NoteBook Discussion Forums: Special Interest Communities - NoteBook and 'Getting Things Done'

Object Wrap (commented by ptram)

ptram — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 10:09:21 +0000

I admit that, probably because English is not my native language, that I don’t understand what you are tying to do. Can you reword the description of your problem? I know pictures have several ways of being moved or anchored to a page.

Paolo

Object Wrap (commented by Dustin)

Dustin — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:41:57 +0000

Nevermind I could my answer. You basically have to cheat your way around by dragging it in as an Object.

This feature is in almost any basic featured word program. Why is it not in this?

Pffffftt.

Object Wrap (by Dustin)

Dustin — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:07:53 +0000

Hi Everyone

I’m just trying to find out how I can have an Object such as a picture have “no wrap” so it does not take up an entire chunk in a notebook page.

In other words I want my object to float above the text so that I can move it exactly where I want.

Anyone?

And then there was light.... (by Nick Walsh)

Nick Walsh — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 20:27:51 +0000

I recently switched to the Macbook Pro from 35 years on the PC. I am an Information Technology Analyst for a very large organization. While out for dinner with my wife recently, I started leafing through my copy of “MacLife” to kill the boredom of waiting for Gail to finish dinner! I don’t normally do this, but the ad for Notebook caught my eye. I wrote down the URL on my analog note pad with my trusty “human graphical interface device” (bic pen). Then last night I downloaded and installed the program. I wasn’t expecting much.

Wow! I learned a big lesson. Surprises come in small packages. I’ve been using the competition (Yojimbo) for a few months. I like it. Thought it was great. But using NoteBook is like switching on the light in a dark room! The interface is extremely pleasing. The features are powerfully rich. Kudos to the developers of this product. It needs to be out there. Why did I not know about this before buying Yojimbo.

Who cares. I will be buy this one regardless. And I can see hundreds of application for this program in my work as an Analyst, my leisure time activities and my hobby… Internet Marketing and Web Design. I have a few dozen clients in my web business as well as over 50 websites that I manage. This program will significantly reduce my workload, and will make me a heck of a lot more efficient at what I do.

I most certainly will demo this program to my peers in my day job, and will others that follow me on the Internet circuit.

Thank you guys for developing this product!

Nick Walsh
Vancouver, BC

Notebook, Time Machine, and package-based programs (commented by repete)

repete — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 18:03:08 +0000

I’ve been using Dropbox for over a year and I’m pretty happy with it. When I’m done with a notebook for the day, I save a copy to my Dropbox folder. The copy I’m working on lives in my Documents folder. I’ve restored from Dropbox a couple of times (when I deleted a file by accident) and it worked fine.

Good Luck.

Notebook, Time Machine, and package-based programs (commented by AWDriver)

AWDriver — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 00:05:20 +0000

Two suggestions: Dropbox and CrashPlan. Dropbox is something you can copy and paste your file to, which will push it to their server (2gb free) which you can then download if you ever lose your copy. You can also work out of the Dropbox folder itself, where changes will be updated, but there are some issues with the current version having a locked file that causes Dropbox to give up syncing. To be safe, work outside dropbox and copy a backup into the sync folder when you want to push a copy offsite.

CrashPlan is a free program (with a paid variant) that will give you incremental daily backups. It recognizes .nb as a package and will back up all items. I haven’t restored a Notebook yet, but have restored other things and it does its job. Backups are encrypted, as well. Plus, unlike TimeMachine, it actually was built to work with FileVault so you can restore parts of files without having to mount the time machine volume and going through all these hoops.

Notebook, Time Machine, and package-based programs (commented by ptram)

ptram — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 17:35:53 +0000

I run TM manually once a day. While I would like to have a hourly backup, I hope daily backups are safe enough to avoid losing too much work in case of severe damages to the main disk.

Before running TM, I close Scrivener. All documents are backed up, from time to time, as zipped archives. The same I do with all my other files (including NoteBook). And then, about twice a year, I save everything into an external drive that I keep in an armory, far from the main desk.

As of now, I have not had a single problem with TM (or Scrivener, or NoteBook), so the strategy seems to work.

Paolo

Notebook, Time Machine, and package-based programs (commented by CareyB)

CareyB — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 13:52:11 +0000

Since this has been a single long post, I’ll be brief.

