TopXNotes offers a Note Pad for OS X
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Mar 31, 2005 at 12:05am
If you miss the Note Pad Desk Accessory, which once came on Macs all the way back to the early days of the “classic” operating system, you’ll love TopXNotes from Tropical Software. If memory serves me correctly, the Note Pad was still there in Mac OS X 9.x (in the Apple Extras folder), then disappeared in Mac OS X.
Several companies have released Note Pad replacements, but TopXNotes—a US$19.95, Mac OS X tool for editing and organizing notes – is my favorite. Described by the folks at Tropical as a “modern note pad,” TopXNotes lets you cut, copy, paste and drag ‘n drop to and from external applications. It can “recognize” links (FTP, Web and e-mail) and let you launch from them with a single click. TopXNotes also features: page turning arrows, an optional “save on time” interval; a set of 10 templates; and more.
The beauty of TopXNotes is that it puts vital data within easy, fast access. I have a variety of info (such as the Macsimum rating/contact end note that follows reviews such as this) that I use at several times a week, if not a day. TopXNotes keeps such data at my fingertips – and that saves me valuable seconds.
The info can be tweaked to your liking. For instance, styled and color text is supported and you can take advantage of a plethora of fonts. You can underline, bold, italics, outline, shadow, condense and expand text.
Advanced features include MultiView, NoteOrganizer and QuickNotes. With MultiView, you can view more than one note view simultaneously. In fact, you can view as many as will fit on your screen. NoteOrganizer provides and advanced table of contents with categories and groups. This makes it easy to navigate your notepads. With the QuickNotes menu, you can keep your “top 10 notes” in a floater on your desktop for quick access. The same QuickNotes list (which can be disabled, if you wish) is also displayed in the Dock in a contextual menu.
TopXNotes is very Mac-like in its simplicity. However, it offers a tool tips pop-up item and a help button if you need assistance.
I doubt if you’ll need such help, however, TopXNotes is very intuitive and its interface very clean and user-friendly. I have heard of some incompatibilities between the app and Tex Edit Plus, but haven’t verified them. However, you have been warned. Other than this possible snafu, most Mac users will find TopXNotes a useful addition to their utilities arsenal.
System requirements: Mac OS X 10.2 or higher.
Macsimum rating: 6 out of 10
Have a product you’d like us to review? Write me at dsellers@macsimumnews.com
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
