnote/ ). Its focus is to help you take better notes by doing things like linking your notes with audio and/or video and/or slides. Also, rather than forcing you to organize your notes, Pear Note has an integrated search feature that helps you to find anything.
I used SOHO Notes for a couple years. However, the more data I added the slower it became. Now I use the app called Together. I had a quarter of the data I have now in SOHO Notes, and it took literally 15 minutes just to open SOHO Notes. I don’t know if it’s because of SOHO’s OpenBase back end or just shoddy coding, but a speed increase could be had by going to XML or SQLite – which I recommended when they asked me how they could improve their software.
I would sure love someone to do an indepth comparison of all the note taking apps. I have used NoteTaker for several years and I really like its design and power, but NoteBook is looking good now, I tried Devon and Stickynotes before, but they and most SOHO apps tend to take over your machine, create a rather more complicated Finder and take up a lot of disk space overhead.
I have Evernote and Curio and they are great for different reasons. I am trying to work Evernote, Curio and NoteTaker into something of a seemless mega app.
Yet, I would really like to see how that would compare to the Devon and SOHO stuff, but I don’t want to spend to much time and disk space playing around with these …. Soo ,…
Would someone please compare ALL of these!?!?!?!? Every time I read a review of NoteBook or this one on SOHO notes it is as if the reviewer never heard of the other dozen apps that do the same thing!!!
Why read a review that says exactly what is on the software’s box?? Can we have a little critical thinking here?
I’ve used SOHONotes for years and still have a maddening love-hate relationship with it. IMO it has by far the best interface and set of features of any routine-use note-taking app. It is especially flexible in the ways it allows input, making it a snap to get docs into it fast without having to open the app itself. But it has a terrible history for bugginess, which has caused a lot of grief in the past. This has lately got much better, but for years the app’s forum was a storm of complaints and was finally closed down altogether. Support is very poor, done now through a kind of ticket system which is very slow, and replies are in my experience uniformly unhelpful – usually just a sniffy assertion that they have no such problem at HQ and recommending you trash the .plist file. In the Mac community, Chronos is a byword for bugs and poor support, and I personally have had more trouble with SN than any other app – and I have used hundreds.
Worst of all is the incredible slowness with which the database opens and is backed up. This is seriously crippling. I’m talking minutes, at least four or five, and far more for some users, which can be a disaster when you need info rapidly and don’t have the app already open. It routinely stalls shutdown if you set it up to back up then. Its alternative feature for backing up in the background is equally clunky – it’s intrusive and freezes the app for the minutes it takes to do it. All this seems to be due to a very badly written compression process. I know of no other app which takes so long to do any of this – though EagleFiler gets close when launching.
Syncing SN is also a huge hassle. You can’t just copy over the database, but have to make a special backup, copy this over to the other machine, then reopen the app there to update. This is unbelievably clunky in this day and age. MobileMe syncing is fine in principle, but I have never been able to get it work. The app spends long minutes apparently syncing but in fact copies nothing over. Preferences for this are confusing, as there are two different places where this is set up, and none of the troubleshooting methods recommended have any effect. Yojimbo and MacJournal, on the other hand, both of which also sync through MobileMe, work smoothly and seamlessly with never a problem.
However, having said all that, I still find myself unable to give up SOHONotes altogether, despite many attempts. For serious database work (research, business – I’m a journalist and writer) I use DEVONthink Pro Office and Tinderbox. For notes that I know I need to have with me always I use Evernote, because of its great syncing to other machines and the iPhone (iPhone Touch in my case), its OCR ability (allowing “scanning” with an iSight cam), etc. For notes that I need unfailingly rapid access too but don’t want to have clogging up my iPhone Touch, I use Yojimbo, and have transferred a lot of this kind of stuff over from SOHONotes. I have also given up SN for MacJournal for journaling entries. But for a lot of other routine material I still use SOHONotes, as I find I just can‘t manage without the advantages of its interface and ease of input.
