Amazingly, Circus Ponies Notebook Works in Mojave

[Teddybear093]

Are you folks talking about CPN 3 or 4 -- I use CPN 3.1.8 on High Sierra with no real problems. Have avoided the update to CPN 4 due to the incompatibility of its files compared to version 3. I have a ton of stuff that I have created over the years of using CPN and cringe when I think of the effort in converting everything. Of course with the impending cliff that macOS 15 will create with no more 32-bit app support, that might make things look different when that happens. Apple's strange habit of abandoning old hardware is one of it's least desirable characteristics IMO, but change happens no matter what, and just deal with it as best you can is my mantra. I've seen macOS Sierra and High Sierra run on what Apple considers non-supported hardware or as they call it "obsolete" and it occurs to me that even if it really works they simply are not interested in supporting customers who paid a lot of money for the computers when they were new. Abandoning users in the quest for more hardware sales when the existing hardware works fine is simply bad business IMO and will come back to bite them someday, I would like to think so anyway, but of course it's possible it never will.

Anyway, i noticed where Teddybear093 talked about seeing the suggestion on another blog about crowdfunding a buy out of CPN and taking it open source and was wondering if anyone could point me to that link? Did anything ever come of this idea?

Thanks...

I have been using CPN 4 since it was released as I found CPN 3 choking on notebooks that were very large in size. I do have CPN 3 and I could test it out on Mojave but I presume that everyone that has posted here are running CPN 4. I'm still having mixed results with CPN 4 with Mojave because of occasional crashes so I am keeping my main system on Sierra for the foreseeable future. I too have years of ongoing projects that will take so much time and effort to port over to some other app that I cringe too. I really think that CPN 4 needs some small tweaking to run better on Mojave and if there are others here who want to form a strategy for reaching out to Jayson Adams I'm all for that. It's not just that Apple abandons software (which they have done all too often) or forces upgrades but we are in a very mature desktop market and all the heat and light are getting sucked up by ios apps.

 

[sbchavel]

I am using CPN 4.0.7 on Mojave 10.14.2. It works, but in limited fashion. It opens all the usual ways. Working inside a Notebook on a page directly, I can do all the normal things. Clicking on the application menubar causes it to quit, except for select menu items under File. I did not succeed to port or export. I tried printing to pdf, but some fonts or embedded materials cause an entire Notebook to crash. Saving the contents to rtf is slow and the contents must be reformatted. Ugh. I have tried *many* replacement applications. Nothing else has collapsable and completely manipulable outline items, on OS or iOS. It is hard to believe.
[doublepost=1547357168][/doublepost]Thanks for the Growly Notes recommendation, Talmy. Can you say more about how similar it is to CPN? For instance, are outline items collapsable and can they be moved around easily on the same page/note and between pages/notes?

Lots of questions and comments. It would be nice if someone would fix CPN My guess is there are plenty of people who would pay money for just a one off repair. But I expect CPN is a real piece of spaghetti code. The program apparently dates back to the Next computer, so it's nearly a 30 year old code base!

Aperture seems to work fine in Mojave, along with my 32-bit Nik plugins, but I do have a number of 32-bit programs I use (and for which I expect no updates) so I don't see a way beyond Mojave. I'm still running Sierra on my iMac, mainly because I'm worried about APFS and the Fusion drive, but am running High Sierra on my MBP for which it is the end-of-the-line version. My wife's iMac is running Mojave with no issues but she doesn't have that legacy software problem.

I'm not concerned with iOS compatibility as I don't have an iPad and my iPhone is a "consumption device" except for adding events to the calendar and occasional notes.

Frankly one problem with CPN was that it was a kitchen sink of features. Far more than needed and too many weren't very well polished and keyboard shortcuts were often mystifying so a major learning curve. Growly Notes seems to be solid and is reasonably fast (much improved speed in recent years). It is more free-form like OneNote. Sometimes this is good for organization and other times it just means a messy appearance. Much less hierarchical for organizing than CPN.

