Free, good looking, fast (so far).. color me impressed. And I access my notes on iOS, Mac, Windows, Windows Phone and Android?
Maybe I'm being idealistic but I'd love to see Microsoft become a truly cross-platform "enterprise-quality" software house. There's tons of great software out there, but rather little that works seamlessly (or even well) across iOS, Android, Windows and the Mac.. and with its resources, inhouse expertise, and no truly successful mobile platform to evangelize, Microsoft seems well placed to take on such a role.
I would love to see this happen. Right now though, the sheer amount of fighting I do with the Office suite on Mac..
Rant mode on:
Remember how people used to feel about accidentally clicking on PDFs before Adobe cleaned their act up and the better third party readers came along? I'm that way right now with Word and Excel. It takes a full 30-60 seconds to spin up and actually render the damn paperwork, sometimes it's not that big a deal if I can make it to the dock and hit force quit before too much time has passed.
Outlook is downright execerable. The search feature simply does not work the majority of the time. I can be looking at a subject line, key that subject into the field, and the messages don't appear.
I have to do a monthly-ish database rebuild or else I get non-stop "failed to save" error messages regarding appointments.
Mail.app might be pretty spartan and have it's rough edges, but dammit, the basic functionality works without being babysat!
This is basically the same as on the PC – Microsoft has shown a few signs of changing their internal culture but for a long time they apparently prioritized new features over improvements to existing features, which meant that most of the bugs / UI mistakes I remembered from Office 2000 (or even 97!) are still present in the current version. Something like switching to asynchronous networking would make daily life better for millions of customers but no PM wants to lead a release with “UI freezes less frequently”
I have to search multiple times to get any results, with the bonus that a single MOC conversation will show up as multiple, separate entries for every time it was saved.
Also the search starts from the oldest mail onwards, which is really handy when I need to find something that was sent to me a month ago. And my mailbox has over 4 years of mails in it...
Microsoft would benefit from a separate division of small groups making stuff that's simple and "just works," then expand the company into the new products, as Macintosh grew from Apple. Right now, Apple is vulnerable in this regard.
I've been looking forward to OneNote on the Mac for years. I installed it and found out there is no option for offline notebooks; all notebooks appear to be synced through the OneDrive cloud. WTF? There's not even the option to encrypt notebooks in the cloud. I'm just not going to share all my personal thoughts and notes with the NSA. I'm disappointed.
> The future is in the cloud though, and OneNote has always
> (for the ~3 years I've been using it) worked this way.
No, it has not always "worked this way" and it still doesn't across the board. I've been using OneNote for ~13 years (since the 2000 version). And in fact, the Windows versions continue to support offline notebooks despite Microsoft's attempts to shoehorn people onto the cloud.
A rather common OneNote usage scenario I see is a OneNote notebook on a company file share, or a shared Dropbox folder. OneNote supports multiple concurrent edits of a single notebook.
Which is great! My business is based on cloud computing. I totally see the value of syncing my business notes through the cloud to my other devices. But I need the option of flagging certain notebooks as private and not to be synced. So I guess I'll stick with Yojimbo for personal notes.
Or try Turtl (https://turtl.it). We're early stage, but everything is private by default (client-side encrypted) before syncing to "the cloud." Your data is available everywhere but completely private. This is great for small businesses who don't want to have to worry about whether what they're uploading is sensitive or not.
>I installed it and found out there is no option for offline notebooks;
It scares me the way this seems to be a statement on the future of Microsoft office. The windows 8.1 styled version of onenote functions the same way. It is also crippled so that you can't lock sections the way that you could in onenote for desktop.
I like how you can run your own server. Have you considered integration with services like Dropbox? That's my go-to for syncing data between systems. I understand that would make monetizing the product more difficult though.
You aren't the first to suggest this and it would possibly make it easier for people to get started. There are two main problems though: monetization (as you brought up), and also the fact that many privacy-conscious individuals may not even have a Dropbox account to begin with because of its implications.
I'm always open to suggestions though. If there was a viable way to charge for Turtl while also making it easier for people to adopt, I'm all ears =]. I think it would be hard to charge a one-time download fee for an open-source app though (and open source is essential for anything dealing with crypto).
