If you’ve been looking for an attractive and easy-to-use note-taking app that fits somewhere between Apple’s built-in Notes app and the leviathan that is Evernote, you might want to take a look at Zoho’s new free Notebook app for Mac. Zoho’s award-winning iOS Notebook app had been around for a while, and has also gained some very nice iOS updates recently such as an iMessage app, Siri search support, and even searching of audio notes using new APIs in iOS 10. This addition of a Mac app makes for a big step in providing a more comprehensive note-keeping solution. Users familiar with the iOS version will find that Notebook for macOS provides the same common user interface, with attractive, fun, and gesture-rich navigation brought over from the iOS side; two-finger trackpad pinches are used to open and close notebook and notes, and two-finger swipes can be used to swipe on a notebook for more information or to flick through grouped note cards. Notes can be given unique colors for quick identification, and a variety of cover styles are available for each notebook — or you can use any photo of your choice.
Notebook lets you write text, add images, create checklists, and record audio, and all of these can be combined in the same note, or stored in individual note cards. Sketch notes from iOS will also sync to Mac and can be viewed, although editing support isn’t available yet on the macOS side. If you’ve got a new MacBook Pro, Zoho has also baked in TouchBar and Touch ID support, so you can quickly change views and create note cards, access contextual options, and secure notes with Touch ID or password authentication. Sadly, there’s no integrated iCloud support for syncing between devices, so you’ll need to sign up for a free Zoho account — however, the cloud-based SaaS provider has a pretty solid infrastructure built on the foundation of its dozens of other SaaS products over the past few years, so they’re certainly not a new kid on the block when it comes to the cloud.