There are times when CPN works fine and others where it crashes immediately and this is in contrast with High Sierra where it did not work at all. It is a 64 bit app so that certainly isn't the problem, however, it probably needs some tweaking in the code which alas it will not get. Like many I'm staying pat on Sierra not only for CPN, but for Aperture, Final Cut 7 and some other 32 bit apps. I am using Scrivener as well, along with MacJournal (it continues to work well with apparently no patches or updates but it's UI is cluttered and old fashioned) but nothing really replicates both the easy and the complexity of CPN. Outline from Gorillized can actually import CPN data if you are interested in migrating things forward, but their UI is still not as flexible or as powerful as CPN. I think not being able to create an identical iPad version of Notebook certainly hurt CircusPonies and looking back it's the one piece of software I would have been willing to pay a subscription for. Maybe there is someone, somewhere who can write a patch for this? I have been experimenting with other notebook apps but there is a startling lack of complexity to many as getting the apps to work well for Mac OS and iOS causes compromises. How are you finding Growly Notes?

[/QUOTE]

 

[FBT]

wow, that is just... terrifying; am glad, for most of us, things are simpler. i am happy to be running one OS (at a time); but if that system (pun intended) works for you (and you can make sense of it)... more power to you!

[doublepost=1547391362][/doublepost]
I had my entire medical noteset. 3000 odd pages of meticulously assembled CPN notes. I needed to access them during the run into fellowship exams and couldn’t because of this ridiculous loss of support for CPN. Jayson lacks any sense of professionalism and I wish I had never bought his software. I tried to transfer it to omnioutliner and because of the dataset it took months. And never worked properly. I hold him in total contempt. It’s good software. It should be updated. And if he can’t or won’t do it he shouldn’t have been allowed to develop in the first place. And he should sell it to a coder with the ability to fix this ********.
[doublepost=1547391578][/doublepost]

[doublepost=1547391362][/doublepost]

I had my entire medical noteset. 3000 odd pages of meticulously assembled CPN notes. I needed to access them during the run into fellowship exams and couldn’t because of this ridiculous loss of support for CPN. Jayson lacks any sense of professionalism and I wish I had never bought his software. I tried to transfer it to omnioutliner and because of the dataset it took months. And never worked properly. I hold him in total contempt. It’s good software. It should be updated. And if he can’t or won’t do it he shouldn’t have been allowed to develop in the first place. And he should sell it to a coder with the ability to fix this ********.

F u c K the guy for the hours of wasted time his laziness and pestilence caused me. Guy is a b I t c h

 

[talmy]

Thanks for the Growly Notes recommendation, Talmy. Can you say more about how similar it is to CPN? For instance, are outline items collapsable and can they be moved around easily on the same page/note and between pages/notes?

Not really similar to CPN. Not nearly as nice an outliner. Much more like Microsoft One Note on Windows. I like the ability to mix media and rearrange on the flat surface.

 

[Teddybear093]

I'm seeing both a lot of love and hate for CPN and I'm working at a new project where neither Scrivener nor Devonthink Office Pro quite hit the sweet spot. How can we get organized here to reach out to Jayson Adams as a group to see if he would release CPN and let it become open source?

 

[ralleman]

I just joined macrumors because of this thread. I also held back on upgrading because my CPN 4.07 is humming along nicely on a 2012 MacMini with Yosemite.
I thought about creating a virtual machine and instead of running Windows or Linux , try running a older OS X version for CPN. Did anybody try this ?

I too would be for a upgraded version of CPN (preferable with less functions)

Rik

 

[talmy]

CPN is the result of a the original developers of NoteBook on NeXT splitting up. The other developer produced NoteTaker which has been dormant/dead for a while but may be coming back to life and would be a possible alternative. See https://www.aquaminds.com/blog-1 but don't bank on it yet!

 

[vlherring]

I say this because it was working in Sierra, but never worked in High Sierra. So Circus Ponies Notebook fans -- you will be able to go back using it if you haven't deleted it already!

I had CPN ver. 3 and its license but not ver. 4 - but I have an old nb. I want to get data out of == but also cannot find a dmg file of ver. 3 on my computer tho I was able to download ver. 4 off CNET -- so any suggestions ref [1] how to get a trial license for ver 4, [2] how to find ver. 3 so I can apply my license to that and/or [3] how to export data from NB file in a useful format? I did a show package contents but nothing there seemed to be what I needed?want.

 

[sum yung guy]

You can find the dmg file archived in the "Wayback Machine" at archive.org. This was the final release of version 3:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140331032335/http://www.circusponies.com/downloads

You can export to various formats. OPML files can be read by OmniOutliner for example and retain the outline, but it's plain text so you lose all the formatting (bold, italic, font, etc.).

The final release of version 4, 4.0.7 (759) is archived here:
https://web.archive.org/web/2015120...ds/NoteBook/CircusPoniesNoteBook4.0.7v759.dmg

 

[Rich Morin]

Possible replacement: AquaMinds NoteTaker. However, I don't know if NT 4 will be able to read NoteBook files.

