<div id="popup_box_thanks" style="display:none" onClick="close_popup_thanks('popup_box_thanks', 'ts')"><br>Thanks for submitting your tip! All submissions are moderated by an editor before appearing online. We've reset the form so you can enter another tip. Or you can close the tip submission box. <div class="x_close" id="thanks_upper_right"><a href="javascript:void(0)" onmousedown="close_popup_thanks('popup_box_thanks', 'ts'); return true;">Close</a></div></div>
<div class="tbf_row"><div class="tbf_wide_extra_top not_bold">Please submit only technical tips that will help other TidBITS readers better use their Macs, iPhones, and related software and hardware. All product announcements should be sent to <a href="mailto:releases@tidbits.com">releases@tidbits.com</a>.</div></div>
<div class="tbf_left">URL</div><div class="tbf_right"><input type="text" value="" name="tip_link_url" tabindex="3"><span class="tip_description"><br>Enter the URL to a Web page that supports your tip.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="spacer"></div>
<div class="tbf_row">
<div class="tbf_left">Linked text</div><div class="tbf_right"><input type="text" value="" name="tip_link_label" tabindex="4"><span class="tip_description"><br>Enter the name of the page linked above.</span></div>
<div class="tbf_wide"><input type="submit" value="Preview Your Tip" name="preview_tip" onClick="fill_preview('tipbits_enclosure_preview', 'ts', this.form); return false;" tabindex="7"> <input type="submit" value="Send Us Your Tip!" name="submit_this_tip" onClick="handle_tip_submission('ts', '', this.form, 'tip'); return false;" tabindex="8"></div>
</div>
<div class="spacer"></div>
<div class="tbf_row">
<div class="tbf_wide"><span class="fine_print">When you submit a tip, you give us permission to use it. Read <a href="javascript:void(0)" onClick="generic_show_hide('tip_terms')">our terms</a> for more details. All submissions are reviewed before publication.</span></div>
<div class="tbf_wide"><span class="fine_print">Our terms: By submitting a tip, you agree to assign TidBITS Publishing Inc., a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual license to reproduce, publish, and distribute your tip in connection with the TidBITS Web site and associated products in any media. You agree that you created the content you submitted, and that you have the right to assign us this license. You give us permission to use your name, but your email address won't be publicly displayed or shared. We review all submissions before publication, and reserve the right to select which submissions we feel are appropriate for our readers and to edit those we publish.</span></div>
<div id="comment_thanks" style="display:none" onClick="close_popup_thanks('comment_thanks', 'comm')"><br>Thanks for submitting a comment! Please check your email for a link that, when clicked, will verify that you're a real person and cause your comment to appear immediately. <div class="x_close" id="comment_upper_right"><a href="javascript:void(0)" onmousedown="close_popup_thanks('comment_thanks', 'comm'); return true;">Close</a></div></div>
<div class="tbf_wide"><span class="fine_print">Our terms: We reserve the right to edit or delete any comment, so please post thoughtfully. We use your email address <i>only</i> to send you a one-time verification message confirming that you posted this comment. We also store your address to allow you to verify using other Web browsers in the future. For more info, see our <a href="http://db.tidbits.com/privacy.html">privacy policy</a>.</span></div>
<li><a href="/feeds/tidbits.rss" title="Subscribe via RSS" class="gettb">RSS <img src="/images/feed-icon-12x12.gif" width="12" height="12" border="0" class="nav_img" alt="Subscribe via RSS"></a></li>
<li><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=276986548" title="Subscribe to the podcast" class="gettb">Podcast <img src="/images/feed-icon-12x12_podcast.gif" width="12" height="12" border="0" class="nav_img" alt="Subscribe to the postcast"></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.twitter.com/TidBITS" title="Get Article Updates via Twitter" class="gettb">Twitter <img src="/images/feed_icon_12x12_twitter.png" width="12" height="12" border="0" class="nav_img" alt="Get Article Updates via Twitter"></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/TidBITS/195314925519" title="Go to the TidBITS Page at Facebook" class="gettb">Facebook <img src="/images/feed_icon_12x12_facebook.gif" width="12" height="12" border="0" class="nav_img" alt="Go to the TidBITS Page at Facebook"></a></li>
<li><a href="javascript:void(0)" title="Sections" class="tabhead" onClick="return showhide('articleslist')">Sections <span id="articleslist_triangle"><img src="/images/nav_triangle_open.gif" width="9" height="9" border="0" class="navtriangle" id="articleslist_tri_image" alt="Click to show or hide the contents of this section."></span></a></li>
<li><a href="javascript:void(0)" onClick="return showhide('stafflist')" title="Staff" class="tabhead">Staff <span id="stafflist_triangle"><img src="/images/nav_triangle_closed.gif" width="9" height="9" border="0" class="navtriangle" id="stafflist_tri_image" alt="Click to show or hide the contents of this section."></span></a></li>
<li><a href="javascript:void(0)" title="Issues" class="tabhead" onClick="return showhide('issuelist')">Weekly Issues <span id="issuelist_triangle"><img src="/images/nav_triangle_closed.gif" width="9" height="9" border="0" class="navtriangle" id="issuelist_tri_image" alt="Click to show or hide the contents of this section."></span></a></li>