Here’s what I do:

I have a large drive sitting in a ‘dock’. I have it partitioned in two. Time Machine has the big partition, and runs in the background doing the maximum, ongoing backups it can. After the initial backup, the incrementals are barely noticeable from a performance point of view.

I have a free piece of software called Silverkeeper from LaCie (the external drive company). This does several kinds of backups, and I use it to do a manual synchronization to the other partition. In other words, the smaller partition is a mirror of my hard drive. You can find it here: http://www.lacie.com/silverkeeper/

From Micro$haft you can get a Power Tool called SyncToy that does the same job as SilverKeeper. You can get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=c26efa36-98e0-4ee9-a7c5-98d0592d8c52&displaylang=en

If you have an iDisk from your .MAC, or me.com account, you can get a program from Apple called Backup (DOH!). The lite version of that will be enough to backup your settings to your iDisk on a regular basis. Get Backup here: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/application_updates/backup312.html

So… Do you think I’m covered?

Oh… I also sync to my iPhone, and to MobileMe, and to Google Sync (iPhone through their Microsoft Exchange interface), which gets me backups of my calendars, and contacts, as well as getting my push email to my iPhone.

Also, make sure, if your mail server will do it, to use IMAP and not POP/SMTP. This way, there’s always a copy of the mail on the server, and it’s always the same no matter what client you use to access it.

As an aside, I am testing OmniFocus as a GTD solution because of the sync to the iPhone.

Sorry, Jayson :-/

Notebook, Time Machine, and package-based programs (by ahleucha)

ahleucha — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:03:54 +0000

Hi all—forgive the length of this message. I post it here, including the really helpful responses from Travis, in CP tech support, because he thought there might be additional wisdom out there on this forum. If you don’t want to wade through the details, below, the gist of my question was this: Time Machine and package-based programs (i.e., Notebook, Scrivener) may have some problems playing nicely together. My question concerned the interaction between Time Machine, which runs backups periodically throughout the day, and Notebook, which will necessarily be in different states throughout the day as it’s being backed up.
Again, for anyone who’s interested, you’ll see below my own queries; Travis’s responses, and a few items from the Scrivener list, where this subject came up after I’d lost a good deal of work in Scrivener.

A few months ago I lost a good deal of work while using Scrivener, and the
> only thing that the forum and the program’s developer could come up with was
> something having to do with the package-based format / structure of
> Scrivener and the Time Machine program of Mac. I use Time Machine—have a
> drive hooked up to my computer all the time, and I’d like to be sure that
> something like that loss with Scriv. not happen with Notebook. But it
> occurs to me that Notebook, like Scrivener, shares the “many different kinds
> of files / data all living happily under one filename” quality, and I’m
> wondering a few things:
>
> 1. Does Notebook use something like the same file structure as Scrivener?

I’m not familiar with Scrivener, but the forum excerpt you copied suggests that Scrivener uses a package format, which is what NoteBook uses. You can think of it as a self contained file format.

2. Have you ever heard of any problems using Time Machine (or any other
> automated backup program) with Notebook (I see no such mentions on the forum
> for Notebook, but I’m not sure my search was complete)?

Yes, we have had issues with some backup applications, specifically how they recognize packaged files. The problem is that some backup applications recognize these package files as a folder containing other files, but because of the types of files they contain, there is information that is lost in the transfer, resulting in corruption. That being said, I have not personally had any issues restoring notebooks from my TM nor have I heard of our customers having issues specifically with Time Machine, but I don’t think posting your question on the forums is a bad idea, even if you’re satisfied with my answer :-)

3. Do you have any particular recommendations or cautions for keeping data
> safe on Notebook? With Scivener, one of the conclusions of the forum was
> that one should NOT use TM in any automated mode with Scriv, because the TM
> backup might be initiated at the wrong point in an autosave moment for
> Scriv. and cause data loss.

In cases where these backup applications have caused corruption, the solution is to compress the files before you backup. Compressing the file will capsulate it in a format that will protect it from corruption when backing up transferring. You could compress your notebooks, or make a folder containing all of your notebooks and compress the file before you backup. To do this, select the file or folder in the Finder and under the File menu, select Compress. That will create a .zip file to appear in the same window which will be safe from the corruption you’re concerned about.

