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My quest for digital organization led me this month to a shareware app called VoodooPad, from Flying Meat. At $25 it's quite a bit less expensive than DevonThink or Current, and has rather more modest aims. Nevertheless, I'm pretty impressed with what it can do.

Making Connections

VoodooPad 2.1.2 looks deceptively simple: When you open the application, the window you see looks pretty much like any other text-editing applet, with a small difference: This notepad lets you create hypertext links that allow you to connect pages on related topics. Instead of making an outline, where you see topics and subtopics on a single page, you put subtopics on separate pages; the subtopic material is hidden but still easy to access. Once you grasp that a VoodooPad document is more like a Web site than like a typical text file, the program is very intuitive to use.

Each new document works like a notebook, containing multiple pages. When you create a new document, it opens with boilerplate explanatory text that tells you how to start using VoodooPad. This boilerplate can and should be deleted. It would be convenient to open blank documents after the first time you start the application; surprisingly, you can't set VoodooPad's Preferences to open new documents with a blank page.

If you're obsessed about order, VoodooPad may not be the app for you: While you can add a bit of organization to your documents with categories, mostly they are intentionally unstructured. The developer calls VoodooPad a "digital junk drawer," which is appealing if you don't know how to start organizing your information. You can just start entering notes, without worrying about where they should go. VoodooPad's solid search tool ensures that you'll be able to find what you need in that junk drawer later.

Once you have created a link and a new page by highlighting a word (or words) and clicking the Link button in the toolbar, every instance of that text string automatically becomes a link to that page. You can drag and drop URLs, images, and application icons into VoodooPad pages as well. The URLs become live links to the Web, and application icons become links that launch the applications. When you drag in an image, it can either appear in your page or be a link to the original.

One really spiffy little feature is that if you type a name that matches a contact in your Mac Address Book, VoodooPad creates a link that lets you either e-mail that person or open their Address Book card. There are no such hooks into ICal, the Apple calendaring program, though. In my idealized vision of a smart notepad, you could drag and drop appointment data into a calendar and contact information into a contact manager to create records in those applications. However, I can think of several reasons why this is a tall order. Barring the ability to send appointments to ICal, I'd like to be able to set alarms in VoodooPad. This would make VoodooPad more useful as a tickler file.

Text With Style

I liked VoodooPad's text formatting tools quite a bit: It has all the same text-styling capabilities as Mac TextEdit, including the ability to choose fonts and colors, create styles, set alignment and line spacing, and create different types of numbered and bulleted lists. VoodooPad goes further, with the ability to insert tables in pages; and it makes indenting or "outdenting" lines easy. And this text-formatting information is preserved when you export your pages to rich text, HTML, or Microsoft Word.

In addition to hyperlinks, VoodooPad has another simple form of navigation, which it calls Backlinks. This is a slide-out drawer that lists all the links and categories in your document; it's a lot like a list of bookmarks. In working with Backlinks I found what seemed to be a small glitch: Deleting hyperlinked text does not eliminate a page. As a result, I ended up with some pages I didn't want, which stuck around in the Backlinks list. The fix is to open the orphaned page and use the Delete button in the toolbar to get rid of it. This is actually a feature, not a bug, because you wouldn't want to accidentally delete pages that have multiple links just by removing one hyperlink.

If you are a searcher rather than a browser, VoodooPad gives you pretty good tools as well, taking advantage of the Mac's Spotlight search function. Search results are returned for all your open documents, and the results list displays the page name plus a snippet of relevant text, which is very helpful for choosing the right page out of a large list of results. However, it would be better to see results from all VoodooPad documents, even if they're closed.

Can't Get There From Here

For a small, focused application, VoodooPad is quite powerful and extensible--but it does have some limitations. If your final objective is a long, structured document, such as a report with lots of sections, you may find that VoodooPad's collections of loosely linked pages can't be easily transformed from a nonlinear structure into something more coherent. For example, you can choose to export a VoodooPad document containing all your research on Chinese cooking to Microsoft Word, but the result is a series of individual, unlinked documents, not one long file with sections. You'll have all your text about ginger graters in one document, and all your text about woks in another one. To pull it together you'll have to do some cutting and pasting.

Also, if your VoodooPad document gets too complex and you need to split it up, that's possible--but not easy. You could create a new document and paste in text, but the links from the old document would be broken. And there's no way to choose multiple pages and make a new document from them.

Everyone Needs a Junk Drawer

No one expects a junk drawer to be as tidy as a filing cabinet, and we all need both types of storage. Lots of stray bits of information don't need to become part of a larger file; they just need a place to live where they can be found easily, and VoodooPad handles those perfectly. I've noted the lack of some features that, arguably, are outside the scope of a digital junk drawer, but they seem within Flying Meat's grasp, since VoodooPad is already stuffed with so many cool little features.

The full version of VoodooPad costs $25; you can download a trial version that will work indefinitely, but your documents can contain only 15 pages until you buy and register the product. There is a free version that has just basic text-entry and hyperlinking. It lacks the full version's ability to save documents as HTML or as Word files and to assign tags and categories to pages; and it does not have the full version's sketch tool for inserting drawings into pages, encryption, and more. Go to Flying Meat's site to download the version that works for you.

Comments or questions? Drop a line to The Mac Skeptic.