BEAUTIFUL DIGITAL COFFIN

I've been using SOHO Notes since it was StickyBrain and being given away free via .Mac. There are lots of things to like.

I especially appreciate being able to save web receipts with a simple keyboard shortcut - never having to go near the app at all. But therein lies the trap! What I've found is that I almost never go near this app. In other words, it's a glorified digital coffin: what goes in rarely comes out. I actually go INTO the app to retrieve or consult things I've clipped perhaps once every two months. And I almost never create my own notes in it, only clippings. Crazy! But that's the truth. It's become a simple repository. Which is one reason I haven't bothered with the most recent upgrade.

The other way I use it is as a backup/syncing location for Memos on my Palm (rather than using Palm Desktop). But again, I create/read/refer to the notes on my Palm and almost never in SOHO Notes, which is just a backup - although once, when I wanted to do some mass editing on a whole set of memos, it was very convenient to do it in SOHO Notes.

It can, as pointed out elsewhere, be a bit slow. Especially since it backs up the database every time you open the app. This may be another reason why it isn't as integrated into my workflow as perhaps it could be.

As I get behind on updates I'm seriously thinking about alternatives. For example, Yep tags and manages my pdfs very nicely, so I no longer need SOHO Notes for that; ReceiptWallet handles web and other receipts very well (and has some nice specialised touches); and there are alternatives for simple backup and syncing of Palm notes, including one that comes with Missing Sync, which I use. And I know there are other clipping/note collecting tools that are worth trying. I've also been exploring Google Notes, which has the advantage of giving me access to my notes at work and home. So SOHO Notes could be on the way out for me. We'll see.

PS. gdnss - thanks for the warning. I've yet to upgrade to Leopard - the so-called benefits aren't sufficiently compelling so I figure I'll wait till the bugs are ironed out and more apps have caught up. But it's good to know in advance that I'll definitely need to do a SOHO Notes upgrade as well (or that migration...)

Warning: If you're still using version 5 and upgrade to Leopard you will find yourself with unusable SoHo Notes. I stopped upgrading after the last one which gave me no usable functions. I didn't realize I'd be stuck in this quandry.

I love all the features of this app, but it's so damn slow. For reasons unclear to me (I'm just a user), once I launch it, I sometimes have to wait a minute or two before I can enter text into a note. This occasionally occurs at other times, too -- it's hard to switch from typing into one open note to typing into another and I'm just sitting there looking at the beachball. Also, although you can do a kind of Searchlight search of the notes from a menubar icon, that is also weirdly slow, considering it's spotlight. Opening a category of notes from the collapsible sidebar window, also really slow. And it doesn't support tags.

Still, this is useful as a miscellaneous collecting tool, partly because it allows you to create a note while in another application using just a keystroke, without ever having to switch over to SoHo.

I'm still looking for a note software that I can use on a book project manage lots of and lots of text clippings with tags. It has to be fast and Notae looks good for this, although it seems kinda buggy.

This has got to be something like the twentieth note-collecting program I've seen lately. Every one of them seems to have its aficionados, so they probably all basically work if you want them to. What I'd love to see is a big comparison of them all.

I would be absolutely lost without this program.
Everyone, of course, has their own way of using it, but here are some of the things I store with it:

- Shopping Crap
-- Product Info (For consumer research)
-- Wish lists (books, albums, dvds I need to buy, etc)
-- Gift ideas for friends (hidden / encrypted)
-- Receipts (although I hate that I cannot directly drag and drop from my inbox)

- Temporary storage for things I need to look at or edit for various projects
-- Research articles for the documentary I'm doing
-- Drum tab I'm working on for a Meshuggah song

- General info for classes
-- Syllabus for each class
-- Professor's contact info
-- Quick overview of what I'm doing / need to do for each class

- Information I need for my documentary
-- Contact lists of cast and crew
-- Schedules for the above
-- Equipment rental information
-- Locations
-- List of current issues / problems I need to deal with

- Directions (webarchived, although it's sometimes a confusing process)

Anyway, I like it. If this kind of thing appeals to you, you may also want to try Yojimbo, which is, as far as I can tell, the exact same thing.

This used to be StickyBrain, but has since been merged with SOHO Notes, their upper-end program. This is a great program for managing lots of notes. I use it to sync on .Mac, my iPod and a my Treo.