<li><a href="javascript:void(0)" onClick="return showhide('abouttidbits')" title="About TidBITS" class="tabhead">About TidBITS <span id="abouttidbits_triangle"><img src="/images/nav_triangle_closed.gif" width="9" height="9" border="0" class="navtriangle" id="abouttidbits_tri_image" alt="Click to show or hide the contents of this section."></span></a></li>
<div class="center_top">Thoughtful, detailed coverage of the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, plus the best-selling <a href="http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/?pt=TB-TAGLINE" style="color:yellow">Take Control</a> ebooks.</div>
<!-- begin centercolumn -->
<div id="centercolumn">
<!-- begin rightcolumn_container -->
<div id="rightcolumn_container">
<!-- begin rightcolumn -->
<!-- rightcolumn is embedded within centercolumn so featured text wraps around it -->
</div><!-- end tearoffbox_wide_container for watchlist items -->
<!-- begin tearoff box wide -->
<div class="tearoffbox_wide_container">
<div class="tearoffbox_wide_tips">
<div class="tip_display">
<div class="tips_sponsor_logo">
</div>
<h6>Set Password Activation Time in Snow Leopard</h6>
<p><p>In Snow Leopard, you can now set an amount of time after your Mac goes to sleep or engages the screen saver before it requires a password to log back on. In Leopard, the option was simply to require the password or not. Choose among several increments, between 5 seconds and 4 hours, from System Preferences > Security.</p></p>
</div>
<div class="tearoffbox_wide_bottom_tips">
<div style="padding-bottom:35px"><div class="tip_display" style="float:left"><p><br><a href="/tipbits/187">Link to this tip</a></p></div><div class="tip_display" style="float:right; width:150px">
<div class="tbf_wide_80" id="hc_rc_5931">To help us avoid automated posts and misuse of our site, please enter the words below.</div><div class="x_close_row" id="hc_upper_right2_5931"><a href="javascript:void(0)" onmousedown="HidePopupContent('hc_5931', 'hc', '5931'); return true;">Close</a></div>
<div class="featured_meta"><div class="meta_article">25 Aug 2003 | <a href="/article/7319?print_version=1">Print <span class="shift_up"><img src="/images/printer_icon.gif" alt="Printer-Friendly Version of This Article" border="0" width="9" height="10"></span></a></div></div>
<div id="article_box_5931"><P>Back in 2001, after I'd written several TidBITS articles about intriguing ways to store and retrieve information on your Mac, a number of readers attempted to impress upon me that for some folks, simpler is better. It was with that in mind that I wrote "Three Simple Snippet Keepers" in <A HREF="http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-593.html">TidBITS-593</A>. And later, in the same spirit, I discussed iData Pro X, hinting that perhaps it was a bit <EM>too</EM> simple, since its notes were just text, with no fonts, styling, or Unicode awareness (see "The Digital Shoebox: iData Pro X 1.0.5" in <A HREF="http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-675.html">TidBITS-675</A>; also see the series "Two Bytes of the Cherry: Unicode and Mac OS X" for more on Unicode). It was in reaction to that article that a reader wrote suggesting that some users were quietly but enthusiastically practicing the cult of Hog Bay Notebook, and that I should be looking into this.</P><P><<A HREF="http://db.tidbits.com/article/06529">http://db.tidbits.com/article/06529</A>><BR><<A HREF="http://db.tidbits.com/article/07145">http://db.tidbits.com/article/07145</A>><BR><<A HREF="http://db.tidbits.com/series/1217">http://db.tidbits.com/series/1217</A>></P><P>Hog Bay Notebook, which recently reached version 2.0.1, certainly is worth looking into. It is indeed simple - you can learn to use it in about a minute - and has an elegance and visual clarity that is simply stunning. At the same time, it's powerful, mostly because it has an amazing search engine build into it. If you have snippets of information and you want to give them a modicum of organization and incredible searchability, Hog Bay Notebook might be the solution.</P><P><<A HREF="http://www.hogbay.com/software/notebook/">http://www.hogbay.com/software/notebook/</A>></P><P><STRONG>Taking Note</STRONG> -- The essence of a Hog Bay Notebook document is the note, which is exactly like a TextEdit document. You can give it a title, enter text, and add character formatting and paragraph formatting, including alignment, line spacing, paragraph margins, and tabs, by means of a ruler, just as in TextEdit. You can paste in pictures, and even drag in other documents, such as PDFs or HTML files, to be stored inside the note as an attachment. (If you didn't know TextEdit could do all those things, you haven't been playing with your computer enough!)</P><P>In fact, Hog Bay Notebook notes <EM>are</EM> TextEdit documents. Hog Bay Notebook's documents are bundles, and its notes are .rtfd files, which are one of TextEdit's native types. Indeed, if Hog Bay Notebook vanished from the universe tomorrow, you could open a document with Show Package Contents, and presto, there are your all notes, safe and warm, ready to be opened by TextEdit. All that would be missing is their titles; but these are stored in an XML document that any text editor can read. This structure adds to your sense of confidence and security when you use Hog Bay Notebook.</P><P><STRONG>Getting Organized</STRONG> -- Notes themselves can be further organized within your document. If you like, you can create virtual folders in your document and put notes (or folders, of course) into them. The resulting hierarchy is displayed in an outline view. You may also set a few attributes of each note: a status, done or not done, which appears a checkbox; a label, which appears as a color (as in the Mac OS 9 Finder); and a rating of 1 to 5, which appears as a row of stars. The attributes are displayed in a table view of your note titles, where you can sort on any column.