And I have found that for this very reason, when I enter data in Backpack I remember it better and can find it more readily later. A lot of trouble.But see, trouble in this case equals structure: Backpack effectively forces you to impose a structure on your data, to organize it to some degree before you even enter it. You have to decide whether something is going to be a note or a list, and if you have multiple pages, which pretty much every Backpack user does, you have to decide what page you want to put it on. If you want to edit it you have to click an “edit” link before you can type anything. Entering information in Backpack is much clunkier that entering it in NV: you have to click a link to create a list or a note or a new entry in a list, then you type it in, then you click a button to save it. In 2005 I started using Backpack and have used it off and on ever since - and that’s what I just went back to. I forget that NV is there until I need to put something in it - but we put stuff into apps like NV because we want to get it out at some point, right?Let me try to make this more clear. Yes, I could search, but I don’t often think to search. I can get things into NV with an absolute minimum of effort and delay - but then I tend to forget what’s in there. But, oddly, that has become a problem for me. Weird, huh? But here’s my reason: what’s great about NV is that it’s totally simple and unstructured and makes text entry utterly frictionless. It’s also free.However, I recently stopped using it. Also, it saves everything you type automatically and instantaneously, and can be synchronized with Simplenote or WriteRoom for the iPad and iPhone. ![]() I can have my notes in rich text or plain text: I choose plain, but even in plain text NV recognizes links and makes them clickable. To find something, I just type a word into the same box and NV runs an instantaneous search. I can keep on typing until I’m done, or I can type a title, hit return, and then just continue, because what I type after that will be the body of the note. I’ve been using it for the past year or so and really digging its UI: when I want to make a note about something, I use a hotkey combination to activate the program, and then I just start typing. One of the coolest applications for the Mac is Notational Velocity, an extraordinarily simple yet also innovative note-taking program.
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