Live data from Hacker News

Introducing OneNote for Mac

blogs.office.com

101–110 of 181 posts

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#101
post #80

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, inhou…

Can I access through a web browser? And from my Linux desktop?

Yeah, full editing through the browser, with semi-live sync to the client (I'm seeing a maybe 20 second lag?)

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#102

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"?

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#103

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, inhou…

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!

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

except for the fact that you can print and export in other versions of onenote. and this is a 1.0

That's exactly the problem. I would expect these essential missing features from a beta, not a release.

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#105

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?

Try View --> Full Page View. That hides the Notebooks, Sections and Pages and shows only the current page.

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#106
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.

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#107
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.

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#108
post #88
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks cobalt for the link - since 2010 it has migrated to an XML format [1] - which is documented albeit not really human readable. However, I can't figure out how to retrieve a .one file from the Mac Client to check for the format - anybody knows where it stores its file locally ? [1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd924743(v=office.12...

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/, 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.

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My wife writes novels with it… Honest question: what does Word offer the novelist that a plain text (or rich text) editor would not? I've known others who have worked on a novel in Word, but I just can't imagine a workflow where binary Word documents would be better than plain text.

> 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…

"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.

Post reply on HN