Outline: Knowledge Organizer App Reviews

I really love it on my Macbook. Awesome work! Hurray, I now have favourite note-taking app. Added: I wouldn’t mind search tags.

Like the MS OneNote compatibility, I use OneNote for work, but at home prefer using Outline. Outline as great and well-balanced app, but would be better with drawing tools and basic shapes (Like arrows and circles etc). I need also categorize notebooks and organize them in different folders.

Nice interface with dark backdrop, allowing lighter page to stand out. Great to have note-taking ability and search. Easy to add pages and expand size of pages. I have Notability for the MAC as well and I find Outline more flexible in terms of being able to put a note anyway on a page and in how pages, sections and notebooks can be added. In addition, being able to read my OneNote NBs on a MAC was a key reason to get Outline. However, lack of search for tags is a big demerit (I also noticed that the MS version of OneNote for the MAC, also has the same restriction). — I have a WIndows system and am hoping I can do searching for tags on a Win8 system. Being able to search for tags (like checkboxes)- allows one to review the scattered todo’s throught the NBs (like in the Windows OneNote version). And support for manipulating tables has some issues (cannot move cursor with mouse to a spot for editing and scrolling around tables becomes a little of a problem for tables larger than screen size). Note that I am running this in Yosemite.

I love the app. I almost never use the Windows version anymore. When they add the ability to reorder the books, it gets five starts. One of the best things about the application is the technical support that is available. I had a sticky problem with one notebook that would not open. I uploaded the file to technical support, and they kept working with it until a solution was found. They then made the file available to me, and it opened perfectly. I appreciate their technical ability, and especially their willingness to keep working on the problem until it was solved. I’m a happy customer.

I had hoped for something more “OS X” like than OneNote, and while Outline is more Mac like than OneNote (or Evernote), it lacks very basic functionality. Their descrption is that it’s great for college students, well it’s not. Copy and Paste from Word into Outline? Only if you want to lose most of your formatting. Keep tabs in the same order as Outline for iOS? Nope. No super / sub scripts …. useless for Chem notes without them It has “added support for the Jot 2 pen”, except for some unknown reason there is no palm rejection. I bought this for my iMac and iPad and wish I could travel back and time to stop myself.

+ : allows to have OneNote experience on Mac - : does not allow to customize interface: no way to move horizontal bookmarks to the right (1/3 of the screen for the interface is too much), no way to get rid of “recents”, "slow-slide” effect everywhere + weak searh function Guys, please, add “OneNote look” option or a way to drag&drop panels — there is no shame or legal risk in it. Please do not reinvent the weel.

This app has a great UI and makes taking notes really simple. However, it still has some UI quirks and frequently crashes. I am also worried about long-term data. I have notes going back years, and importing even basic text files would be a completely manual process given that the app uses a proprietary format with no real import abilities. With Write or MacJournal - importing even large amounts of data is trivial. Similarly, I am concerned that exporting and backing up even just the text is next to impossible. The only way is to export each page one at a time as a PDF. I realize I can backup my journals in Outline+ format, but what happens to my entries when I no longer have access to this app? The developers have really improved this app since the first version, but the bugs and lack of import/exporting make using it for anything critical too risky for now. I have high hopes that over time, this could become a go-to note taking app, but it definitely needs to become more compatible, reliable, and robust before it challenges something like MacJournal.

I don’t understand the criticisms of this app. At this point it seems to be working perfectly for me and I’m having no problems with the new version. Syncing is faster, a backup is stored in iCloud for data safety, and it has numerous levels of nested storage in notetooks. It looks good and works well. I really like it and have eliminated my use of Notability due to data losses in Notability that their tech support couldn’t help with. Prior review below: Outline has come along at the perfect time for me with the right mix of capabilities. I’ve used Curio extensively in the past and it is probably the most full-featured Swiss Army knife application available for the Mac. It seems it can do almost everything to some extent. However, it appears that Curio will never have an iPad app and I use my iPad extensively when teaching college classes and when peer-reviewing publications. For this Mac/iPad integration I had been using Notability until I recently discovered that the PDF parts of project reviews I had graded were simply no longer there for the past semester. My annotations were there, but the pdfs on which they were written were not. After much messing around with tech support they seemed to indicate that I must have been using an earlier Notabilty version, when I was always using the most recent version. So I began checking around and came across Outline. It can’t do everything that Curio can do, but it does much, much more than Notability and the organization is also a great deal better. It uses iCloud and my sync always just seems to work. It has all sorts of capabilities to send info to Outline and to share info out. It’s been a gradual process, but now my workflow is centering around Outline as an organized notebook system. Highly recommended. If you buy it, go through the User Guide to see how to implement all its capabilities with the Mac.

I like the app and it helps me with lof of work. Good design and convenient structure of notebooks. Also, the app makes me feel more safety by storing my notes locally.

Great for writing and organising notes, simple and easy to use. I wouldn’t mind more style fonts and search tags. Also like the various ways to store notes, I use mainly iCloud and Dropbox.

Overall this is very similar to OneNote, which is nice. However my biggest gripe is there is only one font. It looks like for a very long time this has been “on the wish list.” Multiple fonts seems like a default need in any sort of notebook / document - can’t imagine what the reasoning behind only having one font (and Calibri of all ones) is.

I can’t believe I got sucked into this! It runs fine on my iPad, so I bought it for the MacBook Pro. The first five attempts to enter data ended with it aborting each time. I hope this is because I am running El Captian and they haven’t caught up with changes… I want my $40 back! Apple should be ashamed to not allow customers to get money back on apps like this.

