Everyone loves OneNote. It is the most popular free-form note taking app that supports almost everything you drag onto it. You can quickly scribble a text anywhere on the note and add powerpoint presentation, links, images, videos etc to the note. It is part of the Microsoft Office bundle and is not available for Mac. Now, if you’ve just switched from Windows to Mac and you miss your OneNote, Growly Notes is one software that you will be particularly interested in, because it is just like an OneNote clone. Growly Notes, once installed, allows you to capture everything you’re interested in. Just like OneNote, it supports anywhere scribbling and you can also insert in almost any file format – text, images, movies, audio clips, PDF files, tables, lists, web and file links, and drawings.
Getting Started
When you first open the app, it will bring you to the Help page where you can read the tutorial to get started.
Growly Notes works using a hierarchy system. The first document you create is call a notebook. Each notebook can contain one or more sections. Each section can then contain one or more pages. To get started, go to “File -> New Notebook”. When prompted, you can choose to create a blank new notebook or pick from existing templates.
Once a new notebook is created, you can click on the “+s” to add a new section or “+p” to add a new page. To add notes, start typing anywhere on the page and it will start capturing your input.
There are no gridlines or rules to follow here. You just have to use your own imagination. Inserting media files can be done via the “Insert” option in the menubar, or simply drag and drop to the note. It even comes with a calculator app built-in so you can type simple Maths operation and get it to calculate the result.
Search
If you have created tons of notes, it is going to be difficult trying to uncover that one piece of note that you have created years ago. Luckily you can use the search feature to search for any text and it shows you the results in context. You can also tag notes using built-in categories and search for tagged notes with one click. For pinpoint searches, look for tagged notes that contain specific text.
Take notes while working in other programs
If you are into multi-tasking, you can open a floating window to take notes while you’re on another application like Powerpoint. The text is stored in a special location and can be moved to any other notebook when you’re done.
The Price
If you are still not aware, Growly Notes is FREE. It is amazing that a great software like this comes at a price of zero. In fact, all the software in the GrowlyBird package (including calendars, journal, checkbook and several games) are also free. According to the developers, the reason why they offer the software for free because they sucked at marketing (ok, I said that. Check out their own wordings). If you missed your OneNote, you are not going to miss on this one. Growly Notes