If all this sounds like overkill, it is, and I’d cheerfully give up SOHONotes if Yojimbo, Evernote or MacJournal provided its features – but they don’t. Nor, incidentally, does EagleFiler, which I find also runs very slowly.
To answer MacGregor very briefly, the main differences between these apps, apart from those mentioned, are that SOHONotes, DEVONthink (or DEVONNote) and EagleFiler allow hierarchical nested folders, while Evernote and Yojimbo don’t, relying instead on tags. This is fine if you prefer tags, but not if you like to organize visually by hierarchy. DEVONthink is a heavy-duty database app with sophisticated AI searching and organizing features and OCR, and is really in a different class, though it will do all of what SN does (and much more). DT Pro also allows you to have more than one database, and to open them at the same time. You can scan directly into DT and SN, and take iSight pics in EN which it can search for text with fair accuracy. Only EN syncs to iPhone and iPhone Touch, though the devs of Yojimbo and MacJournal some of the others say this is in the works, I think I’m right in saying.
Sorry this is long, but I hope it’s of some help to MacGregor and others looking for comparisons. Note apps are a vastly over-subscribed field in the Mac world, so it’s impossible to discuss them all (Voodoo Pad, Notelist, etc, etc). But none of them seem to combine all desirable features. It’s frustrating to see how SN could easily lead the pack, but is held back by some very strange policies by the dev.
PS – Notebook (by Circus Ponies) is another possibility, if you like the literal notebook metaphor, which some swear by. It also allows you to have several databases open and to take webcam snapshots, and to export as a website (MacJournal is also good for this, at least for blogging). It can sync pages to an iPod.
I’ve given up on all these apps and now use the file system. After a while none of them can handle the data load of anything more than a marginal set of ephemera. While I learned to manage my date using Journler, I ended up using and then leaving DEVONThink, after testing al the others, as I discuss here:
Dating DEVONThink
Doug
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I have used Soho Notes since Sticky Brain but this product and its iPhone companion I consider to be utterly incompetent. Chronos, the maker of Soho Notes has not responded to my support questions in over a month and there are now apparent means of speaking to a real person (at all). The downloads (8.12) start to launch and then dies straight away leaving no trace that it tried to run except a note in the crash log. I wish this company were more consumer oriented or at least show some moderate amount of interest in helping me solve the problems I have with Version 8.x of Soho Notes and Note Life. I would not deal with this company again and it looks as though I am out of luck in getting any kind of support or a return of my money. If you plan on buying this product do so on a trial basis: do not send them money until it works on your computer.
Must agree with Keith about Chronos’s support. It still is among the worst out there, and it is just incomprehensible that a serious company can be so lax and standoffoish in its relations with its clients. They seem olympically unconcerned about their notoriety in this regard. Very strange.
However, unlike Keith, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the latest releases of SOHONotes and very impressed by the iPhone app. All the speed issues and sundry bugs that plagued SOHONotes for so long have now gone, even on my venerable G5 PPC, while synchronisation with the iPhone app (Notelife) is very fast. I synch a number of apps with my iPhone Touch (Things, Shovebox, FileMagnet, etc) and this is by far the fastest. Given problems with Shovebox synching, and the fact that Wonder Warp (the Shovebox dev) is as bad as Chronos for support response, I’m now doing everything I did there with SOHONotes. For me at least SOHONotes is finally back at the top of the list of notes and snippets apps – by far the easiest and most elegant to use. For me, only DEVONthink Pro Office beats it, and this is for fuller, heavy-duty archiving.
One beef remains, though. I can’t for the life of me get SOHONotes to synch with MobileMe and my Snow Leopard MacBook. For now, though, I’m giving Chronos the benefit of the doubt and assuming this is a broader problem with my system.
In short: be wary of the app, but do try it. If it works for you there’s nothing to beat it for interface, ease of getting stuff into it, a proper folder hierarchy (plus tags), etc. Much better than Evernote or Yojimbo in all these regards, IMO. Until you need support, that is…