Jotz - 1.3.60u

I have used and disliked this app for at least three years, yet never gotten it together to choose an alternative -- they're not all that good, either. Jotz is un-mac-like, meaning the UI is fine so long as you're the sort of person who is willing to get totally immersed in one particular developer's idea of how things should work, and for whom having a swiss army knife (features, features, features) is more important than having a good simple blade. I think Jotz is a kludge, messy and disorganized; the advanced features (90% of which are useless to 90% of likely users) are NOT slipped "under the hood." Doesn't a revision number like "1.3.60u" tell you something? In four years they couldn't bear getting to 1.4? I'm not a conformity zealot -- check out Skitch for a truly weird but clever image manipulation app. But an app should be no harder to use than necessary, and require as little training as possible -- we have lives.

I have settled for using Jotz in a very limited way for several years not just because I'm too lazy to learn the rest, but because I intensely dislike having to accumulate skills good for one app only, the opposite of what the Mac is about. I wish Apple would just address the need for an elegant notepad (with Internet sync, spellchecking, intuitive organization)! Regardless, I'm looking for a new alternative and came to this page looking for suggestions.

So is Jotz for you? It depends. For folks like the people who rave about it here, the ones who know every keyboard shortcut, it's genuinely great. For those like me desperate for something that it at least stable and functional, it's OK. (And heck I did pay for it, can't throw that away. :) For the majority of people who are put off by the *horrible* interface (I have rarely seen anything this awful, honest, in 20+ years of using the Mac), it is not.

I suspect Jotz's ratings are artificially high because many of those who tried it and then hit delete didn't stick around to leave a rating. Try it, use it if it works for you, but expect better.

I bought this and used it, and it was okay. But I much prefer Yojimbo by Bare Bones, a really excellent data organizer that's far more useful (although not really a stickies/notepad since it's more of a database). Anyway, I recommend you give Yojimbo a spin before getting this .