I'm honestly not sure what the best way to do that would be. Perhaps a guide on your website of how to configure the server to sync via Dropbox (or other syncing folders), but with a request for donations at the top and bottom of the article. "If you found this useful, please consider..."
and no OneDrive for Business support still. Really tough to sell any company on using that service unless they're a homogenous Windows environment. "It's kinda like DropBox except you have to always use Windows".
Microsoft: supporting BYOD as long as you're bringing Windows.
On a positive note, it's nice to see Microsoft being a good ecosystem citizen and using the Mac App Store. OneNote is visually pleasant, at the same time familiar to Windows users but not foreign to those accustomed to Mac OS.
I guess it depends on what you keep in your notebooks. Business notes in the cloud, fine. Personal stuff I keep notes on -- medical history, financial info, etc. -- all in the cloud, possibly encrypted with some key owned by MS also in their cloud, living forever? Nope.
Don't be silly, local notebooks are a really useful thing when flying and when out of range of cell service (like camping, which is a great time for continual thinking without distraction). Without a capability for offline notes it will be less useful than if it had that capability.
> Not sure how well the merges work in practice, though.
Not too well in Evernote has been my experience. It seems like every time I work on something offline for any length of time it gets into a manual merge bucket.
Meh. Against my better judgment, I downloaded it and poked around. Predictably, it does not play well others. Most notable, there is no export functionality. There is a 'Share as PDF' which is (a) not the same, and (b) broken for me because 'my email program is not set up properly' which is false. Hard to trust. (Evernote has a fine export capability, fwiw).
One Note will, however, appeal to people who prefer 'structuring' over 'tagging'. In fact, if you prefer tagging, look elsewhere. The tagging support here is abysmal. There are tags, but they are canned and the user can't add their own tags. So you have 'Definition' and 'Idea' (which thankfully is not "Idea!") and 'To do priority 2'. And only the ones that the people at MS thought you might think were important. Even more bizarre, they seem to be only visual labels. You don't appear to be able to search for items matching a given tag. Wtf. Am I using a computer or not?
I will say that they seem to have nailed all the account management, in particular two-factor auth, for the 'microsoft accounts'. But they did this largely by copying google's two-factor auth stuff. Which, to be honest, is what I would have done too since it's pretty good. Anyway, they don't appear to have screwed that up. That's a plus and not super-easy. Separate from One Note though.
The tagging fiasco and lack of export are both unconscionable though and embarrassing, imo. They are not an early entrant here; they need to do better than the competition, not notably worse. Plus this is an old product for them, just new to the mac. Bill, where are you? Surely this is easier than Malaria.
tl;dr "It's not the same as evernote". I think that's a good thing; if two products are identical, it's hard to choose between them.
Also, if you think Microsoft's account management stuff is well put together, you... clearly haven't tried to manage a bunch of windows 8, XBox, skype and live accounts for an entire family over the past couple of years. It's a mess, and the only answer MS ever has for issues with an account is "make a new one".
To provide another opinion: Apple does this to, .mac, .me & icloud oh my don't forget about the iTunes account now.
In case you are wondering I switched my household, parents and several friends to apple products since 2002 because it was easier to provide help.
I sometimes wish there was a magic button I could push to merge everything into a unified single sign on for <insert company name here>'s products. It took a while but Google did it in a weird way that didn't make me very happy either.
Oh yes, Apple is a serial offender too - my iPhone is stuck in a world where the iTunes store account and iCloud account are on separate apple IDs, and I've got no idea how they relate to the email addresses I can be reached on facetime through. Neither of them are associated with my apple developer account, either. I'm sure this identity stuff shouldn't be so hard.
Tagging is simply not how OneNote does things. If you're looking for that, use something else. Where OneNote excels is in giving you a tool to organize and manage your structured content. Personally, I prefer that paradigm since it gives you so much more control as well as allows you (in my opinion) to organize your thoughts and ideas better.
Isn't folder structuring a subset of tagging? How can it 'give you so much more control'?
Not saying that the extra freedom from tagging is only good, but it sure is more flexible than folders and tabs.
Agreed - However, I'm still weary of the internal OneNote Format - I haven't poked around, but last time I checked, it was a big binary undocumented blob basically - so the lack of a proper structured export is somewhat worrisome.