 

[stephaniejosine]

[delete comment]

 

[Liane France]

I am running High Sierra (10.13.6) on a late 2007 17” MacBook Pro and suddenly my version of CPN (3.1.9) is running well . . .I have absolutely no idea why! If I click on a notebook, it opens and I can make changes and save without crashing. Stunned!

For years my work, and life, revolved around three apps: QuarkXPress, Photoshop, and NoteBook. I developed and formatted my own version of a Harvard outline in NoteBook that was perfect for my projects. I wrote a 494 page book *IN* NoteBook (over a 5-year period) before exporting the text and then formatting the book in QXP! When I innocently upgraded my MacOS and found NoteBook would no longer work, I felt like my left arm had been cut off (I’m left-handed-LOL). I WANT NOTEBOOK FULLY BACK!

Some of you have talked about crowdfunding an updated version with a new developer . . .I am all for it. So, please keep me in the loop on any future plans to do so.

Like all of you, I have found NOTHING to replace CPN . . .no notebook or outliner app. Please post if you become aware of any new apps that even come close!

 

[Liane France]

Alas, in newer betas it seems to have stopped working, at least for existing notebooks. I can create a new notebook but not open existing old ones.

I am running High Sierra (10.13.6) on a late 2007 17” MacBook Pro and suddenly my version of CPN (3.1.9) is running well . . .I have absolutely no idea why! If I click on a notebook, it opens and I can make changes and save without crashing. Stunned!

For years my work, and life, revolved around three apps: QuarkXPress, Photoshop, and NoteBook. I developed and formatted my own version of a Harvard outline in NoteBook that was perfect for my projects. I wrote a 494 page book *IN* NoteBook (over a 5-year period) before exporting the text and then formatting the book in QXP! When I innocently upgraded my MacOS and found NoteBook would no longer work, I felt like my left arm had been cut off (I’m left-handed-LOL). I WANT NOTEBOOK FULLY BACK!

Some of you have talked about crowdfunding an updated version with a new developer . . .I am all for it. So, please keep me in the loop on any future plans to do so.

Like all of you, I have found NOTHING to replace CPN . . .no notebook or outliner app. Please post if you become aware of any new apps that even come close!

 

[talmy]

Aquaminds Notetaker is a result of a split between developers many years ago. It looks roughly the same as Notebook. Their version 4 has been just around the corner for years, but a post in June said they expect it in the App Store in July (haha).

Anyway I replaced Notebook with Growly Notes. It's more of a better OneNote than Notebook. If Notetaker actually makes it back I'll certainly buy it.

 

[Liane France]

Thanks for the info on NoteTaker . . .I’m happily impressed that the interface so closely resembles CPN.

If CPN, once again, quits working on my Mac, I will purchase NoteTaker 4 when it is in full release. Then I will PRAY that the developer creates an iPad version that works seamlessly with the Mac version.

Right now I am using Noteshelf on my iPad. It is very basic but works for taking quick notes for later transfer to my Mac.

 

[Teddybear093]

Has anyone tried Catalina with CPN 4? It's very hit or miss on Mojave still.
Does anyone know how we might reach out to Jayson Adams? Perhaps we can get him to release CPN if enough of us do so as a group.
It would be great if the new version of AquaMinds NoteTaker will open or import CPN but it's taking a long time for that app to see daylight. Oddly enough my old version of AquaMinds NoteTaker runs fine in Sierra, High Sierra and Mojave.
Go figure.......
[doublepost=1565553584][/doublepost]Has anyone tried Catalina with CPN 4? It's very hit or miss on Mojave still.
Does anyone know how we might reach out to Jayson Adams? Perhaps we can get him to release CPN if enough of us do so as a group.
It would be great if the new version of AquaMinds NoteTaker will open or import CPN but it's taking a long time for that app to see daylight. Oddly enough my old version of AquaMinds NoteTaker runs fine in Sierra, High Sierra and Mojave.
Go figure.......

 

[Teddybear093]

CPN 4 seems stable and working well in Catalina 10.15 Beta (19A536g)!!!!!
Can anyone else conform this????

 

[Teddybear093]

CPN4 is still working fairly well on Catalina and I hope this continues when the OS emerges from it's Beta phase. I also see that AquaMinds NoteTaker 4 has finally seen the light of day. Has anyone taken the plunge yet???

