I enjoyed reading his post, because I like rules of thumb for simple design, and one of my favorites is “why not just use files?” – there are often reasons to do something else, but the filesystem is faster, more reliable, and more open than anything you’re likely to come up with on the first try. So you’d better be sure you’re not just poorly reimplementing it.

Buzz Andersen has a thorough response, centering on the fact that VoodooPad is a very useful app. Certainly I agree – I use it all the time, and its hyperlinking sets it apart from other notes apps (and the filesystem). So yes, VoodooPad is a Good Idea.

But is VoodooPad really an “Everything Bucket”? I’m not sold – you can use it to store PDFs and images and other files, but it really focuses on pages, and those files are just attachments to your pages. I see it as a notes app. I think if your problem is keeping notes – with images if necessary, linking between them, and searching those notes, then VoodooPad is clearly better than the filesystem. But you don’t have to put everything else in there too.

I agree with Alex that I don’t want one program to keep everything in a proprietary database. I like apps that keep my files as files. (like EagleFiler.) But I do want layers on top of the filesystem – you wouldn’t want to use just files for email, for example.

The only solution that’s always bad is the solution to someone else’s problem.

It’s a solid update, including welcome image-editor integration and more. I thought I’d point out my favorite feature in the release notes:

“You can now edit pages and sort the results in the search window (woo!).”

I like this because it matches a kind of manual refactoring habit I picked up with Project Builder / XCode’s excellent “Find in Project…” window – I search for a keyword that marks places I need to look at and edit the files right in the search window. (Note: ‘occur-mode’ and kin are a powerful way to do the same in Emacs…)

It’s a powerful habit if you plan for it, by using comments in code to keep track of what you’ve touched when making a lot of cross-cutting changes, like # @addsearch Then when you think you’re done with a change, you can run a quick search to see if you forgot to fix anything.

Sometimes in VoodooPad notes, I’ll write in placeholders like that comment when I don’t have a bit of information yet, and now I can follow my trails the same way I do in code.

Thanks, Gus!

I got tired of all the clicking around it took to fill in the navigation every time I put in a new page, so I decided to write a script to mimic XCode’s “Select Next Placeholder” command. In XCode, if you use code completion, you might get something like this: [dict setObject:<# (id) anObject #> forKey:<# (id)key #>] Then pressing Control-/ cycles the selection through those placeholders so you can replace them with whatever you want quickly.

That’s really handy for code, and it’s great for VoodooPad templates too. I wrote the script as a Python script plugin for VoodooPad, and it maps Command-/ to select the next placeholder, wrapping the search at the end just like XCode does. Now my new page template in VoodooPad has a few placeholders in it, and I have a lot fewer pages with default template text sitting in there making me look lazy.

Download it here. (Note, it needs the VoodooPad Python Plugin Enabler )