Get organized with these notebook apps for the Mac

I've been looking around for Mac software to help me with journaling and keeping track of small scraps of information. I've never found anything satisfactory, but I never stop trying.

I'm trying to solve two problems, both related to starting a business. I'm learning how to do new things every day, and I want to keep track of these tricks, so that I don't have to reinvent the wheel in a month or a year when I'm faced with the same problem again.

The other problem is journaling. I want to keep track of what I'm doing every day, because clients want progress reports, and it's better to be able to keep those as you go.

Here's what I'm looking for: Do you watch Lost? You know the character Daniel Faraday, the mad scientist who knows everything about the island?? He's got a bulging, dog-eared notebook in which he stores handwritten notes, sketches, and equations relevant to his years of research. When he faces a problem, he leafs through the tattered notebook to find the answer he discovered years ago.

Indiana Jones's father had the same kind of thing in The Last Crusade. It seems to be standard-issue equipment for benevolent mad scientists, along with wild facial hair.

I want something like that notebook -- but electronic. I could just use text files and Word documents, but they get lost. I want something that will corral all these notes, and index them for later search.

I've been looking for the perfect notebook for years, and have never been satisfied. I haven't given up. Indiana Jones's father didn't give up looking for the Holy Grail, did he?

I'm now looking at Yojimbo, a $39 application that aggregates text, bookmarks, PDFs, Web archives, images, and more. I've tried Yojimbo before and rejected it, but at that time I was trying to use it for everything. I think that was over-ambitious. I'm going to try it now just for small scraps of information. When the scraps get big enough, I'll bunch them together into text files or other grown-up documents.

Yojimbo has a simple, easy, and elegant interface. It's popular with my favorite Apple bloggers, who've pointed me toward my favorite Mac software in the past. It synchs with the Simplenote iPhone memo app. And the price is reasonable.

Yojimbo has several competitors and alternatives:

EagleFiler ($40) has a lot going for it, and I used it happily for a long time. It works with the native Mac filesystem, and it does lightning-fast searches. The downside: It's ugly, and I found it inconvenient moving files into and out of the EagleFiler structure.

A friend recommended MacJournal ($39.95). It's comprehensive -- maybe too comprehensive. The interface is too cluttered.

Evernote is the big daddy of notebook applications. It synchs across the Mac, Windows, Web, iPhone, Android and Blackberry. It's free for a basic version. I used it happily for a year, but I started to find the user interface annoying. Also, I feared I was relying on it too much.

Also: Circus Ponies Notebook ($49.95). I didn't care for the fake-notebook interface. There were, possibly, other reasons I rejected it; I need to take another look.

I have to admit I'm put off by the name: "Circus Ponies Notebook." It is too silly and sissified. If it had a more masculine name, I'd like it more. Might I suggest: "He-Man Hairy-Chested Testosterone Commando Notebook"? Just a thought.