Meh. Against my better judgment, I downloaded it and poked around. Predictably, it does not play well others. Most notable, there is no export functionality. There is a 'Share as PDF' which is (a) not the same, and (b) broken for me because 'my email program is not set up properly' which is false. Hard to trust. (Evernote has a fine export capability, fwiw).
One Note will, however, appeal to people who prefer 'structuring' over 'tagging'. In fact, if you prefer tagging, look elsewhere. The tagging support here is abysmal. There are tags, but they are canned and the user can't add their own tags. So you have 'Definition' and 'Idea' (which thankfully is not "Idea!") and 'To do priority 2'. And only the ones that the people at MS thought you might think were important. Even more bizarre, they seem to be only visual labels. You don't appear to be able to search for items matching a given tag. Wtf. Am I using a computer or not?
I will say that they seem to have nailed all the account management, in particular two-factor auth, for the 'microsoft accounts'. But they did this largely by copying google's two-factor auth stuff. Which, to be honest, is what I would have done too since it's pretty good. Anyway, they don't appear to have screwed that up. That's a plus and not super-easy. Separate from One Note though.
The tagging fiasco and lack of export are both unconscionable though and embarrassing, imo. They are not an early entrant here; they need to do better than the competition, not notably worse. Plus this is an old product for them, just new to the mac. Bill, where are you? Surely this is easier than Malaria.
tl;dr "It's not the same as evernote". I think that's a good thing; if two products are identical, it's hard to choose between them.
Also, if you think Microsoft's account management stuff is well put together, you... clearly haven't tried to manage a bunch of windows 8, XBox, skype and live accounts for an entire family over the past couple of years. It's a mess, and the only answer MS ever has for issues with an account is "make a new one".
To provide another opinion: Apple does this to, .mac, .me & icloud oh my don't forget about the iTunes account now.
In case you are wondering I switched my household, parents and several friends to apple products since 2002 because it was easier to provide help.
I sometimes wish there was a magic button I could push to merge everything into a unified single sign on for <insert company name here>'s products. It took a while but Google did it in a weird way that didn't make me very happy either.
Oh yes, Apple is a serial offender too - my iPhone is stuck in a world where the iTunes store account and iCloud account are on separate apple IDs, and I've got no idea how they relate to the email addresses I can be reached on facetime through. Neither of them are associated with my apple developer account, either. I'm sure this identity stuff shouldn't be so hard.
Tagging is simply not how OneNote does things. If you're looking for that, use something else. Where OneNote excels is in giving you a tool to organize and manage your structured content. Personally, I prefer that paradigm since it gives you so much more control as well as allows you (in my opinion) to organize your thoughts and ideas better.
Isn't folder structuring a subset of tagging? How can it 'give you so much more control'?
Not saying that the extra freedom from tagging is only good, but it sure is more flexible than folders and tabs.
Agreed - However, I'm still weary of the internal OneNote Format - I haven't poked around, but last time I checked, it was a big binary undocumented blob basically - so the lack of a proper structured export is somewhat worrisome.
The UI looks great though - if only office for mac proper could follow with the same quality, it would be great.
I'm actually working on an org-mode onenote sync tool right now and the files are stored in an xml format of some kind. With very little knowldge of the format I was easily able to parse out all todo lists from the blob (which is a zip file btw).
Have a look in ~Library/Containers/com.microsoft.onenote.mac/Data/Library/Application Support/Microsoft User Data/OneNote/15.0/OneNoteOfflineCache_Files
Any sandboxed app has its data under ~/Library/Containers/<app>, then from that usually under the Data/Library folder, which is a kind of mirror of your user library folder, just holding that stuff the sandboxed app is allowed to see.
All I see locally is a ".onecache" file - a binary file that appears to contain the notes themselves, and a directory named "OneNoteOfflineCache_Files" of attachments (embedded images, etc.) I don't recognize the header on the onecache file, so I'm guessing it's proprietary.
I use OneNote a lot as long as I'm on Windows or Android and for me it easily beats Evernote, mostly because of Evernotes buggyness.
Now that a lot of the OneNote team seems to be around here I'd like to mention two issues with OneNote:
* Metro/modern/app-version doesn't support password protected notebooks. Client side encryption should be nice as well.
* Sane (>2005) tagging. Why oh why do you have to use the mouse (or several key combos + arrows in a row) to choose one of a list of predefined tags? (The checkbox feature is nice though.)
