A very brief history of sharing notebooks

Way back in 2006, we introduced NoteShare which roughly came about four years after first launching NoteTaker for OS X. As its name implies, NoteShare was and still is about sharing notebooks for collaborative work. Encouraged by Doug Snow at Apple and other passionate NoteTaker users, we imagined NoteShare as a simple yet elegant solution for sharing and working on notebooks across LANs and other ad-hoc wireless networks. In the process of launching and refining NoteShare, we learned a lot about networking and provisioning 24/7 access to notebooks which eventually resulted in the development of a dedicated notebook server solution launched as NoteShare Server. At the time, we were intensely focused on serving the needs of schools, research teams and workgroups that found real productivity in offering dedicated notebook sharing for campus LANs. Over time though, the cloud-based storage services emerged and became the default choice for maintaining synchronized documents and files across multiple user devices. Collaboration went from real-time interaction to asynchronous workflows and then distributed synchronization of documents across mobile devices.

Mobile devices like the first iPhones ushered in the true age of pervasive computing to the degree that cloud storage services were becoming equally pervasive. Today, no one blinks an eye about sharing a document via iCloud Drive or Google Drive or any number of file storage services (Box, DropBox and Microsoft's OneDrive). In our ten year plus journey of working on notebook sharing and collaboration, we have returned to the basic idea that users want notebook synchronization on their own terms above all. When we launch NoteTaker 4 and NoteShare 4, both products will seamlessly support iCloud Drive synchronization. We will always support our own sharing technology for collaborating and editing notebooks in real-time but now MacOS desktop users will have even more control of their notebooks and their workflows. It's true, old software dogs like us can learn new tricks especially when they're obvious.