iData Pro, Go Cocoa -- iData Pro has long been my favorite digital shoebox, a repository for completely miscellaneous text snippets, as I explained in TidBITS-675. The program was available through Casady & Greene, who closed their doors in June 2003. iData's author, Mike Wright, robbed of a distribution channel, thereupon generously started giving the program away. On Mac OS 9 (non-Classic) it was made free forever; on Mac OS X it was a six-month "demo," but it was fully featured, and over time, eight bug-fix updates kept it from expiring. Meanwhile, Wright partnered with Robin Casady to revive the program by rewriting it in Cocoa. This effort has now resulted in iData 2 (currently version 2.0.2, with the "Pro" deliberately dropped from the name). The Cocoa rewrite provides all the cool stuff and good behavior that Cocoa brings along for free, such as styled text, Unicode, images, Services, scroll-wheel support, speech, and spell-checking. A valuable new feature is the capability to insert a live link to any file or folder on disk. iData 2 and iData 1.0.17 can import each other's files; iData 2 can also import InfoGenie and QuickDex files. iData 2 costs $50; a few iData 1.0.17 features still missing from iData 2, such as label printing and advanced phone dialing, are slated to return in a future major update, at which point the price will rise to $70. A 30-day demo is available for download (1 MB). iData 2 requires Mac OS X 10.3 Panther or later. [MAN]

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/07145>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/07247>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/07276>
<http://www.idata2.com/>