The UI looks great though - if only office for mac proper could follow with the same quality, it would be great.
I'm actually working on an org-mode onenote sync tool right now and the files are stored in an xml format of some kind. With very little knowldge of the format I was easily able to parse out all todo lists from the blob (which is a zip file btw).
Have a look in ~Library/Containers/com.microsoft.onenote.mac/Data/Library/Application Support/Microsoft User Data/OneNote/15.0/OneNoteOfflineCache_Files
Any sandboxed app has its data under ~/Library/Containers/<app>, then from that usually under the Data/Library folder, which is a kind of mirror of your user library folder, just holding that stuff the sandboxed app is allowed to see.
All I see locally is a ".onecache" file - a binary file that appears to contain the notes themselves, and a directory named "OneNoteOfflineCache_Files" of attachments (embedded images, etc.) I don't recognize the header on the onecache file, so I'm guessing it's proprietary.
I use OneNote a lot as long as I'm on Windows or Android and for me it easily beats Evernote, mostly because of Evernotes buggyness.
Now that a lot of the OneNote team seems to be around here I'd like to mention two issues with OneNote:
* Metro/modern/app-version doesn't support password protected notebooks. Client side encryption should be nice as well.
* Sane (>2005) tagging. Why oh why do you have to use the mouse (or several key combos + arrows in a row) to choose one of a list of predefined tags? (The checkbox feature is nice though.)
Tried it, and yeah, lack of export features is a deal breaker for me. I'm sticking with Org-mode. Well, I know this is a different animal, but then most I'd use something like this for structured outlines... (and I can export the contents to files that other people can use...)
No print and no export functionality are a deal breaker for me. I want to own my data, but unfortunately even my own data could only live inside Microsoft's domain. This is the vendor lock-in that I don't want to face.
how is it essential? I've gotten plenty of work done using onenote on my surface pro and it's been months since I've needed to open a onenote file from the filesystem.
I just want to chime in on how frustrating it is that you can't save Outlook emails in a standard non-mircorosft format that another mail client can understand (even Outlook on Windows) - apparently it saves it as ".olm" format (Outlook for Mac). Serious WTF here.
For this reason alone, I'm still using a Windows VM simply for the "real" Outlook for work purposes.
If you drag one or more e-mail message out of Outlook for Mac, it creates .eml files. These are just RFC2822 MIME source with a file extension—almost any mail client out there can read them.
If you drag an entire folder out, it creates a .mbox file. This is also a standard that many mail clients can read/import (Mail.app included).
I was the PM who led Outlook for Mac 2011; so I know many, many of those tricks. We rebuilt the thing in Cocoa with an entirely new Exchange client codebase—it was a beast of a project done in a fairly short period of time.
For better or worse, there were a lot of edges we didn't get a chance to smooth out by the ship date though I believe we made reasonably solid trade-off calls based on the team and deadlines we had. Updating the Export feature was one of those trade-offs (it's just not a super frequent user activity); that part of Outlook leveraged code from the much-despised Microsoft Entourage. The app was far from as full-featured as some users wanted (especially Win Outlook switchers) BUT did make enough progress to avoid the backlash of other "rewrites" out there (e.g. Apple Final Cut Pro X).
Little insider history: we did a lot to try and make sure data didn't get locked-in... we really wanted a place where, even if your app crashed, you could always get the data out of the app. During development, we even had builds where the entire underlying database was exposed as XML docs (one per item in your db). We couldn't get the perf we wanted out of that system. We ended-up with Outlook 2011's database which still bites folks from time to time but has a lot more "recoverability" than previous products such as Entourage (where it users often cited being locked-out of their database).
Maybe different now—back then, nearly everyone only had a single Exchange account. We looked at supporting both WebDAV and EWS. The result would have introduced by confusing UX but also reduce reliability of both solutions (adds a lot of testing complexity). Instead, we did a release of Entourage with WebDAV (a horrible protocol that Exchange barely ever supported) and a free update with just EWS support (also rough initially, but much better designed and fuller-featured).
When we got to building Outlook, we decided to look forward—Cocoa and EWS only, building a strong base so that future releases could be far more capable. When I started on Entourage, the team was executing on a strategy to shove Exchange capability into a consumer-oriented app. It was shaky from the start, there were so many problems and customer complaints. I gradually learned as a PM that often a more impactful but riskier product strategy is to go big—instead of fixing 50 small issues a week at a time, fix 1 big issue that takes a year but renders the 50 irrelevant.
