SOHO Notes

The recent version 9.3.7 is running on High Sierra ! But translate the DATABASE is difficult

Does anyone know whether this version works OK with High Sierra? This is the only reason I haven't updated yet to High Sierra, as I don't want to risk losing access to my SOHO Notes database and I haven't had time yet to migrate the data (a VERY slow process) across to my selected alternative, Yojimbo. Note that Yojimbo does not replace all of SOHO Notes functionality, but it is the closest equivalent I have found so far, and it is, at least, rock-solid and supported.

SOHO Notes is now Notelife.

I've been a user of SOHO Notes since version 1.0. It has been an indispensable tool, integral to my daily work flow for years and years.

I'm a private IT consultant with 500+ clients. SOHO Notes holds all the private accounts, logins, passwords, alarm codes, gate codes, etc, etc, etc for all my clients. 99% of the data belongs to other people, not me. I’m just the custodian of the data. No way is it my right to cloud sync data of this nature, so having local syncing is a must.

Several years ago Chronos finally released an iOS companion app called NoteLife (iPhone) and NoteLife HD (iPad). Finally SOHO Notes in my pocket. Fantastic!

Anyhow, Chronos recently killed SOHO Notes. I had been checking the site weekly for months hoping that the serious bugs introduced with macOS Sierra’s release would be addressed in an update. Finally when I made my check on June 13th, I was greeted with a new updated home page heralding the “Coming Soon” release of “A premium note manager for the rest of us” - NoteLife. There was a button to buy a special 18 month subscription for $20.00. I clicked the button, made the purchase and received an eMail with my License Key and Download Link. I was surprised that there was a download link for a product listed as “Coming Soon”. I thought great, they’re giving the early birds an early version, but no. Clicking on the download link brought me right back to the main product page. There was no language stating anything about when I might get the product I had just paid for. Annoyed already!

I opened a trouble ticket on Chronos’s support portal. To date I have received no reply. When I login to the portal my ticket is still listed as “being processed” a month later. So much for customer service.

I kept checking the site everyday for a download. Several days after I purchased, the site had been updated again, but this time the button to purchase had been removed. Finally last Friday the download link appeared - excited to FINALLY see what I had paid for a month ago.

Beyond disappointed! Where to begin?

They took an amazingly functional app with a long legacy of innovation and unique features and replaced it with a slash and burn, hatchet job of an app, renaming it NoteLife. They removed virtually all of SOHO's rich feature set and whittled it down to minimalist kids app. On top of it, they moved to a subscription based model which I would have totally been behind had the product been a modernized version of it formal glory, instead of useless regurgitation of Apple's own useless Notes app and the sea of other mediocre “Notes” apps on offer at the App Store. The subscription was described as a necessary change in their business model to ensure continued development. I understand that, but they have years of future development ahead of them to get the app anywhere close to what SOHO Notes was.

NoteLife migrates your SOHO 9.3.7 database into it’s new database, but what a half assed effort that is. Like I said, I have over 500 clients. All this data was nested in an organized hierarchy of folders in SOHO Notes. The migration did not retain the nested hierarchy. Instead, it imported each folder to the top level. I had to spend over 2 hours going back and forth between SOHO Notes and NoteLife moving folders around to rebuild the hierarchy. Really? What a joke.

NoteLife does not have note types. All the notes are rich text (rtf) files. SOHO Notes had many different types of notes. My data consisted of many different notes types. All my form notes were converted to rich text loosing all of the usefulness of the Form type. All my PDFs, of which I have hundreds, became attachments to rtf files, represented in NoteLife as a thumbnail. The interface still sports the familiar three column arrangement with the big preview pane on the right. However, since PDF’s have been relegated to an attachmnet, when you select a PDF note the big preview pane is blank, only displaying a tiny thumbnail of page 1 of a PDF. To view the PDF you have to click on the thumbnail which opens a large black window in the middle of your screen displaying the PDF within it. There are no tools of any kind for zooming, navigation, or any other familiar and expected interaction modes.

But, worst of all, you can only sort your notes by Modify or Create date. Thats it. No alphabetical option. Unbelievable. I guess the developer skipped “Sorting 101”.

The promised and currently advertised on Chronos’s website iOS app is still a no show on the App Store, so I have no info on it. Given what I have seen from the desktop version, which historically has richer feature sets than iOS counterparts, I can only expect an even poorer offering.

I will be demanding my money back if I can ever get ahold of anyone at Chronos. If not, I’ll be disputing the charge. I’ll get my money back one way or another. NoteLife is useless for my needs. I was expecting to move forward in a modernized version of an app I have used for a ages, not take a trip back a decade.

Stay away from this piece O’ crap. Don’t waist your time. Research and look for an alternative, you’ll be happier. I am going to move over to NoteBooks at notebooksapp dot com. The local sync feature is of paramount importance to me and this app offers wifi local sync and ticks most of the boxes for my other needs.

GOOD NEWS! SOHO Notes has made a special update for macOS Sierra only, 9.3.7. Seems to be OK. Hope that SOHO will re-commit to SOHO Notes and NoteLife and keep them up to date. Have tried many alternatives, none are as full featured and easy to use and as versatile as SOHO Notes and NoteLife.

SoHO notes is no longer being supported. It would be best to find another resource .

SoHo notes is not compatible with Sierra and Chronos has not responded to my question about the problem. I like the program but Chronos should not advertise that it is compatible with all OS. At the moment I cannot use SoHo Notes and have no way of transferring my data, that I know of. .

