NoteCase has always been an indispensable application in my productivity toolbox. So the news that NoteCase's developer ceased its development sent me scrambling for a replacement for this excellent note-taking tool. It didn't take me long, though, to discover KeepNote. Similar to NoteCase, KeepNote is a hierarchical note manager, which means notes in the application are organized in notebooks and subnotebooks that act as nodes in an hierarchical tree. You can assign different icons to each notebook and note (or page, in KeeNote's terminology), which makes it easier to identify and find specific pages and folders.

As you would expect from a note-taking application, KeepNote supports different text formatting options, including bold, italics, underlined, and monospaced. Using the available tools, you can also tweak font properties, apply different text and background colors, and choose between several text alignment options. Like any note-taking application worth its salt, KeepNote lets you insert links and images. In addition to that, KeepNote features its own screenshot tool. Choose Edit -> Insert Screenshot (or press Ctrl+Insert), and you can take a screenshot of any currently opened window. KeepNote then automatically inserts the screenshot into the currently opened note. Other nice touches include an integrated spell-check with automatic in-line spell check and a search feature that allows you to search the current page or all existing notes. All pages in KeepNote are stored in the HTML format, and you can view them in the browser or edit them in an external editor. The only missing feature here is the lack of import and export functionality and the ability to encrypt notebooks. There is, however, the Backup Notebook feature that can save the currently selected notebook as a tar.gz archive.

All in all, while KeepNote is still missing a few features some users might consider important, it already provides a viable alternative to the now-defunct NoteCase.