In my experience, moving mail messages between clients is best done via an IMAP server. Drag them to it in client #1, then out of it in client #2. That preserves folder structure and time stamps.
The only problem I know of with this approach, when coming from Outlook, are the Winmail.dat files that Outlook (or MS Exchange?) creates "to preserve text formatting".
Its been a long time Microsoft has done something that makes me happy but this is one of those times. People in my office use OneNote a lot, I use Evernote but I have seen others use OneNote and it looks more powerful.
That being said the current state of Office for Mac is horrible, my outlook and lync crash every time I plug in an external monitor, awake from sleep, and sometimes when I switch desktops. They also have weird window behavior and the windows get stuck halfway above the menu bar.
Please fix the problems with Office for Mac before you add new products.
A big update for Office for Mac is also supposed to be incoming soon. (as in, a major update like Office for Mac 2014 kind of major) I agree that the current stuff is kind of janky and it would be nice if it got fixed, though. My wife writes novels with it and tends to have 10+ documents open, which makes it freak out sometimes and totally stop working. Hopefully the new version will work a lot better, not be too expensive (hey, they released OneNote for free! you never know what's going to happen with them next), and not change the UI around too much.
I can't say specifically why she values using Word as her text editor of choice, due to not being in her head. I know she uses some features such as adding notes to pieces of text (which I know she uses to track what she needs to work on/revisit later, etc.), but I don't know how many of those features she uses or how many advanced features she touches.
I suspect a large part of the reason she sticks with it though is threefold: familiarity, volume of content in the Word format, and working with agents/publishers. (like another commenter mentioned) She's already familiar and comfortable with using Word, and so she can be productive and just get things done by sticking to what she knows. (she has expressed displeasure with the idea of upgrading due to possible UI changes) She has a /HUGE/ amount of stuff already written using Word, and moving that to anything else would be a herculean undertaking which is, honestly, not worth her time. And using an automated tool to attempt to do so could lose information, which she is already extremely protective of. Lastly, because she needs to work with other people, and might submit documents to those other people in a digital format, it basically needs to be in Word, otherwise that person is unlikely to ever even touch her stuff. Having to deal with agents as a writer is harsh, as they won't even tell you if you did anything wrong. They'll just ignore you. Submitting an unknown, uncomfortable format to those people will just cause them to ignore her anytime she tries to submit anything.
While you might consider plain text to be the ultimate format which is compatible and usable everywhere, people who are not tech people (my wife is not very "techy") just want to get things done with tools that are highly supported, comfortable for them, and widely recognized and used by the people they need to interact with. While you might consider VIM/Emacs/Sublime Text/<insert plain text editor here> to be the ultimate editing environment, anybody in the world my wife deals with will just give you a blank stare the moment you try to deal with those people using those tools.
> what does Word offer the novelist that a plain text (or rich text) editor would not?
It handles large documents efficiently, renders them nicely, and has a ton of features for working with large prose documents.
Plain text has no value to most users since they use no other tools that work with raw text. If you don't use git, grep, cat, find, diff, etc. there's no effective difference between binary in text: in both cases they are just a blob of bits you load into a program.
"It handles large documents efficiently" - and plain text doesn't? That's just an insanely bad reason to use word. Vim can open, edit and "handle" very large documents with ease. A typical novel - even one by Thomas Pynchon is trivially small for plain txt. At roughly 300k words for a long novel, 400k if you're Tolstoy, that's tiny.
Spell check maybe is a reason, no writer wants to admit they can't spell "Hemingway", maybe word/page count abilities, but large documents isn't a reason to forgo the benefits of plain text.
Most of the world doesn't want to deal with Vim's normal vs insert modes. Nor do they want to engage in a philosophical battle about proprietary formats vs plain text. Most people just want to get stuff done, and in this case, send their work to other writers in a recognizable form that they can easily read, edit, make comments on, etc. Word and other programs offer that to them. Plain text and Vim do not.
If you're working with a traditional publishing house, you almost have no choice at this point. I was able to get my wife into a text-only markdown-based format because I am responsible for the layout.
