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   Vote for Your Favorite Mac Personal Information Manager

   Adam C. Engst

   For those who rely on the outline-based personal information management
   app Notebook, the shuttering of developer Circus Ponies last week was
   sad news (see '[1]Circus Ponies Closes Its Doors,' 7 January 2016).
   While Notebook will likely continue to work fine in OS X 10.11 El
   Capitan, its lifespan is necessarily limited, and users would do well
   to start researching alternatives.

   But there are an overwhelming number of choices to sort through, and
   many of them look quite similar. Several readers have asked us for our
   opinion, and while it's easy to suggest Apple's Notes or point at
   powerful apps like [2]DEVONthink, it's impossible for us to recommend a
   single app. Personal information managers as a class have evolved to
   fill every available niche in the ecosystem, and only you know what
   features you need.

   We want to help provide some direction to your research, and some data
   to support your eventual choice, so we're trying something new: a
   reader-driven survey aimed at rating personal information managers for
   you to fill out (it's embedded at the bottom of this article on our Web
   site or you can [3]navigate to it directly). A few important notes
   before you start clicking:
     * Please rate only those apps with which you have significant
       personal experience. That means weeks or months of use, not
       something that you launched once before discovering that it lacked
       a feature you need. Just don't enter ratings for apps you haven't
       used.
     * We've listed a lot of apps in the poll, but if we missed the one
       you use, let us know so we can add it (obviously, those added later
       are a bit less likely to have as many votes, but there's no way
       around that).
     * Some apps will get more votes than others, so when looking at the
       results (click Show Previous Responses after you vote), take that
       into account. A lot of votes may indicate popularity (or a
       successful attempt to game the system), but an app with just a few
       highly positive votes is still worth a look.
     * Ratings don't give a complete picture, so feel free to say what you
       like or don't like about apps you use in the comments for this
       article; we've seeded the top-level comment for each app, and
       please keep your thoughts within the appropriate top-level comment.

   We'll report on the results next week.

   Thanks for the help ' we can all work together to help other TidBITS
   readers find the best apps for their needs. And if this approach works
   well, we can expand it to other categories of apps.

   IFRAME:
   [4]https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1aaRKgeWWOLXDVPEdn1L1fKk-4uenQctaYIQ
   __PVVkyY/viewform?embedded=true
   Loading...

References

   1. http://tidbits.com/article/16181
   2. http://www.devontechnologies.com/products/devonthink/
   3. http://goo.gl/forms/K9U1k2jLbC
   4. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1aaRKgeWWOLXDVPEdn1L1fKk-4uenQctaYIQ__PVVkyY/viewform?embedded=true

.