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Hog Bay Notebook Replaced By Mori

TUAW reported that one of my favorite applications, Hog Bay Notebook, has been retired and replaced with a rewritten version named Mori. Sure enough, it’s true.

Mori is much more than an upgrade to Hog Bay Notebook. Rather, developer Jesse Grosjean has built a “platform” in Mori that allows for future growth. The biggest architectural change is that Mori uses an open-source framework for plugins called Blocks, which allows features to be bolted on to the basic platform; it’s a flexible and sensible approach.

While Mori is not an open-source project, it’s nevertheless quite open. For one thing, users are encouraged to participate in the development process by submitting feature requests, and there’s an SDK available for anyone who wants to write a plugin. If you don’t like the way Mori works, you can change it. Besides the new plugin-based architecture, another big change from Hog Bay Notebook is that Mori uses Core Data for its file format. As a result of this decision, Mori requires Tiger.

As a 1.0 application, Mori hasn’t reached feature parity with the mature Hog Bay Notebook. While it’s quite usable just the way it is, I think I’ll stay with Hog Bay Notebook for a while longer and just spend Tuesdays with Mori until it matures a little.

By the way, Jesse Grosjean lives in Maine, and you can bet I asked him once for his opinion on the lobster rolls in his area. He was gracious enough to recommend a few places, although we haven’t ventured far enough north in the state to try them yet. Maybe next year. Oh, and best wishes to Jesse on the birth of his first child, Jaeda!