Product Reviews

Trapper Keeper is a note-keeping and snippet-storing application that is well executed, if a little expensive.

It is designed to sit out of sight in the Menu bar, except when you call it to action with a click or a keyboard command. Initially, all you see is a Spotlight-style search pane, into which you type. If there's already a note containing the text, it is found for you. If no such note exists, hitting return will create it. The same

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system was used in the super-minimalist notepad Notational Velocity some years ago, and once you've got the hang of using it, comes in very handy.

Trapper Keeper is designed for short snippets, such as a to-do item, a phone number or a chunk of code you might want to re-use. It's possible to paste in longer items, but the interface is not geared to displaying them. An item can also be encrypted, making storage of things such as web passwords or credit card Pins feasible.

One unexpected feature was Trapper Keeper's habit of storing all the text that is copied to the system clipboard. However, this is only useful if you can remember what text you copied, so can search for it.

Once you are using Trapper Keeper to search or edit, additional controls let you do things such as lock a particular note, or search Google with its contents.

Trapper Keeper has plenty to offer and is certainly one of the more stylish storage apps we've seen, but plenty of similar programs do the same tasks and don't cost anything.