Product Reviews

Everyone has bits of information floating around on their computers that they don't quite know what to do with. Things like news articles, clippings from websites, to-do lists, invoices, instructions, electronic receipts - you know the kind of thing. That probably explains the popularity of snippet-keepers - little programs that store almost any sort of data for easy retrieval later on. There are dozens of programs like this, but of them all, Notational Velocity is probably the simplest and offers the fewest features. And that's its strength.

Notational Velocity is unlike any other data storage application - in fact, it's unlike almost any other piece of software. The user interface is so minimal you can hardly see it, but as a means of storing and finding chunks of text that would otherwise get lost in the cluttered mess of the average hard disk, it's one of the fastest, most efficient and effective programs around.

Notational Velocity looks simple enough. It has a small window split into three panes: the top one is a text-entry box, the middle one lists entries or notes, and the bottom one displays the body of a note. That's it: there are no buttons or controls of any kind.

To use the application, just type into the text box at the top. If there's already a note that includes any of the words you type, it will be listed in the middle section. To jump to that and start editing, hit return. If there isn't already a note with that text, hit return anyway, and it will be created there and then - just start typing.

There's no save command, as everything you type is saved automatically. In the Preferences dialog,

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there's an option for telling Notational Velocity to make automatic backups of its database, just in case. You can password-protect your notes and change the display font, but that's it.

This simplicity is what makes Notational Velocity great. Because it will find any instance of a word in its database, you can use it for storing all kinds of snippets and for finding relationships between them. Simply, type a few keywords and the list of notes that contains them might surprise you.

Notational Velocity can be used for storing anything comprising text. It might be an article you want to read later, or your bank account details, or receipts for software purchased online, or bug-ridden code or the draft of your forthcoming bestseller. This means it can be used as a universal pasteboard. While Notational Velocity is running, it's easy to call it to the front of your other applications with a user-defined keyboard shortcut, so pasting text is simplicity itself. It also uses the system Services menu, allowing you to select text in compatible applications and hit another key combo to instantly make that text a new note.

By using a few simple prefixes to your note titles, you can use Notational Velocity's search system to sort everything. Put 'toread' with unread articles, then all you need to do is search for it to bring up a list of everything you haven't read.

The point is that, as with any freeform database, there's no need to worry too much about the prefixes. Just type what comes to mind or what you can remember, and the software's astonishingly fast search system will be able to pick it out straight away.

Since there's so little to it, there's also not much that can go wrong. We found the system-wide Service for grabbing text from other applications was sometimes unreliable, though.

Some users will consider the text-only nature of the program another drawback - other brain-assistant applications, such as DevonTHINK or Sticky Brain, can cope with almost any kind of file, for example. However, for anyone who stores text on their computer and hates having to organise it all, Notational Velocity offers an excellent means of doing just that in a meaningful and searchable manner.