NoteBook for Mac OS X
The human mind is extremely capable of processing and acting on information in real-time; however, it's not so good at maintaining a record of information for arbitrary lengths of time. Or, at least that's how my mind works. So, I rely on tools - digital and analog - to get by in this crazy world. One tool that I've become come to rely on at work is NoteBook 2.1 for Mac OS X.
NoteBook works just like the $2 Mead notebooks I used in school, except that it's intended to organize and collect digital information. Most people find themselves working with a mixture of digital information (e-mails, attachments, URLs for webpages, etc.) and analog information (post-it's, T.P.S. reports, etc.) Managing information across the two mediums can be a real pain. I don't know if we'll ever see a product that handles both successfully, but NoteBook does a wonderful job of taking care of digital half.
In my job, I often have a running list of new features I'm working on for the Documentum product, bug-fixes, and customer cases. Prior to using NoteBook, I created folders on my computer to hold attachments and random data associated with my current task. I also created a physical manila file-folder to hold the notes, printed e-mails, and research materials I collected. Correlating the two was difficult, and neither could be searched effectively.
NoteBook allows me to easily aggregate information into pages that resemble pages from a college-ruled notebook. Paste information from an e-mail, drag a URL from Firefox, or drag a ZIP file sent by a colleague - NoteBook ties it all together and maintains a hidden database of all the cruft that you collect in your notebook, just like iTunes takes care of the details of storing MP3 and AAC files without the user's knowledge. This makes is easier to get back to collecting and annotating your information.
I tried the 30-day demo of NoteBook and enjoyed it so much that I bought a copy within a week. I bought an individual license which cost $50. The license is enforced by NoteBook during program initialization by sending a multicast DNS query on the LAN; any other copies of NoteBook running in the LAN respond to the query, which allows NoteBook to determine if the license terms are in question. It's a pretty clever way to enforce the program's license. I don't usually need to run NoteBook on both of my Macs at the same time, so this doesn't create much concern.
Overall, NoteBook is an excellent tool that makes managing information and easy and efficient. I highly recommend at least trying the demo to see if it works for you!