Review: Mac Notepad 8
- Article 8 of 19
- MacUser, March 2010
There are better options out there for your note-taking needs, including the free ones in Mac OS X.
Think of all the things you could do to improve Mac OS X's built-in note-taking functions, whether you're using Mail, Stickies or TextEdit. In fact, that's probably what Apimac should have done before releasing version 8 of Mac Notepad, a note-making program that not only does very little that Mac OS X doesn't already, but actually loses many features along the way - and asks you for £28 for the privilege.
Mac Notepad is a relatively standard application built around notes. Using a standard three-pane window similar to Address Book's or Mail's, you can create individual notes, give them titles, customise text fonts and colours, and sort them into categories. You can also password-protect them, back up your database of notes and email them. To save screen space, you can 'iconise' the application down to a floating palette containing just a search box. New to version 8 is the ability to drag and drop text into and out of Notepad. But that's about it.
The notes are all kept in a separate Valentina database and there's no import facility to get your existing Mac OS X notes into Notepad. There's no MobileMe syncing to sync notes between different computers, no Spotlight integration, no iPhone app with which to sync your notes and no option to attach files to notes. There is an export facility for saving notes in RTF, HTML, OpenOffice and Word formats or to some iPods, but this requires manual intervention and is no better than TextEdit's export functions.
Where Notepad is superior is its speed and its ability to organise and search large numbers of notes, as it scales well, has a Recent Items menu for quick access and can search by partial text or regular expression. However, for the same price, you can get similar functions and more from Missing Sync for iPhone, which also comes with its own, near-identical notepad application that syncs with a free iPhone app; or you could buy yourself Scrivener, which is a far more versatile product altogether.