http://snipurl.com/xht4c

A very good review of Notebooks, otherwise. I’ve used the app for a few weeks & appreciated its “note/notebook” metaphor, which approximates the “document/folder” structure of OS X and Windows. Nesting notebooks (folders) is a necessity in any modern document-organization software.

The bookmarklet in Notebooks is also useful, though its saving of webpages is erratic: one day Macworld.com pages save, into Notebooks, like any other webpage, the next they don’t. (Variations in a webpages contents seem not to be a factor in this.) I had the same trouble you did with the New York Times. About 15% of the webpages I’ve tried to save via Notebooks’s bookmarklet failed to save at all; the bookmarklet needs work.

But the lack of text-formatting in Notebooks’s notes drove me to test other apps. I can report that Quickoffice’s Connect Mobile Suite has a similar nesting folder structure *and* better text formatting than Notebooks. It’s more expensive ($9.99) but its folder-navigation scheme is superior to anything in the App Store.

In Notebooks (on the iPad), navigating among nested folders, &/or moving a note or notebook, involves a lot of tapping and scrolling:

- tapping a folder’s information arrow, which
- opens a popover containing
- another mini-folder icon, which
- summons a second popover, through which you must
- scroll to find your intended note or notebooks

By contrast, Quickoffice’s folders display in a constant hierarchy, revealed in columns from left to right (just like Column View in an OS X Finder window). It’s more familiar, from years of desktop-OS interfaces, to simply drag documents and folders from folder to folder (& to/from email, & to the trash), preserving the visual hierarchy. One window for everything—no popovers. This way of organizing files is much more like a desktop PC’s method & beats Notebooks’s nonstandard interface.

You can look in the note properties (by tapping the blue disclosure arrow for the note in the note list) to see the word count.

Another positive point I’d like to add is that I contacted the developer Alfons on a couple of occasions, with suggestions and to notify hIm of a problem, and he was very quick to respond. For the problem I reported, he had an updated version of the app submitted to Apple for approval within a couple of hours, which is unbeatable support.

All in all, a great app from a great developer, and I haven’t regretted buying it in the least.