There have been countless notebook apps for the Mac over the years, so why do I find AutoNotes to be the first (apart from Notational Velocity) that I find truly compelling? Mostly I think because it has hit a sweet balance between function and simplicity: it can be summoned and dismissed with a global shortcut, the window is simple and uncluttered, the search and tagging features are excellent, and, particularly in this version (1.3.8) it gives you an unusual degree of control over your text style, with user-selectable defaults for fonts, background and text colour, and line spacing. It even has automatic wiki-style links between pages.The keyboard control is also very good. Pretty much everything, in short, that you could reasonably expect from a streamlined notes app, with nothing you don't want to get in the way.

In addition, and this is always a bonus, the developer is very friendly and amenable to suggestions, and keen to eliminate bugs. (If you need the other functions, buying AutoNotes as part of his full Automaton suite is a bargain too.)

This has to be one of the most powerful ten buck "note takers" I've ever come across. You can hot-key create notes or grab text system-wide, you can tag what you grab, and use the tags to filter your files. The program creates auto-wiki links between document names and you can create you own wiki-links...it has built-in spell check and grammar check, URL link detection....just grabbed something from the web with a user-define hot-key? Want to append to what you just grabbed? A user-defined hot-key does it. The interface is brilliant, using side-panes for showing tags and the docs in your database, and is simplicity itself. Also, the file formats are all RTF, txt, or RTFD, so you're not trapped into a proprietary format with your data!

If I was not so wedded in data collection/organization/management to the *much* more expensive DevonThink Pro, I'd buy this program in an instant. In fact, I'm damn tempted to get it anyway, use it for quick and dirty (but smart) data collection, and then dump files into DevonThink for it's way smart artificial intelligence and other amazing features.

I just don't see how you can go wrong for $10 with this program, and the suite of programs that this program is related to called Automation is also brilliant and a damn good buy. I usually don't review a program I haven't bought (in this case, for reasons of redundancy with DTPro) but my test drive of this blew me away. AutoNotes is just a brilliant little piece of software.

I downloaded the trial, opened up the application and created a note. I then closed the application and re-opened it. The note list came up blank, in other words the note I created previously had not been saved.

So I tried creating a new note repository in my Dropbox folder. This created 4 identical repository entries in the preference pane and resulted in many popup messages telling me there were duplicate entries.

My conclusion: This is not ready for release