Software Review: VoodooPad

We’ve discussed some different ways of taking notes before, here and here. When you’re taking notes in a digital form, using the right software to keep them together is very important. One application that is particularly suitable for this is VoodooPad by Flying Meat. Here’s a review.

You can use VoodooPad for taking notes, brainstorming and jotting down your ideas, but how does it work? For people familiar with wikis on the internet (click for a definition on Wikipedia), VoodooPad will have a very familiar interface: you write down some text and create links which automatically point to new, blank pages. So actually you’re creating a web consisting of different pages, linked to each other.

Creating a Document

When you open a new document, VoodooPad provides you with a page of information on how to use the program, and as you can see in the first line, they assume you won’t really need any explanation if you’re already familiar with wikis:

You can start editing right away. Delete the info text and start creating your own links and pages. It might be a good idea to use the first page, or ‘Home’ page, just for links to other pages. You can always come back to this page by clicking the ‘Home’ button. It works just like a website.

Creating Links and Pages

A link is created by highlighting one or more words and clicking the ‘Link’ button in the top panel of the window. VoodooPad sends you to a new page immediately where you can start inputting information. Coming back to the previous page you will see the link you just created.

Another way of creating potential links is, as written in the Help file, by “smashing capitalized words together”, like MyNotes in this example. The link is automatically generated but you have to click on it to activate it. When you write down a word that has been linked before the new word will automatically become a link too.

Links can be deleted from the document whenever you want, but this won’t delete the page they link to. To delete pages you have to remove them from the ‘Pages’ palette.

Once your document has been set up, you can start editing the pages, and adding text. VoodooPad gives you the tools you would expect from any basic text editor. It also has a full-screen mode, which gives you a white background and the toolbar on top, so for purists, the screen is not as clean as you might want it to be. You can set a default font in the Preferences, as well as a color for the VoodooPad links, potential links and external links.

Adding pictures is very easy, just drag and drop. VoodooPad will ask you if you want to create a link to the picture or if you want to import it to the document. Double clicking on any picture in your document opens the picture in an external image editor if specified in the Preferences.

The advantage of taking notes on paper is that you can make drawings to clarify your writing. You can do that too in VoodooPad. Click the ‘Sketch’ button in the toolbar and you’ll be presented with a blank sheet of digital paper to sketch on and insert it in your page. It does take some skills though to make a clear drawing using just a mouse or a track pad.

Navigating Your Document

Now how do you keep track of all the pages you created? Luckily VoodooPad has a little floating window you can open with an overview of all your pages. Although you might ask yourself the question if you really need an overview of all the pages, because there’s a search field in the toolbar which works very well, and which might bring you to the desired page much faster.

As you can see in the screenshot the program lets you open different pages in one window using tabs. Navigating your document really is very similar to using a web browser: it has tabs, back and forward buttons, a home button and you click on a link to go to the next page. As we’re used to browsers a lot these days, the user interface feels very natural and very intuitive. You can save your thinking for more important things, like writing your pages.

Importing and Exporting Things

Although VoodooPad is great for taking notes, you might want to import some things to your document now and then, like when you’re doing research on the internet. A nice way of getting information into your document is by using the ‘Save as PDF’ menu available in every print window. VoodooPad creates a link in this menu which allows you to save a PDF directly into your document. The application also understands Microsoft Word documents and can import and export them.

As mentioned before, the interface really resembles the interface of a web browser, and navigating the content is like using a website. So the Web Export function is a natural addition to this: it allows you to export your entire document as a web page. I imagine this can be very helpful when you have a large document you want to make public, although it will be read only and not editable like a wiki.

Conclusion

The question is: will it make you happy? If you’re looking for a clean, easy to use application to take notes in, or to intuitively write down your thoughts and ideas, and you don’t need the extra organizing functionality an application like DEVONthink provides, I think VoodooPad is a great choice. It’s very flexible and easy to get used to. Their slogan “You put your brain in it” is well chosen and describes how it’s good for brainstorming too. I haven’t covered all its functions by far, but you should have a good image of its capabilities by now.

The best way to use it, I think, is to just keep it running in te background, whatever you’re doing, and as soon as you need a place to write something down, past a picture or a piece of text, it’s there for you. And while doing this you’re slowly creating this web of information around the subjects you’re interested in, all in one document. And as long as you know how to use the search field, there’s no need to keep everything organized.

For this review I used the standard version of VoodooPad . There’s also a Lite version, which lacks some of the functionality, like the full-screen editing, page encryption, inter-document linking, sketching, exporting as HTML or Word documents, and more. There is a Pro version too, which adds the ability to encrypt entire documents and has a built-in web server, among others.

VoodooPad can be downloaded from the Flying Meat website. The Lite version is free, the standard version is $29.95, or €23,65 and the Pro version is $49.95, or €39,45.

Photo by: jhderojas