But again, I haven’t heard of any issues with Time Machine. You may want to send an inquiry to Apple and see if they’ve heard of issues like this and if they have any recommendation for backing up package files. I’m inclined to say they will tell you everything should be fine, since may of the applications in OS X use the package file format.

I’ve excerpted a few of the relevant posts from my Scrivener forum
> discussion below:
>
> thanks for any help you can give me
>
> John Whittier-Ferguson
>
>
>
>
>
> Regarding using time machine and what might be happening. Best practices
> first.
>
> TM is a backup system (duh). As such it will “snapshot” the FS at a point in
> time. This snap shot is based on disk allocation via inode/block usage and
> the journal. if you watch TM in action you will see that the first thing is
> does is “prepare” the backup. I suspect the TM is doing the same things that
> its brothers do and is FREEZING the journal and copying it to a new
> location. In theory this is fast and safe (I use very $$ apps that do this
> all day). There is one condition that makes this “unsafe”. That is when a
> write intensive (think save) app start building data in the journal before
> the copy/move is complete. This is compounded by large writes like a big
> binary (think mov). Basically the journal is frozen, so the write doesn’t
> really complete. Now your file handle is pointing to a bad location and data
> is written but the sectors are not marked as associated with the first part
> of the file. Since the data is still in memory of the process it looks
> correct UNTIL you stop (quit) the process) and open the file again. Oracle
> and I spent quite a bit of time working on this with a backup vendor that is
> NOT apple, but the claim was that the technology was very similar to TM.
> Hence Oracle recommends full exports instead of “hot” backups†.

My knowledge of Time Machine is not in depth enough to know it’s internal workings on this level, but I will tell you that I used to work for Apple as a technician and I rarely had issues of customers that experienced any kind of loss whatsoever with this software and on a personal level as an Apple enthusiast, I can say this is one of the most reliable and stable Apple products that I’ve used.

As far as handling write intensive applications, Apple has plenty of those and I’ve relied on TM to recover many of their files. Final Cut, Pro Tools, and Motion to name a few, so I don’t think hot backups pose a threat with TM.

Wonderful that we understand how this might happen. How do we prevent it?
>
> We take a note from Oracle best practices and do the following:
> 1. DO NOT ENABLE TM OVER WIRELESS.
> 2. Run TM on a direct attached drive.
> 3. DO NOT ATTACH DRIVE WHILE YOU ARE WORKING ON PROJECTS.
> 4. Quit scriv (and all other package based apps) before attaching your TM
> drive.
> 5. Attach TM drive.
> 6. Once TM completes reopen project and get back to work.
>
> and this is from the creator of Scrivener:
> The cause seems to have been synchronisation – that can be different from
> backing up. By far the best way of backing up is to use Scrivener’s File >
> Backup To feature and choose to zip up the backup. This ensures that the
> search info is updated etc before creating the backup. Of course, to be
> doubly sure, unzip the backup and check it opens. That way you know you have
> a working back up.
>
> The problem with synchronising a .scriv file is that it is prone to the same
> problems that synchronising a folder is prone to. I would need to know a
> little more about your exact synchronisation set up, though. I have never
> used ChronoSync so would need to look at that, but if you could tell me
> exactly what you did, that would help. Were you synchronising two ways (that
> is, trying to update an existing version of a project with an updated
> version) or one way (just copying a project), for instance?
>
> Incidentally, given the problems mentioned above, you are probably wondering
> why Scrivener uses a package-based format, then, rather than a flat one. The
> reason for this is that Scrivener files need to pack a lot of information
> and data, as you can import movie files, PDF files and so forth. “Flat”
> files tend to get read into memory in their totality. A Pages or Word file
> is unlikely to get so big that reading it all into memory at any one time is
> going to cause a problem; and besides, you want to see the entirety of these
> files in the interface at once. But reading a Scrivener project containing
> 100MB movies, hundreds of PDF files and so forth all into memory at once,
> and keeping it there while you work, could slow everything to a crawl. And
> really there is no need to have everything in memory all the time anyway, as
> you generally only ever look at a couple or three files at a time. The
> package-based format allows programs such as Scrivener to load into memory
> only what it needs. It is ideal for the job, but unfortunately the pay-off
> is that it does not play well with synchronisation.

