Notational Velocity Lives
Years ago — even before Getting Things Done was all the rave — a powerful note-taking application named Notational Velocity, was all the rage. And then it lay nearly dormant. For years. But just a couple nights ago I received a fantastic email notifying me of all that’s been going on with Notational Velocity these many, many months.
Notational Velocity captures your notes in a way that’s so simplistic, you really need to try it out to grasp its brilliance. The application window, from top to bottom, consists of a text entry field, a listing of all notes that have been created, and then the selected note’s content. The top field is multipurpose: Type a note’s title into it and if there’s no currently saved note with that title, hitting return creates the new note and moves your cursor to the body area. If the title you’ve typed matches an existing note, hitting tab selects that note and moves you into the body of that note’s content to continue editing. It’s an elegant concept, and in this writer’s opinion, creates a hugely simple and effective user interface.
There’s a great deal of new features in version 2.0. Making it a universal binary (for Intel Macs) is a great first step. The list is long, so here it is directly from the email:
- Option to maintain/synchronize notes as text files for Spotlight and/or text editor access
- More robust and space-efficient database with encrypted, compressed write-ahead logging
- On-demand mounting of disk images and servers while loading the database
- Optional AES encryption with variable-strength key derivation
- Styled text editor supports font-independent formatting, an alternative to “rich text”
- Partial word-by-word or full-phrase searching
- Highlighting of found words
- Multiple-note selections and sorting by different criteria
- Support for input methods and unicode searching
- Basic support for editing structured text and code
- Per-note undo histories
- Importing of additional file types, including the Mac OS X Stickies database
- “Paste clipboard as new note” command grabs the current web context
- URL and email address recognition
Though the list of enhancements is great, almost more noteworthy is the open status of this great application. If you’re a developer who’s interested in getting your hands dirty in Notational Velocity code, or just want to learn a thing or two, check it out over at github. Hopefully this means that subsequent updates won’t be nearly as few and far between.
It doesn’t get easier than taking and retrieving notes with Notational Velocity. I’m thrilled with the update, and highly recommend giving it a try to see it it will fulfill your note-taking needs as well.
Tweet This (16)
Nick on September 17th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
It sounds great and like it has a few extra features over Notes in Mail or Stickies. How would you compare it to those two options?
Staff Comment Nick Santilli, TheAppleBlog on September 17th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
I think they’re two very different solutions – I like NV because it’s easily searchable and updatable via a single interface. It’s very concise, which works for me.
Paulius on September 18th, 2009 at 1:04 am
I don’t like user interface. The main problem is that the notes disappears when you need to create new note. Useless app!!! Save some time and get Evernote, Yojimbo or something else.
skellyrocker on September 18th, 2009 at 8:42 am
I have to say I don’t see the benefit of this over either Notes or Evernote. For example:
Option to maintain/synchronize notes as text files for Spotlight and/or text editor access – or just use Notes and a text editor.
More robust and space-efficient database with encrypted, compressed write-ahead logging – whatever that means as a number two enhancement!
- On-demand mounting of disk images and servers while loading the database – how big are your notes?
- Optional AES encryption with variable-strength key derivation – oh good AES encryption, eh?
- Styled text editor supports font-independent formatting, an alternative to “rich text” – does font independant formatting mean it doesn’t support fonts? I guess that’s an alternative to rich text!
- Partial word-by-word or full-phrase searching – see Spotlight, Evernote etc.
- Highlighting of found words – oooooh!
- Multiple-note selections and sorting by different criteria – this actually might have been useful – they should have stuck this in the top.
- Support for input methods and unicode searching – OK
- Basic support for editing structured text and code – how basic? what about BBEDIT?
- Per-note undo histories – OK that is actually genuinely something that would make me give it a go.
Importing of additional file types, including the Mac OS X Stickies database – that is the second thing – I’m gonna give it a go!!
“Paste clipboard as new note” command grabs the current web context – meh copy and paste.
URL and email address recognition – Notes does this.
This might actually be a good application, and I DO like neat, concise apps, but the list was ordered completely wrongly for me to be interested. If I hadn’t gone and done this wee tirade, I probabaly wouldn’t have read as far as impoorting of file types and per note undo histories.
Apologies for the moad – it’s been a tough day and I’ve been lookign at someone / thing to have a swing at.
TSR.
denke on September 28th, 2009 at 1:07 am
Clearly NV is not for everyone, but I was delighted when I found the new version. The old version was exquisitely adequate, but when I tried to run it after upgrading to Snow Leopard, I was perplexed to get a message that it would require Rosetta. I have the impression that Rosetta is causing many problems that I want to avoid: I’ve jettisoned Excel 2004 to avoid installing Rosetta, but I would not want to do without NV. I don’t use it for all notes, only unstructured ones–but it’s nearly perfect for that use. I’m quite grateful to whoever updated NV to Universal binary. The other new features are mere icing on the (chocolate decadence) cake.
Steve on October 12th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Fantastic software. Best part for me is being able to set a keyboard sequence to bring it to the foreground.
I set it as Control, Option, Command spacebar.
Rotated Toenails on September 21st, 2009 at 3:56 pm
You’ve obviously completely missed the point of the software, as well as this post.
Download the application and then load 2000 notes into it. What–you can’t even imagine having that many notes? Then I guess your needs can be satisfied by using toy programs.
Or maybe you can’t imagine creating that many notes with an interface as unwieldy as Evernote’s. It’s perfectly conceivable with Notational Velocity.