NoteMind: Review

I’m playing around with some new software right now called NoteMind. It’s in the vein of DevonNote and Yojimbo (et al), but has some standout features and a simplicity that I adore. I’m within a couple clicks of purchasing it right now. I could actually see it replacing Yojimbo for me, but can’t, at this moment, live without Yojimbo’s tagging and smart folders. However, there are a few things that I think NoteMind does better…

Mindmaps

Create folders to store your information and NoteMind will create mindmaps from the data stored in the folder, with items connected based on their relation ship. You can edit the MindMap by adding and removing connections, changing color coding and adding text. They’re not mind blowing organizational tools, and not fast enough to create to be great brainstorming tools, but they’re pretty cool and good for visual people who need to organize a pile of data.

Searching

NoteMind interfaces with Spotlight to allow for indexing your documents and searching for related documents. It displays the results as a ranked bar chart showing the relevance of the results. It can also search all types of Spotlight data, including contacts and todo items. There’s also a “related websites” search that does a pretty amazing job of finding relevant website results.

PDF Handling

Like Yojimbo, you can print from any print dialog right into the NoteMind database. It handles PDF’s really well, displaying previews and indexing readable text.

Data Input

NoteMind allows for several methods of getting data into it, including shortcut keys, dragging and dropping and manual input. These make it equal to Yojimbo and superior to DevonNote. The main window is dockable to any side of your screen and you can drag any valid type of data over the tab and pick a folder to file it in. I haven’t discovered any bookmarklets similar to Yojimbo’s for archiving web pages yet, so I can’t comment on that. You can have several databases in separate files and open multiple windows with the different databases simultaneously, even docking them to different sides of the screen for project management.

So I miss the tags, and it may be enough to keep me with Yojimbo for now, but NoteMind is an excellent project organization and management tool and I intend to watch its development closely, and probably fork over some cash after a little more experimentation.