</P><P>Hog Bay Notebook also provides a couple of organizational extras. Selected text can be highlighted, and you can then jump from highlight to highlight within a note (but not through the document as a whole, which is a pity). And you can make wiki-style links: any capitalized word with inner capitalization, LikeThis, is taken to be the name of another note, and you can jump to that note, or create it, by clicking on that word. Also, you can navigate backwards to recently viewed notes, as in a Web browser.</P><P><STRONG>Seeking and Finding</STRONG> -- Hog Bay Notebook's tour de force is its inclusion of a free, open source, search engine, Lucene, which does a live batch search of your entire document while you type into the search field at the top of the window. The results appear in the table view, showing each matching note's title and a bar whose length ranks the quality of the match. By default you're doing a whole-word search, but you can do partial-word and wildcard searches, boolean searches, phrase searches, proximity searches, and even weighted searches. To keep things simple, titles are automatically included in the searched material. This magic depends upon an index, of course, which is maintained live and adds somewhat to the size of your document.</P><P><<A HREF="http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/docs/">http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/docs/</A>><BR><<A HREF="http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/docs/queryparsersyntax.html">http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/docs/ queryparsersyntax.html</A>></P><P>In an attempt to push Hog Bay Notebook to its limits, I imported my entire diary into it - over 3,000 notes. Hog Bay Notebook wasn't fazed. I did unearth one bug: in the table and outline views, note titles stop appearing beyond some number of titles; but you can work around this by clumping your notes into folders. Everything else - the search engine, sorting, navigating, opening and closing a document - was as fast as if had been just one note - namely instant.</P><P><STRONG>Taking Stock</STRONG> -- I did run into a couple of little issues. Hog Bay Notebook isn't at all scriptable with AppleScript, which is a pity. You can't customize the names and colors of the labels. Selecting a note in the outline view displays it, but doesn't also show it in the table view, so I don't understand how you are supposed to find out what attributes it has (its status, label, and rating). And you can't navigate from a note to its folder - when you're reading a note, you have no way to know where in the hierarchy it lives - which seems to me like an oversight.</P><P>As weighed against this, however, one can only be astounded by how clean and compelling Hog Bay Notebook's interface is. It's a kind of poster child for Cocoa, taking advantage of what seems like every widget and every technology Cocoa provides. The outline appears in a drawer. The table appears in a split view, where the split can be horizontal or vertical. You can edit a note in its half of the split view or in a separate window. The clipboard contents in another application can be pasted into a Notebook without switching to it, through the application's Dock menu; selected text can be copied in through a Service. There's spell checking, which can be inline, and a note can read itself aloud. It has a Finder-like toolbar you can collapse or customize to display text, small icons, or large icons. In fact, things are customizable to a fare-thee-well, plus there's extensive Undo. It's as if the author's intent were to give every Cocoa feature a workout.</P><P>It would be wrong, though, to give the impression that Hog Bay Notebook is a mere Cocoa kitchen sink. It's not like a Liszt tone poem; it's more like a Mozart symphony. The interface is clean, clear, well-behaved, with a sense of rightness throughout. To the user, it seems easy, obvious, light as a feather - but if you have some Cocoa programming experience, you know that, behind the scenes, this apparent artlessness is not at all easily achieved. What's really impressive here is Hog Bay's evident thorough dedication to doing Cocoa right. This, too, gives the user confidence that, with Hog Bay Notebook, your snippets are safe.</P><P>Hog Bay Notebook costs $20 shareware, and is available as a 700K download.</P><P class="paybits">PayBITS: Did Matt's review of Hog Bay Notebook help you organize<BR> your important information? Consider thanking him via PayBITS!<BR> <<A HREF="https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=matt%40tidbits.com">https://www.paypal.com/xclick/ business=matt%40tidbits.com</A>><BR> Read more about PayBITS: <<A HREF="http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/">http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/</A>></P><!-- Go Hog Wild with Hog Bay Notebook Matt Neuburg --></div>
<!-- end article text -->
<!-- PayBITS -->
<p> </p><div class="sponsorbox">
<div class="sponsortext"><A HREF="http://markspace.com/bits?source=tidbits"><IMG SRC="http://db.tidbits.com/images/badges/mark-space.gif" ALT="" HEIGHT="50" WIDTH="50" BORDER="0" ALIGN="left"></A>SYNC YOUR PHONE with The Missing Sync: Sync your calendar,<br />address book, music, photos and much more between your phone<br />and Mac. Supports ANDROID, BLACKBERRY, PALM PRE and many<br />other phones. <<a href="http://markspace.com/bits?source=tidbits">http://www.markspace.com/bits</a>></div>