Note-taking software: Caboodle
July 14th, 2008 by ravi

Caboodle Screenshot Today’s Deal of the Day at MacUpdate Promo is “Caboodle“, an information organiser or journal. Here is the intro:

Caboodle – Everyone comes across information that they want to refer to later. Maybe gifts you’ve received or sent, product serial numbers, recipes, directions to someone’s house, a photo of your pet, or anything else. Caboodle is a tool to help store and organize such varied bits of information.

The price is really low ($7.99) for a very useful application. I am told that the golden standard, believe it or not, for note-taking and information management (by which I don’t mean PIM) applications, is Microsoft’s OneNote. Since I do not use Windows systems, I cannot unfortunately compare against that. Instead, I will add a few comments on Caboodle based on its features, and by comparing it to equivalent tools I have used.

Caboodle supports some very useful features, listed in no particular order below:

  • Hierarchy of categories
  • Keywords (tags)
  • Extensive text formatting, including tables, bullet lists
  • Entry encryption
  • Custom fields

A fairly complete set of features which position it advantageously against its more expensive rivals like Journler (used to be free, now $34.99) and MacJournal ($34.99). Both these competitors are more feature rich, supporting attachment of varied media formats (e.g: audio,video) to notes, more advanced cataloguing of entries, labelling, [arguably] slicker interface, and so on, but most of which, at least by criteria are not “must have”. One thing that they do offer is integration with the Mac environment via global keyboard shortcuts, print menu export options, and so on, which is critically absent in Caboodle. These features make it possible to swiftly import information and files into the application, and (again by my criteria) do fall in the “must have” list. From that same list, the ability to export to iPod seems to also be missing in Caboodle.

The field of Mac note-taking applications sports an abundance of candidates; for example: Mori, Circus Ponies’ NoteBook, Notae, Yojimbo, Mémoires, Together, meinKOPP, DevonNote, SuperNotecard, and so on. And in a lighter vein ShoveBox, MacNote3, xPad (free), SideNote (free), MemoBlock (free), SketchBox (free), etc.

I will leave it to you to choose the one that works best for you ;-), but after using Journler for a good bit of time, I have now settled on an application not listed above: EverNote. EverNote is a free online service + desktop application. While it does not (yet?) support lists, tables, and such for text formatting, it makes up with a range of other features.


[ MUPromo: Caboodle ]

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