Long Live the King! Jotz is the monarch of note pads. It is so far ahead of anything else calling itself a note pad that it should really have its own category. The feature set, the ease of use, the wonderful flexability of pad and note design, the constant brilliant development and addition of new features, and much more have made it my one and only information hub. Hats off, gentlemen, a genius program!

The interface is awful and does not always work right, though they have cleaned up things like the maddening behavior of URL links. It is nonintuitive bloatware that somehow makes simple use ignoring without the bells and whistles difficult. Sure, I could learn everything, but that misses the point of this quintessential simple app. I now have the "counterfeit" license code warning under this version -- reported by another reviewer and while I'm sure I'll figure it out, this is more time wasted. The only really good thing I can say about Jotz is that it is better than the lackluster competition I've seen. This is faint praise indeed.

I trialed 4 other products in this category and decided to finalize my purchase with Jotz. It's fast, reliable and powerful enough to satisfy my hunger for flexibility. I found the other alternatives too simple, simple enough that I might as well just use textedit. This is not true of NoteTaker but this product simply costs too much. Jotz offers the best of all products at a decent price. The interface could use more user friendly icons but that is my only qualm.

Jotz is simply the best way to organize your life. It's easy to use from the start. If you go further and spend five minutes checking out the excellent online mini-manual, you will appreciate just how good this software is: it is wonderfully customizable, rich in useful and easy to use features, it is lightening fast. It is addictive. I have dumped all the others as nothing can even come close to Jotz in features, flexibility, ease of use. Also nothing looks as good: you can even infinitely customize the look of your Jotz notepads, make every one different too if you like. I now organize everything I need to do: from simple to do lists, to detailed outlining and planning; everything I need or want to know or remember: it's even great for storing quotes or notes for projects (or if you're a student or academic, for papers/articles/books).
Jotz is a nice environment in which to think and plan: everything's orderly, everything's at your fingertips for quick and easy reference.
Great program! It's a pleasure to use, and I use it constantly.

The developer is too modest when he states that this is an extension of Classic NotePad. Jotz goes way, way beyond CNP. It saves its "notes" as independently-accessible RTFD files in package format, which means they're always there for export or re-use.

Indexing-and-search is phenomenal, with a browser-like search function that takes in an unlimited number of Jotz notefiles. (You can also instantly generate a list of principal words in the notefile.) RTF formatting allows color, highlighting, and the like, yet the user interface couldn't be simpler.

Notes can be meta-indexed with class labels. Sorting can be done under several different categories. Drag-and-drop makes import incredibly simple.

Having bought a license for it, I quickly made Jotz my principal organizing tool, and I haven't changed my mind yet -- even after trying Alepin, iOrganize, MacJournal, etc. All of them are worthy products, but lacking the perfect balance of features that is Jotz.

All this describes the old form of Jotz. The rewritten form (1.3) has few visible differences from the old version, but works (as advertised) much more efficiently and smoothly. The developer knows how to avoid messing with perfection.