Introducing OneNote for Mac

  > 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.

Not everyone wants everything in the cloud.

> 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.

I wish it felt like it was made for the Mac -- hopefully they'll work on it more.

- Standard Mac keyboard shortcuts don't work (ie. ctrl-a & ctrl-e to move to beginning and end of lines)

- Can't drag a picture from the Finder into the OneNote

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".