Circus Ponies NoteBook - 3.0 (v355)

This is not a rant. Hopefully I come across somewhat balanced in my review.

I paid for and have been trying to use this obviously inspired software for almost a year now. Unfortunately there have been several issues, one critical, which have forced me back to Microsoft Word out of necessity until they are quashed.

1. CRITICAL: Having spent a lot of email time with the techs, I am informed that there is a conflict with Adium, Bonjour and mDNSResponder that causes Notebook to fault out to the ''all licenses are in use'' dialog when mDNSResponder crashes--and then provides no way to save work before it quits out. All I'm given is an ''OK'' button to push. While I'm a bit anal in ''oversaving'' my work in progress--basically when I stop typing, I hit CMD-S to save--one day I lost over a page of work and I realized I just couldn't take this kind of chance anymore. This issue is fairly new and cropped up after the first version of 3.0. I never had this happen before that. Something changed and needs to be reversed--in my humble opinion.

(For the record, Adium is a wonderfully useful and inspired software that puts all IM chat alternatives (MSN, Yahoo, GTalk, AIM/AOL etc.) ''under one roof'' and makes interacting with them simple--without advertisements--and it's free. I will not be forced to sacrifice one good piece of software for another when I have a perfectly good alternative in Microsoft Word.)

2. USABILITY: There are ''glitches'' on CTRL-clicking on tabs to bring up the Tab Inspector. It apparently gets ''stuck'' on the previous tab and wants some sort of ''closure'' before ''moving on'' to the next tab you wish to modify. Only by ''tinkering around'' by selecting various tabs, pages at random to ''make it forget'', will it ''move on.'' This feature is definitely in need of ''therapy.''

3. USABILITY: Overall the preferences and settings are not entirely intuitive--often to the point of confusion in some cases. Things just aren't where you expect to find them. This is a big ''slow-downer'' of an issue that seems to call out for a bit more organization.

I love the presentation and organization of Notebook overall and would love to see a more stable environment--but I just can't take the chance to lose work anymore.

NOTE: I have been told that ''I am the only one having the Adium/mDNSResponder/Bonjour issue. I have a hard time believing this and would love to hear if there are any more of us out there who can perhaps fast-track resolution on this issue.

I've been seeking a replacement for Attain's In Control for years now, and while none of the current outliners really comes close, I'm dumping Curio (which I've used for the past year) for NoteBook. Curio has some great features but the developer has been unresponsive to a few requests that would make it a truly great outliner, and it's got some serious speed issues. Oh well. NoteBook is fast, intuitive and very powerful and flexible. Resizable file attachments is a nice plus missing in many competitors including OmniOutliner and NoteTaker. Super Find (in combination with keywords and "stickers") is a great feature. One thing I'd really really like to see is for "Super Find" results to include the children of topics found by the search. That way I could tag just the main topics I want to retrieve in searches - as it is now I have to tag every single subtopic, which is a royal pain.