Everyone check your Gnotebooks. If everyone didn't see the major UI changes then I'll post screen shots.

http://www.google.com/notebook/

Looks like there are sharing options like Collaboration

Actually "collaboration" has been there for a long while. What I'm talking about is the UI redesign:

http://www.pacificdave.com/google/google-notebook-redesign.jpg

Cool

They have taken away the "Labs" status. I don't see Beta listed either.

The interface is much more like Gmail's now. They also default to entering new notes at the top of the page instead of the bottom.

The ability to move a Note or even an entire Section to a different Notebook via a drop down is new. This sure beats dragging notes around, which I had to do just a few hours ago.

It looks like some great improvements, and the speed is still great for me.

Tony

And it seems that in some term all Google services are going to have that UI. That´s good, standard graphics, smaller logo.

The interface is definately better – but it's no match to the improvements made in Google Reader back in September – they were mind-blowing.

I was not expecting Notebook to be released as a final product – I thought they were just testing the waters, ready for it to be fully integrated with Google Docs and the like. More of a "glue"...

Whilst i do not mind the new redesign of google notebook. Looks nicer, also on the web. But i do hate the new iG personalized homepage gadget. The old gadget let you see 6 entries, now barely 4.

Wow. Was the "show on map" feature on the drop-down menu there before? It works brilliantly, for me, for notes that include addresses.

Fritz: Agreed. The IG Gadget is badly designed. They should talk to the Greader Team on Gadget design.

The new features I find most useful are being able to sort your notebooks in alphabetical order and adding comments to individual notes that are separated from the main note body by color. Alphabetical order was way overdue.

Next up should be note "tagging."

Fabulous.

Finally painless blogging! :-)
Just select some text, clip to public notebook, and add a few comments. The only thing that stopped me from doing this before was chronological order, instead of reverse chronological.
Now, if only they'd remove "Are you sure you want to add this to public notebook" question... :-)

Does anyone actually se Notebok??

It's like Hibernian Ins*rance – Pretty Good!(thats an Irish thing, though Im hardly Irish)

Why is i*surance blocked

WHO really use that tool?
There is maybe a lot of "test" message, but who *really* use that?
You can count them with your fingers I think...

WOW! The re-design is excellent. Let's hope that this is the wave of the future for Google applications. I would love to see them make ALL of their offerings more consistent.

As to who uses this, I use it occasionally. But now that it's improved, I'll likely use it more. Excellent upgrade!

Now, if Google REALLY wanted to improve this, they could offer an "offline" version that could sit on a USB drive and seamlessly sync with the online version. This would be invaluable to me....

TOMHTML: I use it in conjunction with bookmarks. Instead of bookmarking a whole page I can take a "snippet" of info from the page and bookmark at the same time by using the Gnotebook Firefox Extension. I used to have to keep Word open then highlight, CTRL+C, CTRL+V everything and finally FTP it to my web server for viewing anywhere. This takes those extra steps away and it's organized.

I practically run my office from One Note 2007. I love it. But because of the price and the use of a couple of shared computers, I can't have it on every machine I work on.

For web-clippings, notes and projects that I want portable, I have been using Google Notebook. There are three different computers that I work from, so having some of my data in the Cloud has been very useful, and I don't have to mess with USB drives.

I am very excited about this update. Notebook is finally becoming what I expected it to be when it was first announced last spring.

One Note is and will continue to be my main app. Notebook is a great place to stick away info that I am accumulating over time or may want to access anywhere.

TonyB

I use it to compile quotes about a product from different sites. To synch with a desktop app, Notebook would need an API. The pseudo-API available now gives you read-only access.

http://code.google.com/apis/notebook/gdata.html

I really use it – from time to time. It´s the easiest way how to show somebody some text. It´s the easiest way how to set up a trip – how to get to one page possible lodging, interesting places, local information etc.

I don't use it much but i noticed it's not on their products page http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/

... it is now :)

But under Search heading. :-)

I may be the only person here who believes this but the new interface is horrible, the cluttered look is definitely not as great as the older cleaner one.

After using it today, I've noticed 2 significant flaws in the redesign:

- When you click "Trash", it LOOKS like you're going to trash a notebook, because it's part of the notebook surrounding area.

- The "Add Note" button is on the same line as the note formatting buttons. Eh?!?! That means, if you're not currently editing a note, the formatting buttons do naff all.

It's also available in other languages now.

"- The "Add Note" button is on the same line as the note formatting buttons. Eh?!?! That means, if you're not currently editing a note, the formatting buttons do naff all."

Actually the WYSIWYG editor is always present even if you're not editing a note... so with that the "Add Note" is always present.

<< Actually the WYSIWYG editor is always present even if you're not editing a note... so with that the "Add Note" is always present. >>

Sorry dave but that's actually my point. Why have a WYSIWYG editor is there for absolutely no reason a lot of the time. It should appear inside the note, as it did before.

Mambo: Ah, I see what you're getting at. Either way it doesn't matter to me. Maybe they did it this way so they wouldn't have to recall the script everytime you went to edit another note. I remember it used to take an extra second to call up the editor before.

Very slick improvements!

The ability to have titles for notes is new.

I don't have an opinion either way on the "Add Note" issue that Mambo brings up. I certainly doesn't bother me.

Working with the new Notebook it for about a day now, I really like both the features and appearance.

TonyB

Peter and Tony, I for one use it to organise simple research. It's much easier, I can have interesting stuff (with the URL) at one place + adding comments + formatting options. Although I do use OneNote for more complex research.

I was hoping for a bulleted list button (it's a notebook, after all!), but alas...
Interestingly, copy-pasting lists from Google Docs seems to work, bullets included.

An idea for a Greasemonkey script maybe?

I like it so far but I'm very disappointed GN is still lacking a way to group similar notebooks (eg. work, personal, etc).

I don't mean to harp on the negatives because there are some great features but I wish the pop-up would auto-close/hide once I've noted something. The way it stays open is very annoying

"but I wish the pop-up would auto-close/hide once I've noted something. The way it stays open is very annoying"

I can see how that would be annoying. That should be a choice within the Firefox Extension and IE Plugin. Try submitting this to the Gnotebook Group:

http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Labs-Notebook

pacificdave

Hah, I already did!
See second to last item under UI
http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Labs-Notebook/web/google-notebook-ideas

Now you mention the plug-in, there are zero options available. Odd not to have any options whatsoever...

I've just noticed – have they got rid of the "Search Notebooks" functionality? When it was in labs, you could search everyone's public notebooks...

Good point Mambo. Now you have to use [site:google.com/notebook/public] in a normal Google search to get these results...

I found another annoyance – when I change the notebook in the pop-up and select a specific section, the item is NOT clipped to that section. I'm forced to manually move it. I think in the previous version, the clip would be saved to the selected section.