SOHO Notes still works for me on El Capitan with one minor glitch in text fields where the auto-correct "bubble" pops up but cannot be dismissed. I have not noticed any other issues. Having said that I have lost all faith that Chronos will ever update this application.

I have had emails from them about new products such as PrintLife, Labelist and Business Card Shop, but never a mention of any future for SOHO Notes or the replacement product (NoteLife) that they pre-announced in 2013. Who knows what will come along - I really do think they are shocking in terms of respecting people who have loyally used this product for years.

Personally I depend on it as I have used it for all my passwords, along with a host of other stuff, ever since I first purchased it. It is still a really powerful product with a vast range of capability, but it could certainly be improved and it would be very nice to see the glitches ironed out.

The biggest positive for me is that it never crashes in my experience, and I have it running constantly for weeks and months at a time in the background. But I would still like to see a new version coming out, or just have some confidence that I am not using a product without a future.

Loved using this for many years. However, it fails to open under El Capitan and I have not had a response to my support request. Sorry to see the app die.

For me, this version (9.3.6) does not work with OS X El Capitan (10.11). I think the developer has finished working on SOHO Notes for some time. There has long been any updates or other information.

Looks like 9.3.6 will probably be the final ever version of SOHO Notes - Chronos have announced that "Development has ceased on SOHO Notes" and it will be replaced "in 2014" (December?) by a new product called NoteLife which will be based on SOHO Notes but will use cloud-based synchronisation rather than local database synchronisation. On the face of it this should be a good move because it may avoid the problems there have always been with sync services synchronisation (which database is authoritative? - leading to inevitable duplication issues), but the devil will be in the detail. Whose cloud will they use, for example? NoteLife will also integrate into a product called iTriumph (totally rubbish name IMHV), which they are introducing in Jan 2014, which appears to be a conflation of Calendar and Contacts. I must note that although I have seen some minor problems with SOHO Notes on Mavericks, I have not in any way experienced the database problems that others have reported here.

I downloaded this latest 'update' this morning - it said it would recover the database, but although it said it was successful it refused to open the database and will not even let me create a completely new database, and, of course, absolutely no response to my support request[s] now over 20 days old. My patience with this company, their products and what they think passes for support for a long time and previously loyal customer is exhausted! Perhaps even they don't know how to fix the problem[s]!!!!!

Totally agree with Harristype - completely broken under Mavericks. Current file will not open and backup will not restore. Support ticket lodged with Chrono 17 days ago - absolutely no response, not even an acknowledgement. Years of data now locked away. I doubt that I can trust this software, or the Company, again!

Totally broken under Mavericks. It may work for a while (like it did for me), and the wham: The database was successfully restored, but could not be reconnected, because the following error occurred: The file couldn’t be opened.

Got an email today advising how support has been seriously beefed up. Whilst that may be too late for me returning from Eaglefiler, it's nevertheless very positive news, as it was the insufficient support and lack of improvements resulting from that which drove me away in the first place. Good to see the developers being a bit more active and I look forward to seeing how things develop now.

I find SOHO Notes to be generally quite sympathetic software. I tried to use it to manage and organize my "paperless office" - a bunch of (then) around 400 scanned searchable .PDFs. Unfortunately, SOHO is not really suited for that: it lacks any cloud sync (like dropbox or google drive or icloud) and there are too few "fields" you could use to sort the notes. (For the Paperless Office you'd need at least an "Author" to sort by source and "Date" to sort chronologically). The interface is also somehow unfriendly and requires lot of unnecessary actions to fill the forms. There are some kind of attempts to connect notes with contacts (could be fantastic for paperless office), but implementation is very poor and this part of GUI is simply terrible. But for notes taking SOHO Notes should be OK.

Now at 9.3.0: • Fixed several issues related to scanning under Mountain Lion • Fixed problems where opening the Preferences from DockNote if SOHO Notes wasn't already running would result in a messed up Preferences window

I've tried SoHo Notes, but does anyone know of a note-taking/organizing program that allows manual ordering of notes within a group or folder? Most programs offer the options of sorting by creation date, by edit date, or by title (alphabetically), but don't allow true ordering capability. A simple example - I have a group of notes titled WEEKLY, and there are 7 notes in that group - Sunday, Monday, etc. But I cannot arrange the days-of-the-week notes in order - I'm locked into sorting options that don't apply. Is there a note organizing program that actually allows you to ORGANIZE your notes? Help, MacUpdate!

As someone who has relied on it for approximately 2 years, I feel that SOHO Notes does what is says it will do most of the time, but places too much reliance upon its GUI at the cost of speed as well as bugs which come and go with each update but, accumulated together, eventually become quite irritating. The latest bug for me with this 9.25 update (after overcoming the fact that the app would immediately crash upon launching) is not being able to use the sidedock at all. No agenda here - you may not enounter these problems and its certainly worth installing this product to see if it fits your needs - just my experience.

Just LOVE IT!

I am a pretty heavy user of SOHONotes with it running all the time and many folders of notes of all types in the database. My experience is that the current version is totally reliable, running for many days (even months) at a time with not a single crash. I did have one issue (documented in a comment below) with the contents of fields in a form disappearing from view after a context switch to another application (but not losing the data), but after reporting this to Chronos it has been fixed and I do not have any more functional bugs with the product. I find this an incredibly feature-rich Notes product; indeed I find it hard to think of a feature that is missing. Adding its stability to this I don't think there is another similar product on the market that compares. Obviously there are some rather critical reviews of this product below but my experience does not replicate theirs in any way. I can't help but wonder whether there is actually some hidden motive to them.