Organize those Documents, Notes & Thoughts - What I left out and why | Macintosh Software, Review, Software Comparisons


Organize those Documents, Notes & Thoughts - What I left out and why

In some online references there are applications that come up as alternatives to, or are listed in the same basic category as, the applications I chose to review. I left out a raft of applications that do not provide the organizational capabilities of the group in my comparison table. I addition, I removed a few after testing them side-by-side with the nine that remained.
I didn’t include Mori, even though on their own website they position themselves between OmniOutliner and DEVONThink. One of my original tests of all the apps was to import my Accounting folder, which I then modified to inporting a “test folder” with a variety of file types. Mori doesn’t even bring in the PDF’s via import — only text files — so it fell off my list immediately.

I originally had NovaMind in my list as well. It is another app that allows for the creation of mind maps. It is much more a project management / mind map application than a file / document organizer. In addition, it is well above the price of the other software on my list, which all range roughly between $20-$49 rather than $99 — with the exception being the more robust versions of DEVONThink, but I held my review to DEVONThink Personal to keep within the “under $50” price I was shooting for personally.

Notae was in the running until I got 90% of the way through the feature-by-feature comparison. When I do my comparison of “Note” apps this one will be in there as it is very full-featured in that area but doesn’t have enough of the capabilities to push it to a more encompassing organizer status. It does have some really nice export features for a note app: native format, txt, txt to iPod, rtf, rtfd (with attachments) xhtml, .doc, .xml, AIFF, speech to iTunes . It has autosave and backup capabilities as well as full screen view mode to eliminate screen clutter while working on notes.

MacJournal fell into the gap between note/journal software and organizer too. Like Notae, it just didn’t have enough of the organizer features to keep it in the running for comparison here. I do, however, make very heavy use of it for blogging and have a number of journals that I keep in MacJournal on a wide range of subjects.
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