I'm not a novelist but I rather enjoy being able to annotate my work with the review features in Word. That's the primary benefit to me over a plain text editor. I would assume an author working with editors and such would find these features to be even more valuable.
Outlook 2011 for the mac is the first true Outlook client for OSX. Previous we had MS Entourage which was a lot worse than the current Outlook client for Mac. I have high hopes for Office 2014, hopefully it will be better than the current product.
It doesn't allow use of digital ink on Mac. I'm quite disappointed in this. In older versions on Windows one could drag and drop PDFs and images. You can't on the Mac version.
The layout is great and it looks and feels like a slick application. If you are doing notes via typing and don't have to insert many images then this will be a great application for you. It beats Circus Ponies in look and feel and is much more intuitive than Circus Ponies. But it is missing two great features and as such I'll be sticking with Circus Ponies.
At the moment you can't even drag and drop a url from the browser.
I think I'll stick with the somewhat mediocre Notes.app that are included with OS X for the moment. If we take away all the gloss, and the fact that you can't have multiple Notebooks, and sharing, and .. and .. then we are left with basically the same. :)
Another objection is the max password length of sixteen, that may be long enough but...
Also worth noting that OneNote for Windows is also free from today (the desktop/Office 2013 version, not the existing Metro/Modern app).
Downloadable from here - http://www.onenote.com/Download
Great timing too as my Office 2013 1-month trial just ran out and OneNote was the only app I really needed! LibreOffice is good enough nowadays for the rest. Plus it runs great with a Wacom digitiser.
Yeah, I just noticed the "can't drag pictures in" issue. If anybody from the OneNote team is reading these comments, this is a pretty big missing feature. Mac OS is all about drag-and-drop, and a well-behaved app (especially one that is supposed to be a notebook-type thing) should be pretty robust in its d&d support.
This feels very much like a 1.0 (no drag and drop? no paint tool?), but what I'm most excited about is their sync looks really solid - I can edit the same list in two places at once and it Does The Right Thing. I absolutely despite my current note tools - Notes.app and Evernote, since they continually F-up the syncing. The UI is also way cleaner and easier to understand than Evernote, and I'm a big fan of the visual tags.
If this is a preview of the new Office for Mac, I'm totally excited. Office 2011 for Mac really didn't implement the Ribbon well, and this looks like it's an amazing experience.
We also just added this to Zapier in about 40 minutes with our developer platform [0], so if you want to create notes automatically, check us out: https://zapier.com/zapbook/onenote/
When I switched to a Mac, I had to switch from OneNote to Evernote. I missed the various levels of structure OneNote provides, and also found Evernote occasionally glitchy. So it's nice to see Microsoft finally come out with this.
Agreed, OneNote was my favorite Office app, and was my go-to note-taking app until I switched to a macbook. It made keeping notes in meeting much easier with recording and syncing.
Very nice, OneNote is a pretty fantastic program that I never really found a good replacement for. I used it mostly for college course lecturing, and it was great. Although I don't teach anymore, it would still be really handy for workshops and things like that.
I used Evernote fairly extensively a couple of years ago. It had a long way to go back then.
In OneNote if you want a table you can type something and hit tab. What you wrote will be in a cell, and you will be inserting in the next cell. Tab again for another cell. Cells created like this merge if placed together. Tables in general are leagues ahead in OneNote.
One note also acts like a note book. you can write anywhere on the page. Evernote acts like a traditional text application. There is a single text area. It's difficult to explain without demonstrating, but it feels more natural.
The hierarchical nature of Pages, Sections and Section Groups works better for me then Evernote.
Shared notebooks with live update are really awesome in OneNote as well.
Finally I had more merge conflicts with Evernote, and lost data, but yymv.
I was about to ask "what is the difference between OneNote and Evernote" since I haven't used OneNote since 2006 and am obsessed with Evernote, and you just nailed it. Thank you.
They've gotten better in recent years, at least supporting OS X, iOS, and Android. I've used Office 2011 for Mac for a couple years now, and OneDrive works every bit as well as Dropbox or other cross-platform cloud document programs.
Even if you don't use OneNote for Mac, hopefully this gives Evernote the competition they need to move faster.
