Mac users - what software do you use?

[denk]

It looks like "OneNote" is the de facto standard in the Windows world.  But what are Mac users doing?  Anyone use Omni Outliner for anything serious?  I haven't learned how to use it yet.  Otherwise, I use Open Office for outlining and writing for my job.

[yvyty]

I used omnioutliner for all my class notes, and simply condensed those into my outlines for the finals. Omnioutliner has its upsides and drawbacks.

Things I liked about it:
-easy to take notes right into outline form
-exports to Word in Office 2004 for sending notes to other people
-the space between lines in outliner is smaller than say MS Word, so your outline/notes will be half the length of your classmates'
-the ability to drag sections of your notes and rearrange them is gold.
-ditto the ability to nest/hide child sections. e.g. you can have the summary of the case as the top layer and the facts/ph/issue/reasoning hidden when you are doing your outline.
-if you took your notes right, collapsing all the nested rows will show you the skeleton outline of your course.

Things that suck:
-lines are kinda close together, may be hard to read in an open book exam
-similarly, the indent for child levels are small, making the document look congested compared to an MS Word doc.
-it really really blows when you need to print out your omni document and have no way of connecting to the school's intranet/internet, thus forcing you to convert the file into rtf, transfer it onto a usb drive, and then print it in the computer lab.

Btw I never learned to use the finer points of omnioutliner, just the bare basics.

[scarlett]

I'm a diehard OmniOutliner user (and yes, you can correct all of the things that you don't like about it, yvyty.)  Anyway, I use OOPro for notes and outlines, Scrivener for organizing my legal writing, OmniDazzle to keep me entertained in class, and OmniFocus to keep me organized.  If you just spend some time with the software before school starts you'll learn everything you need - OmniGroup's stuff is all pretty simple and intuitive. 

[SwissMiss]

I think what you might be looking for is NeoOffice.  It's the most comparable thing to OpenOffice.org there is out there for the Mac. 

I used it for a bit before I was able to put Microsoft Office on my Mac, and funny enough, it's the only program on my Mac that gives me errors.  Every time I get one, I imagine Bill Gates sitting in a corner giggling at me. 

[Tinkgirbell]

I thought that you could get OneNote for the Mac.  Does anyone know?
-Jen

[denk]

Thanks for the great feedback, everyone -  there are some interesting things here to track down.

I've used OmniGraffle and it's great, but probably not so applicable to law school.

[scarlett]

Actually, I used Omni Graffle to diagram during 1L - esp. in Property and Contracts.  But I'm a very visual person. 

[denk]

Actually, I used Omni Graffle to diagram during 1L - esp. in Property and Contracts.  But I'm a very visual person. 

Interesting - I'll have to give that a shot.