Tried it, and yeah, lack of export features is a deal breaker for me. I'm sticking with Org-mode. Well, I know this is a different animal, but then most I'd use something like this for structured outlines... (and I can export the contents to files that other people can use...)
No print and no export functionality are a deal breaker for me. I want to own my data, but unfortunately even my own data could only live inside Microsoft's domain. This is the vendor lock-in that I don't want to face.
how is it essential? I've gotten plenty of work done using onenote on my surface pro and it's been months since I've needed to open a onenote file from the filesystem.
I just want to chime in on how frustrating it is that you can't save Outlook emails in a standard non-mircorosft format that another mail client can understand (even Outlook on Windows) - apparently it saves it as ".olm" format (Outlook for Mac). Serious WTF here.
For this reason alone, I'm still using a Windows VM simply for the "real" Outlook for work purposes.
If you drag one or more e-mail message out of Outlook for Mac, it creates .eml files. These are just RFC2822 MIME source with a file extension—almost any mail client out there can read them.
If you drag an entire folder out, it creates a .mbox file. This is also a standard that many mail clients can read/import (Mail.app included).
I was the PM who led Outlook for Mac 2011; so I know many, many of those tricks. We rebuilt the thing in Cocoa with an entirely new Exchange client codebase—it was a beast of a project done in a fairly short period of time.
For better or worse, there were a lot of edges we didn't get a chance to smooth out by the ship date though I believe we made reasonably solid trade-off calls based on the team and deadlines we had. Updating the Export feature was one of those trade-offs (it's just not a super frequent user activity); that part of Outlook leveraged code from the much-despised Microsoft Entourage. The app was far from as full-featured as some users wanted (especially Win Outlook switchers) BUT did make enough progress to avoid the backlash of other "rewrites" out there (e.g. Apple Final Cut Pro X).
Little insider history: we did a lot to try and make sure data didn't get locked-in... we really wanted a place where, even if your app crashed, you could always get the data out of the app. During development, we even had builds where the entire underlying database was exposed as XML docs (one per item in your db). We couldn't get the perf we wanted out of that system. We ended-up with Outlook 2011's database which still bites folks from time to time but has a lot more "recoverability" than previous products such as Entourage (where it users often cited being locked-out of their database).
Maybe different now—back then, nearly everyone only had a single Exchange account. We looked at supporting both WebDAV and EWS. The result would have introduced by confusing UX but also reduce reliability of both solutions (adds a lot of testing complexity). Instead, we did a release of Entourage with WebDAV (a horrible protocol that Exchange barely ever supported) and a free update with just EWS support (also rough initially, but much better designed and fuller-featured).
When we got to building Outlook, we decided to look forward—Cocoa and EWS only, building a strong base so that future releases could be far more capable. When I started on Entourage, the team was executing on a strategy to shove Exchange capability into a consumer-oriented app. It was shaky from the start, there were so many problems and customer complaints. I gradually learned as a PM that often a more impactful but riskier product strategy is to go big—instead of fixing 50 small issues a week at a time, fix 1 big issue that takes a year but renders the 50 irrelevant.
In my experience, moving mail messages between clients is best done via an IMAP server. Drag them to it in client #1, then out of it in client #2. That preserves folder structure and time stamps.
The only problem I know of with this approach, when coming from Outlook, are the Winmail.dat files that Outlook (or MS Exchange?) creates "to preserve text formatting".
One Note will, however, appeal to people who prefer 'structuring' over 'tagging'. In fact, if you prefer tagging, look elsewhere. The tagging support here is abysmal. There are tags, but they are canned and the user can't add their own tags. So you have 'Definition' and 'Idea' (which thankfully is not "Idea!") and 'To do priority 2'. And only the ones that the people at MS thought you might think were important. Even more bizarre, they seem to be only visual labels. You don't appear to be able to search for items matching a given tag. Wtf. Am I using a computer or not?
I will say that they seem to have nailed all the account management, in particular two-factor auth, for the 'microsoft accounts'. But they did this largely by copying google's two-factor auth stuff. Which, to be honest, is what I would have done too since it's pretty good. Anyway, they don't appear to have screwed that up. That's a plus and not super-easy. Separate from One Note though.
The tagging fiasco and lack of export are both unconscionable though and embarrassing, imo. They are not an early entrant here; they need to do better than the competition, not notably worse. Plus this is an old product for them, just new to the mac. Bill, where are you? Surely this is easier than Malaria.