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Introducing OneNote for Mac

blogs.office.com

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Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#151

Post by SquareWheel »

orthecreedence wrote: post #137
dpatriarche wrote: post #17

I've been looking forward to OneNote on the Mac for years. I installed it and found out there is no option for offline notebooks; all notebooks appear to be synced through the OneDrive cloud. WTF? There's not even the option to encrypt notebooks in the cloud. I'm just not going to share all my personal thoughts and notes with the NSA. I'm disappointed.

It's early stage, but try https://turtl.it . Works on mac. Encrypts everything . Offline mode is in the works. Disclosure: I built it.

I like how you can run your own server. Have you considered integration with services like Dropbox? That's my go-to for syncing data between systems. I understand that would make monetizing the product more difficult though.

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#152

Post by dunham »

motdiem wrote: post #88
motdiem wrote: 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...

All I see locally is a ".onecache" file - a binary file that appears to contain the notes themselves, and a directory named "OneNoteOfflineCache_Files" of attachments (embedded images, etc.) I don't recognize the header on the onecache file, so I'm guessing it's proprietary.

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#153

Post by hippee-lee »

jameshart wrote: post #60
methehack wrote: post #58

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 'struct…

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 ac…

To provide another opinion: Apple does this to, .mac, .me & icloud oh my don't forget about the iTunes account now.

In case you are wondering I switched my household, parents and several friends to apple products since 2002 because it was easier to provide help.

I sometimes wish there was a magic button I could push to merge everything into a unified single sign on for 's products. It took a while but Google did it in a weird way that didn't make me very happy either.

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#154

Post by s3r3nity »

runjake wrote: post #52
gum_ina_package wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is in the cloud though, and OneNote has always (for the ~3 years I've been using it) worked this way. Everything is synced with the cloud.

> 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…

"shared Dropbox folder" is still the cloud, just not Microsoft's.

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#155

Post by s3r3nity »

moonlighter wrote: post #92

I wish it would offer iCloud as an alternative to OneDrive (and remove the need for an Microsoft Account) but I can see that MS wants to use their own services and get you to use them in the process.

To be fair, you get a lot more storage with OneDrive (I currently have 28 Gb.)

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#156

Post by arikrak »

arikrak wrote: post #8

When I switched to a Mac, I had to switch from OneNote to Evernote. I missed the various levels of structure OneNote provides, and also found Evernote occasionally glitchy. So it's nice to see Microsoft finally come out with this.

Anyone know a good way to import notes from Evernote?

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#157

Post by jameshart »

hippee-lee wrote: post #153
jameshart wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ac…

To provide another opinion: Apple does this to, .mac, .me & icloud oh my don't forget about the iTunes account now. In case you are wondering I switched my household, parents and several friends to apple products since 2002 because it was easier to provide help. I sometimes wish there was a magic button I could push to merge everything into a unified single sign on for 's products. It took a while but Google did it i…

Oh yes, Apple is a serial offender too - my iPhone is stuck in a world where the iTunes store account and iCloud account are on separate apple IDs, and I've got no idea how they relate to the email addresses I can be reached on facetime through. Neither of them are associated with my apple developer account, either. I'm sure this identity stuff shouldn't be so hard.

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#158

Post by yuhong »

ruff wrote: post #147
r00fus wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huge thanks on that, ruff. This definitely thrills me :) Just wondering why the hell isn't this part of the export menu... great feature, undiscoverable as hell.

I was the PM who led Outlook for Mac 2011; so I know many, many of those tricks. We rebuilt the thing in Cocoa with an entirely new Exchange client codebase—it was a beast of a project done in a fairly short period of time. For better or worse, there were a lot of edges we didn't get a chance to smooth out by the ship date though I believe we made reasonably solid trade-off calls based on the team and deadlines we ha…

While you are here, I wonder why there was no version of Entourage/Outlook with both EWS and WebDAV support.

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#159

Post by yuhong »

ams6110 wrote: post #149
kyrra wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outlook 2011 for the mac is the first true Outlook client for OSX. Previous we had MS Entourage which was a lot worse than the current Outlook client for Mac. I have high hopes for Office 2014, hopefully it will be better than the current product.

It's not compatible with older exchange servers though. If you're stuck with that at work you're forced into imap mode.

Yea, I don't really like the Outlook name as the internals are completely different from Outlook for Windows unlike Outlook 2001 for Classic Mac OS.

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#160

Post by ruff »

yuhong wrote: post #158
ruff wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was the PM who led Outlook for Mac 2011; so I know many, many of those tricks. We rebuilt the thing in Cocoa with an entirely new Exchange client codebase—it was a beast of a project done in a fairly short period of time. For better or worse, there were a lot of edges we didn't get a chance to smooth out by the ship date though I believe we made reasonably solid trade-off calls based on the team and deadlines we ha…

While you are here, I wonder why there was no version of Entourage/Outlook with both EWS and WebDAV support.

Maybe different now—back then, nearly everyone only had a single Exchange account. We looked at supporting both WebDAV and EWS. The result would have introduced by confusing UX but also reduce reliability of both solutions (adds a lot of testing complexity). Instead, we did a release of Entourage with WebDAV (a horrible protocol that Exchange barely ever supported) and a free update with just EWS support (also rough initially, but much better designed and fuller-featured).

When we got to building Outlook, we decided to look forward—Cocoa and EWS only, building a strong base so that future releases could be far more capable. When I started on Entourage, the team was executing on a strategy to shove Exchange capability into a consumer-oriented app. It was shaky from the start, there were so many problems and customer complaints. I gradually learned as a PM that often a more impactful but riskier product strategy is to go big—instead of fixing 50 small issues a week at a time, fix 1 big issue that takes a year but renders the 50 irrelevant.

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