MacMost Now 125: Getting Organized With VoodooPad

Gary Rosenzweig takes a look at VoodooPad, the personal wiki software for Mac. He uses it for to-do lists, taking notes and organizing information.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. Today I'm going to show you how to use a really cool organization tool called VoodooPad. It's hard to explain what VoodooPad is. To get it, go to flyingmeat.com and download the trial.
Now, it's kind of like a notepad, but a notepad on steroids. See, it's built like a wiki, so you can actually create a couple of words and link it to a whole other page inside of the wiki. But it's not a wiki like on the web, like Wikipedia, where everybody can contribute to it; it's just something on your local computer that you can add things to. So you can add as many different pages as you want and link between them. Let me show you. 
So here's a very simple VoodooPad document that I've created. I've typed a couple of lines in and I've created links. So for instance, the To Do List line actually links to a page that has To Do List items on it. I can navigate kind of like a web browser, going back like that. 
So if I wanted to actually  create something new like typed notes on a phone call, I can actually go ahead and select that and click 'link' and now it creates a page that I can type anything I want on it. And I can add a link in here as well. So for instance, say if I am taking notes on a phone call, I can actually later on go back and if I type the person's name in there, I can decide, I want to take notes on specifically this person, so I create a link to them, and I can type notes about them here. So basically I can create an intricate set of links to other things. And everything doesn't have to be a link, I can go ahead and type in various information that I want here, anything I want, and I can format it like I want too. 
But I can go a lot further than that; I can include all sorts of different things in here. So for instance, if I get an idea here, I can go ahead and create a new page for that, and I can do a sketch instead of typing. So I can sketch my idea here and insert it in.
You can also record audio notes into VoodooPad. You can even embed files, any file you want. Another cool thing you can do is you can encrypt pages in VoodooPad with a password. So of course you can copy and paste from other applications. You can also print as a PDF into VoodooPad, so for instance, if I'm at the webpage here and I want to save a copy of it in VoodooPad, I hit Print and then the PDF button, say VoodooPad, and I actually create a PDF and save it inside VoodooPad. You can also export from VoodooPad in various ways, including as html, so you can create some simple web-pages this way too.
I use VoodooPad in places where other people use other organizational software. I like VoodooPad's freedom. I can go ahead and create a To DO List on one page but on another page create a single page for an entire project and then link to various pages about people or pages with e-mails or print-outs or even notes about phone calls with that project. I can re-arrange them at will, print out what I want, and even go ahead and export it and put it somewhere where I can get to it like on a private website for external viewing.
I've been using VoodooPad for more than a year now and I love it. I find that it does things that I just can't accomplish any other way. There are 3 versions of VoodooPad. There's a light version which is free, there's a $30 regular version, and there's even a pro version for $50 that'll do advanced features like encrypting the entire thing, or allowing you to serve the entire thing up as a website. So go to the website flyingmeat.com and give it a try.
Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

MacMost Now 125: Getting Organized With VoodooPad

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