 

[Wisebraveofheart]

Does anyone have the dmg file CPN 4, old MacBook got fried, cpn website non-existent and their email unresponsive.

 

[jelliott610]

Have downloaded and paid for Aquamind Notetaker 4, did not know about it before. Running 10.12 on a 2012 MacBook and the only reason I haven't upgraded Mac OS to a newer version is the need to keep running CPN4. After playing around a bit, I feel Notetaker 4 is close enough to CPN4 to move on. The only issue right now is the need to export the old CPN4 files to open them in Notetaker. If they were to figure someway to do a direct import, then I would probably upgrade my operating system today. Notebook has nearly the same look, feel and ease of use.

 

[talmy]

CPN 4 seems stable and working well in Catalina 10.15 Beta (19A536g)!!!!!
Can anyone else conform this????

Just reinstalled and tried CPN4 in 10.15.1 and, wonder of wonders, it works! Probably iffy to rely on, and I'm still running Mojave here because I've got too many not-yet-replaced apps that won't run in Catalina.

 

[sum yung guy]

Does anyone have the dmg file CPN 4, old MacBook got fried, cpn website non-existent and their email unresponsive.

The answer is already posted above: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...otebook-works-in-mojave.2122123/post-27461943

 

[sum yung guy]

Are people saying that Notebook works better on Catalina than Mojave? Like it doesn't have all the crashes? I'm also stuck on Sierra for the sole reason of having a functioning Notebook.

Notetaker looks good, but I think it lacks the ability to open a page in a separate window, which I use all the time. I wish there was a demo to try.

 

[HenryJ]

Has anyone tried Catalina with CPN 4? It's very hit or miss on Mojave still.
Does anyone know how we might reach out to Jayson Adams? Perhaps we can get him to release CPN if enough of us do so as a group.
It would be great if the new version of AquaMinds NoteTaker will open or import CPN but it's taking a long time for that app to see daylight. Oddly enough my old version of AquaMinds NoteTaker runs fine in Sierra, High Sierra and Mojave.
Go figure.......
[doublepost=1565553584][/doublepost]Has anyone tried Catalina with CPN 4? It's very hit or miss on Mojave still.
Does anyone know how we might reach out to Jayson Adams? Perhaps we can get him to release CPN if enough of us do so as a group.
It would be great if the new version of AquaMinds NoteTaker will open or import CPN but it's taking a long time for that app to see daylight. Oddly enough my old version of AquaMinds NoteTaker runs fine in Sierra, High Sierra and Mojave.
Go figure.......

Amazingly, it does! I discovered it quite by accident only few days ago...having sadly given up on CPN when it first stopped working. Am obviously still a little nervous about putting eggs into that basket. Anyone else had more experience? What happened to the crowdsourcing idea for resurrecting CPN? Did anyone pick up one it?
[automerge]1573843937[/automerge]

Are people saying that Notebook works better on Catalina than Mojave? Like it doesn't have all the crashes? I'm also stuck on Sierra for the sole reason of having a functioning Notebook.

Notetaker looks good, but I think it lacks the ability to open a page in a separate window, which I use all the time. I wish there was a demo to try.

I think it works with Catalina. Haven't tried it extensively yet...still unsure if it's safe for the long haul. But so far seems to work consistently except for a few functions on the far right side of the menu bar that cause a crash.

 

[talmy]

Sadly, after a little more work with CPN4 in Catalina, I've found it to be crashing again. Considering AquaMinds NoteTaker. They say this about importing from CPN:
Not directly. However, NoteTaker 4 can import RTF, OPML, HTML, and (to some extent) NBML files.

You must first export or copy your CPN content into files in one of these formats. Then create a new NoteTaker 4 notebook, and use the File->Import… command to import the files. Each of the formats has advantages and disadvantages.

NBML may preserve the most formatting and metadata, but in our limited experience, CPN can only export a single page of NBML at a time.

On the other hand, CPN's OPML export may allow an entire notebook's data to be imported at once, but formatting and attachments will be lost.

You should experiment with transferring your data in all of the available formats and choose the one that provides the best results for your content.

In general, if you import several files at the same time, they will all be placed in a single section. When importing NBML, NoteTaker 4 will attempt to also import attachments. It may prompt you for the location of the folder containing the original attachments. For embedded attachments, this is a folder called “attachments” within the original notebook.

To view it, control-click on the notebook in the Finder, and select “Show Package Contents”. You can then copy the folder out of the notebook where it can be accessed by NoteTaker 4.