This app is beautiful and it’s format logical until you begin to work with it. You find out that the toolbar cannot be customized and that files must be located on the cmputer in cryptic locations for the database to even find the files let along sync and back-up. Most curiously, there are several GUI anomalies such as the entire word processing bar vanishing and new tabs often leave gaps and produce two notebooks with the same name in the sidebar. Further, you cannot change the names of the Notebooks because it literally reverts back to the name stored in the Finder. If you change the name in the Finder, the file vanishes form the sidebar. When you create a Notebook, you have to tell the app where you want the notebook to go straight away, whether to a Cloud option or that cryptic place on the Finder. Not choosing matters when you want to deal with it later and cannot find it or sync it because some notebooks are in the Finder and the others are in the Cloud! When I manually dragged the Notebook files in the ‘OneDrive’ Finder folder (why there?) to my iCloud folder, the Notebooks vanished from the Sidebar! This means that all management is expected to be handles automatically within the app, but the app fails to do this and customization is the Mac ethos. I get the feeling that this is PS coding poorly integrated into Mac OS? Today after a couple of months of non use and hoping they get things sroted out, I saw an email that version 3.7 is availble. Really? Where? Ohhh, for the iPad only. It’s always like that. Beautiful content with some vital piece of information missing. I could go on. It’s very frustrating. I really want this app to work.

I wish I didn’t waste my money on this app. Syncing NEVER works.

I purchased Outline as an alternative to Microsoft OneNote because my company has security policies which prevent me from storing data in the cloud. I really wanted to like this app, but after a few weeks of use it just has too many basic usability flaws to continue with it. Where it immediately falls down is as a note taking tool. I often need to record a lot of notes at meetings, which includes the ability to quickly type a header with nested bullet points below it, followed by another main header. Unfortunately, once you create a bulleted list it’s incredibly difficult to get out of ‘bullet mode’. Most good word processors or note taking programs allow you to just hit return a couple times and the cursor jumps back to the left margin, but in Outline it just keeps making bullets forever. The only way to get out is to do a convoluted combination of multiple returns followed by multiple deletes. It interrupts the process of just taking notes. Also, as far as I can determine there’s no way to export notes except as PDF files. No way to export as Word, RTF, or anything else that preserves formatting. (If it’s in there I haven’t found it yet.) The lack of any font choices is annoying as well as I find it difficult to read the default font. Outline has a lot of potential, but it’s just too unpolished at this point to be a useful productivity tool for me. The user interface is attractive, but I hope the develoer can make the underlying features more robust. If so, I’ll definitely give it another try.

Outline has never fully delivered on its promises. Development for this app is very very slow and i’m not sure if they will ever be able to deliver functionality implied by the listed feature-set. If you need/want to be able to sync with OneNote or use sync at all - you’re in for some serious frustration. The application itself is beautiful - if you only need to use local data you may really enjoy the app. For this type of utilization I have been very pleased. But if you want to create a notebook which you can read your iPad or sync with a OneNote notebook on OneDrive (or any of the other choices) the frustration never ends. I will keep hoping for a functioning update - but it has become more frustration than utilization for me, I’m sorry to say.

Good look but poor operation. Syncing is unreliable. Using Dropbox: Sometimes it works: at other times it either loses what has been added or adds what has been previously been deleted. Operation is transiently defective. Without warning the app stopped permitting the attachment of both PNG and JPEG files, although it permitted TIFF files. Have this on my iPad where there are also similar problems. The solution? Go back to OneNote for OSX and iOSand forget about the problems this app has. Have to ask why Apple’s standards are so low that they let this app be sold on the App Store.

The app has potential, but for now it is still a half-backed product. It is still a bit unstable. It is lacking very basic note taking capabilities, e.g. arrow, shapes. The page/tab is still half-implemented (nested tabs do not collapse). The TOC can’t be updated. Etc. Merge this app with Notabily and you’d have a winner.

Mostly this is a reliable, attractive app to replace onenote. I have run into a few bugs with pages corrupting, spell check acting wonky, formatting being difficult but I don’t mind that it is somewhat scaled down with attractive with easy layout.

I come from world where I used OneNote on windows for ~13 years before moving to mac. Given that OneNote for mac doesn’t support local storage of notes anymore, I was forced to move away from onenote. So I thought outline will work… but what a disappointment!! I have been trying really hard to like it but how can I do that when it loses my data? I tried to copy a list of numbered items from one page to another.. the data would refuse to be copied. I tried cut-and-paste, same result except I Was not able to “undo” the “cut” part :(. Later I had to move an entire page from one section to another (blank) section and it won’t do it. Not only that it erased one of the sections also. Seriously Outline team.. can you please give us a few basic features (Afterall it is a note taking app): 1. Allow automatic numbering and bulleting when I type “1.” or “*” at the beginning of sentence 2. allow simple copy/paste of numbered lists… without losing my data 3. allow drag and move of pages… without deleting any content 4. allow changing the default fonts of various styles… not everyone may enjoy your choices 5. selecting a numbered line, and doing a cut-and-paste at a different location within same page shoudl not mess up content… please fix it 6. Please maintain some objectivity of data so when I cut from outline and paste in Pages or Word (and vice-versa), it maintains its formatting I have a long list of other items, but i will be a happy camper if I can get just these… thanks