Caboodle Express at Mac App Store analyse

Everyone comes across information that they want to refer to later. Maybe gifts youve received or sent, product serial numbers, recipes, directions to someones house, a photo of your pet, or anything else. Dejal Caboodle is a tool to help store and organize such varied bits of information.

Structured and Free-form, Together At Last

Some kinds of information are best stored in an organized structure, like a phone book. You want a label and a short value, and dont care about text formatting and such: you just want the information.

On the other hand, sometimes youd like to write a paragraph or two about something, or include pictures, web links, lists, tables, PDFs, and more.

Why compromise? Caboodle gives you both, with no learning curve!

Your Bag of Tricks

Caboodle provides a single place to store, organize, and find those little pieces of information that you might have previously stored in Stickies or obscurely-named text files strewn over your desktop.

Every Caboodle entry has an icon and subject. The icon can be altered for each entry, if desired, to make them even easier to identify. The subject is the name of the entry, displayed in the entries list. The entry is automatically saved when you switch to another one (or quit), or can be manually saved as desired.

The entries list is a standard outline, making it simple to see as many or as few entries as desired. You can select one or more entries and drag them to reorder them, or to move them up or down the hierarchy, and expand or collapse the entries.

You can also type in the search field to quickly locate entries: the entries list changes to show only the matching ones, with the match words highlighted in each entry.

One Big Happy Family: Sibling and Child Entries

Caboodle uses an intuitive inheritance design. When you create an entry, it inherits the icon and custom fields of its parent. You can choose to create a "sibling" entry, at the same level as an already selected one, or a "child" entry, within the selected one. This allows quickly creating content in an organized fashion, without precluding you from changing the icon and custom fields any time you like.

Yes, thats right: there is no "folder" concept in Caboodle. Every entry can contain other entries, so you can treat any entry as a folder-like container, and add child entries when needed. The parent entry could just have a subject, to treat it like a primitive folder, or it could contain a summary of the contents, general information, or whatever you like.

Uniquely Flexible Custom Fields

In addition to the standard subject field, you can create your own. Simply click the button to add a custom field. You can give it a suitable label, and type whatever value is desired. Whats more, you arent restricted to the same custom fields for all entries: you can add or remove custom fields for each entry, but thanks to the inheritance, each entry starts with the same set as its parent.

Simple Storage of Your Stuff

Custom fields are useful, but most of the time, you just want to jot down a thought, store a picture, etc. Caboodle handles this simply and elegantly. You can type or paste rich text, drag or paste pictures, PDFs, and even documents into the text area of an entry. Caboodle stores a copy, leaving the original intact.

Any content stored in Caboodle can also be dragged out again. Drag a PDF out to make a copy on your desktop or elsewhere; it is still stored in the entry. You can also double-click on such items in Caboodle to directly open a copy of them in Preview or whatever application is appropriate.

For Your Eyes Only

What about privacy? Got some information you dont want others to see? An entry can be encrypted to hide your most sensitive information, using an industry-standard encryption algorithm. The password can be saved in the keychain if desired. Decryption is as easy; you can even temporarily decrypt entries for viewing without decrypting them on disk.