Productivity downloads - Circus Ponies NoteBook by Circus Ponies Software, Inc. And many more programs are available for instant and free download. Circus Ponies has released NoteBook for iPad, a powerful note-taking tool that includes a full-featured outliner with multi-font text, and lets you add files, diagrams, and sketches to your notes. And NoteBook makes it easy to find anything with just a few clicks in the Multidex™, an auto-generated dictionary of the content in your Notebooks. Circus Ponies NoteBook is the perfect app for managing projects of any size, assignments and classwork, client information, research, and much more.

Quirky But Solid Notetaking App Becoming Abandonware

For years this app has helped many attorneys prepare trial and litigation notebooks. This has been my goto app for trial notebooks mainly because of it’s tabbed interface and ability to print a hardcopy paper version of a trial notebook with chapter style pagination. The app adopted a notebook metaphor with formatting for each page and divider page employing an outline format. Additionally, the app could sort these outlines by a number of different features, including alpha-numerical, date created, modified and other meta-data. In short, I’ve been a big fan and user of this app over the years (here, here, here).

But, over the last year activity level at Circus Ponies dropped significantly with fewer and fewer updates (much like this blog #sarcasm). More recently, the website is completely down as of today. Recent twitter posts (here, here) have also begun to question the continuing viability of this really useful bit of kit. UPDATE: A quick check on the iOS App Store and the Mac App Store show that the Circus Ponies software pages are gone. It’s really a shame. About 6 months ago I began to get the feeling that this app was on it’s way out. To date, I have not found a solid replacement for it. OneNote, Evernote, OmniFocus’ OmniOutliner all come close but, ultimately, fall short. There is one potential replacement that is being regularly updated and, I’m told, is currently working a beta for a completely retooled application. I’ll hold off on saying what that app is until I get a chance to test drive the new version. Suffice to say that it is a significant paradigm shift.

Circus Ponies Notebook Replacement

UPDATE 2: A user over at the MILO Group received a response from Circus Ponies regarding Notebook as a continuing piece of software. The response was apparently delayed because Circus Ponies is no longer monitoring their support email address. They confirm that Notebook for the iPad is dead and that Notebook itself is “mature,” “stable,” and will only receive “incremental changes” in the future. So, if you can read between the lines, better start migrating anything important before an OS update breaks the Mac version and there is a long delay before an incremental update gets released. Given the the death of the iPad version and dicey future support, moving forward to a different app is advisable.

Circus Ponies Notebook Alternatives

On a separate note, this is the first post in a loooooooong time. A combination of joining a new law firm and personal life have slowed down my blogging. That should change from hereon out and I hope to bring back some more long-form in-depth articles, reviews and tips and tricks.