I, for one, have been looking for an Evernote replacement for quite some time. Evernote still has so many basic text and formatting bugs that it feels v1.0 quality.
There is no trying out on Outline. You must buy is ($40). Outline is relatively new, editing was recently added. As such, it is limited, and somehow buggy.
Hopefully the release of OneNote free of charge will not stop Outline on its tracks.
Microphone! If you connected a microphone to OneNote it would sync the audio with your note taking (I had a Tablet which I used to hand write my note) Was the best thing EVER.
OneNote will even search handwritten notes and audio.
Study Guides = I would then click on my notes and OneNote would play the audio of the professor and I could relive the lectures that went with the study guide. Everyone loved it in my class. I would email them the audio files if they missed class. No one else ever would use it. I even had the college I worked for purchase OneNote for all students and no one ever connected a microphone and few used it. SAD
my guess is that it relied on a Windows API thats not available on mac. stuff like that might show up again at some point. i did love the audio recording function.
I wish it would offer iCloud as an alternative to OneDrive (and remove the need for an Microsoft Account) but I can see that MS wants to use their own services and get you to use them in the process.
Finally! The OneNote client simply beats Evernote on Windows Phone (surprise surprise) and I finally don't have to use the online version that's even hard to log into, forget to use!
Love to see this out there, but it seems to suffer from the same visual clutter that I believe Evernote does. I love the OCR technology of Evernote, but I have the hardest time with it as a writing environment. Does anyone know of a nice, clean note taking environment for Mac that still supports links between notes and the occasional image?
You're looking for Notational Velocity. It's free, open source, minimalistic, keyboard-centric, and extremely fast. I use it all day, every day.
http://notational.net/screenshots.html
My life depends on Notational Velocity. It's the fastest note taking system I've ever used. The killer feature is the ability to go from search to edit instantly. It's so good, that I'd consider buying a Mac only because of it. I recommend NValt, a more updated fork.
Notational is so badass. I'm going to give OneNote a hard look when I have some time but I'm so used to Notational that I might just stick with it. I would like to see some additional formatting options in NV but the speed and UX are unbeatable.
Thanks for this. I'm only a few weeks in on OSX and nvALT is just what I was looking for. I also hooked it up with iA Writer, which is only $5 at the moment.
I was looking for a personal wiki-type thing on OSX, but this is a fantastic set-up for me.
- Circus Ponies Notebook, (paid, $50) which is very different from OneNote but is a good note taking environment and is quite clean and has some good features
- And if you really need some insane power: Curio, (paid, $100) where the basic concept is to emulate the power of a whiteboard. It includes things like mindmaps, tables, linking between boards, etc. The features list is insane.
I really wish they included inking support on the iPad app. I loved OneNote on my Tablet PC I had five years ago, and I'd love to use it today, but I handwrite all my notes on my iPad.
Me too. I think there could be a sizable market for a tablet or app that does notetaking and handwriting really well. The iPad seems limited by its touchscreen tech/software, which seems to be optimized for fingers and not fine-tipped digital pens.
Which app and pen do you use for handwriting notes on your iPad? I've tried a few but I haven't liked any of the input interfaces. Writing in a small area of the screen is cramped, but when the whole screen is available to write (e.g. Paper, the drawing app) I find my arm constantly getting in the way.
I use Notability for my daily note taking but also find Note Taker HD to be excellent. I sometimes use Penultimate (an Evernote product) as somewhat of a whiteboard, but I find its palm-rejection technology has gotten poorer with recent releases.
I just use cheap styluses/ my finger for writing, as I find that tips wear our way too quickly to spend a lot of money on one. (although I would be open to the idea of a high-end stylus with a replaceable tip)
uPad has been great for me for a couple of years worth of note taking.
I use the adonit Jot Pro stylus, retina ipad mini and the adonit Tote case to keep the pen with the tablet all the time. ( http://www.adonit.net/ )
Not too worried about the bit of extra bulk as I can now chuck it into my consulting bag without worrying about scratching it up.
The reason i like uPad is that it presents a large space on the screen for you to write into, and then takes what you put in there and places it on the page. It means you get all the benefits of writing 'big' with palm rejection on the non-writing areas, but then all your notes go where you want by placing where the text will appear on the page.