That’s exactly why NoteBook uses this file type, and there are synchronization issues with it, but as I said, haven’t heard of any with TM. Aside from the precaution I mentioned earlier, you can never have too many backups of your important files :-)

Regards,

Travis
Circus Ponies Customer Support

dayBook_2010 7th Edition - A (GTD) NB Template (by petert)

petert — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:10:25 +0000

Greetings all,

I have just released the 2010 Version of my dayBook GTD Template.

Additional detail on it and how to get a copy of the dayBook_2009-7th Edition – A (GTD) NoteBook Template is available from the The Great NoteBook Template Swap section of the NoteBook community Forums.

GTD for Multiple Unrelated Projects (by 77miker)

77miker — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 05:38:26 +0000

I am a serial entrepreneur. I just downloaded notebook for the first time yesterday and am quite excited about it. My dilemma is that my mind works faster than my body is capable of physically keeping up. As a result, I can have a real problem “getting things done”. I am hoping to find a template that aggregates the GTD methods with multi-project flexibility.

Is there anybody out there that has developed a template that allows for multiple projects that are unrelated as well as some type of centralized to GTD to backlog indexing? I’m not sure if I’m using the right terms.

spamfor2009 ### me.com

Cheers, Mike.

GTD format suggestion offered (commented by gizaplat)

gizaplat — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 08:28:22 +0000

Why Circus Ponies NoteBook is Sui Generis

NoteBook is just a Super program! The learning curve is PERFECT for so many people like me. I spend less time TRYING to get organized and much more time actually SIMPLIFYING my life with it!! NoteBook is capable of so much & is feature rich! I like the way e-mail clippings are handled so easily. It makes the using of my graphics tablet for sketchs and handwritten notations a snap! What a cool, seamless program for GTD advocates! It is laid-out, looks like and works like a real paper notebook. NoteBook is, by far and “hands-down” the BEST program of its type. In terms of value for money spent I cannot think of a better value. I use it for the bulk of simpler-to-medium-tough work. However, when it comes to some more complex “stuff-crunching” I also use OmniFocus, OmniOutliner Pro and OmniWeb. Moreover, DEVONthink Pro is also a tool I find very helpful. Personal Brain is, for me, the best of the mind-mapping solutions.

Reocurring "Tasks" (commented by ptram)

ptram — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 21:32:25 +0000

Actually, I seem to remember that the method described in Allen’s book does not include recurring tasks. When an action is done in the first folder, you move it to the last position (i.e., the same day in the next week).

I do this way: when a recurring task is done, I click on its due date and then on the same day of the following week, when the miniature calendar appears. When I need to see all occurrences for a longer time (like birthdays, check-up meetings or lessons), I just create more occurences of the same task (this happens for a very limited number of tasks in my agenda).

Paolo

Reocurring "Tasks" (commented by andyhayes)

andyhayes — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 20:46:39 +0000

I eventually moved to OmniFocus as I needed a more hardcore GTD tool than NoteBook. This is still a fantastic app though and I upgraded to v3 despite not having used the app for a long time. I still recommend it to non-hardcore GTD’rs as well as any other Mac or potential Mac users.

Reocurring "Tasks" (commented by Eric)

Eric — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:41:21 +0000

You probably have Sync Action Items to Entourage selected in the Page menu for one or more pages. You can easily find such pages by looking at the Stickers page of the Multidex.

Reocurring "Tasks" (commented by AceSi)

AceSi — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 11:05:56 +0000

I’m finding that tasks entered in NB are being duplicated in entourage? any ideas?

GTD Template for NB2.0 to share (commented by Brandy )

Brandy — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:28:38 +0000

i’d also like a copy of this – please send to pedrogirl@gmail.com

thanks! :)

dayBook_2009 - A (GTD) NoteBook Template (commented by petert)

petert — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:04:08 +0000

Links fixed ( a few months back actually, but I forgot to comment. OOPs! my bad!)

GTD Template for NB2.0 to share (commented by lklo)

lklo — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 18:06:50 +0000

Would you please send me a copy?
meladylo@gmail.com

thanks

GTD Template for NB2.0 to share (commented by lyrad euguyal)

lyrad euguyal — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:50:45 +0000

nice post

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