Sadly, I am ending about 15 years of using Chronos applications. This company has squandered the goodwill and reputation gained from earlier years of solid innovative programs and responsiveness to customers. If a rival had bought up Chronos with the intent of destroying the company, it would have followed the same plan Chronos has followed the past few years.

My use of their products goes back beyond StickyBrain (precursor of SOHO Notes) to Consultant, one of the earliest PIMs (Personal Information Managers) for the Mac. Chronos was, I thought, an innovator, with the elegant Consultant and with StickyBrain, an early notes-managing program that offered a number of neat features. One could drag a little calendar into a note, sort in folders-within-folders, have various templates for notes, searching was very fast & there was as I recall a fuzzy search feature, and the program was totally reliable. It was pretty much Yojimbo but, what, 10 years ago? Customer support was good. Sync with Palm worked well.

Then reliability faded, the replacement SOHO came along, and customer forums and free email support were eliminated. SOHO is slow and buggy. It loses information, the cardinal sin for its type of program. I expect the entire company to fold soon. They had a ten-year lead on this now-huge area of hierarchic folder-analogy notekeepers and now they can't compete at all. I'm not angry but sad.

There's at least a dozen programs to choose from when leaving SOHO behind. For the serious researcher, I believe DevonThink Pro [http://www.devon-technologies.com/] is the only real contender. It's flexible, fast, reliable, and has features nothing else attempts, like auto-indexing and “see also” or “find similar” suggestions from an AI. It learns from your own organization of the material into subject folders, so that before long it can categorize new entries all by itself, with remarkable accuracy, as well as suggesting related items that may be filed elsewhere.

For a little less money, Circus Ponies Notebook [www.circusponies.com] does a good job. It doesn't offer AI or self-organizing, but you can place clippings into specific subject notebooks very easily using contextual menu choices, it does do outlining, and handles large volumes of information quite well. The customizable notebook format is appealing. I still use it for organizing less scholarly information when I want to be able to leaf through material on well-defined topics, such as various areas of plants and gardening. Topics are put into separate notebooks rather than being in folders within one or a few very large databases, so if your mac has memory limitations this may be for you. DT Pro doesn't yet have the ability to open more than one database at the same time (though this is promised soon) so there's a temptation to keep everything in One Big File--which gets maximum benefit from DTP's terrific ability to suggest similar items [see Steven Berlin Johnson's lengthy paeans about how this enriches his thinking and writing, at http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html and http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2005/02/devonthink_cont.html].

For thorough, structured reviews of many other applications that might replace SOHO for you, see Ted Goranson's About This Particular Outliner series, in the online publication About This Particular Mac [the various installments are listed at http://www.atpm.com/Back/atpo.shtml]. Though his title says “outliner”, these days it seems that most apps that do outlining do it in the context of another larger capability such as word processing, information organizing, snippet-keeping, making presentations, etc., so his series gives you a unique bird's-eye view of a big section of mac landscape. If outlining per se is especially important to you, remember that the excellent Omni Outliner has a clipping storage faculty too.

To the people at Chronos--perhaps not the same people that made Consultant and Sticky Brain?--we can only say “Ave atque vale”, “Hail and farewell.”