It looks like Microsoft has added a Windows 8.1-style window snapping to the Windows 7 version of OneNote, which (in my opinion) is one of the best features of Windows 8: http://i.imgur.com/HhA2YaB.png
(This may have existed for a while, but I just discovered it today.)
I don't have my MacBook with me, is this included in the new OneNote for Mac? Is it even possible? I confess I'm not very familiar with OS X or its capabilities.
The whole Office Suite was the best product for quite a while. I prefer OSX alternates though now. XCode for C/C++/ObjC and Keynote for PowerPoint etc.
It is a good movement from Microsoft. For the last couple of year, they have partially ignored the mac environment. Eg: Office is not retina display yet.
I compare immediately with Evernote, a daily tool in my case. I like the idea of concurrents for Evernote.
> The latest version of Microsoft's Equation Editor (and since ~07 imo) is quite good. Still a shame one needs to relearn certain symbols.
Since 2011 on Mac. The new Equation Editor was not in Mac Office 2008.
This was particularly annoying because Mac Office 2008 could load and save DOCX files -- yet you couldn't take it for granted that the equations would carry through.
My understanding is that the Equation Editor relied on some Windows components, which made it difficult to port.
As for LaTeX \symbols, I haven't encountered a problem. But maybe my equations just aren't that complicated. It doesn't always interpret LaTeX equation structure correctly, but I haven't had any problem with \symbols.
If we are going to be ignoring features, let's go with the two options built in to the OS: TextEdit and Notes. Take your pick which one better supports your workflow.
Since they released Notes with 10.8, its pretty much replaced Notational Velocity for me. Search isn't quite as fast but syncing via iCloud is awesome. Now with AirDrop its super nice, being able to quickly send a note to someone else and have it show up in the 'normal' notes format (trying to read it in a text message is goofy).
I know its just outside of the scope of notes, but if there was some level of collaboration, Apple could seriously cut down on the number of couples arguing in supermarkets (and Ikea)
OneNote feels more like a piece of paper, where I can jot down exactly what I want where I want. To me, Evernote feels more like a collection of post-its.
And this may have changed, but at least taking notes for math etc. worked much better in OneNote.
Edit: Heh, the other commenter thought of Evernote as post-its as well. :p
Evernote appears to me as a thoughts organizer - its focus is heavy on managing notes, and its note editing features are pretty sparse. For my use case, Evernote seems horribly over engineered, as it is my note taking that is complex, but the management of my notes is rather simple. For simple notes and reminders, Google Keep has replaced it completely (and I was a Pro user for a while).
I've always envied OneNote on Windows (Phone), and will definitely try this. Its rich editing features appear to be much more suitable for better, you know, note taking.
Its pretty equal. There is more microsoft integration (obviously), and its setup more like a notebook rather than evernote which feels more like digital post-it notes. Not sure how sharing/colaboration compares.
I've never felt safe with my data with Evernote. They have been hacked quite a few times and sent me password change email requests as well numerous times.
Plus, I've lost post due to sync error on Evernote between devices often, mobile app is pretty poor - crashes often :(
Is there a migration tool for that? Because I have tried running them side by side and it gets too fragmented. But I have stuff on MediaWiki going back to 2007, so abandoning it is too painful a bridge to cross.
markdown forever. ive seen institutions that use onenote for everything and i find it gives me a headache dealing with everyones own structuring model. it's like myspace all over again.
It's so incredibly "windows" in design. In a typical OS X app the toolbar at the top would be greatly simplified and a lot of lesser used functionality would be relegated to contextual inspectors.
This is pretty comparable to their Office suite for OSX (which admittedly is 4 years old, but the supposed 2015 Office for Mac will probably continue with a similar UI). You find this to be true with a lot of cross-platform vendors and products: Adobe, for example.
I don't have it installed on this machine currently, but doesn't Libre Office has a similar set of UI conventions as on other platforms, or is it "OSX-y"?
Maybe I'm being idealistic but I'd love to see Microsoft become a truly cross-platform "enterprise-quality" software house. There's tons of great software out there, but rather little that works seamlessly (or even well) across iOS, Android, Windows and the Mac.. and with its resources, inhouse expertise, and no truly successful mobile platform to evangelize, Microsoft seems well placed to take on such a role.