Findings is a Mac utility that enables you to store information about your lab experiments, notes, and other useful data connected to your research. The program features a nicely-designed and intuitive interface and provides you with a wide variety of useful built-in tools.
You can store various types of details regarding your work. For instance, the tool enables you to attach personal documents to your experiment entries, take notes from a group meeting, make to-do lists, and even use a countdown utility to see how much time it took you to complete a research test.
Another great thing about this tool is that you can sync the stored content across your Dropbox account. This feature might come in handy since the developer also gives you access to an iOS version of the utility. This means that you have the ability to access and manage your lab work from your Mac as well as your iOS device (when you're away from your computer).
Other useful features include the option to quickly share your work via email, the access to various reference material (for example, the periodic table), and the ability to customize the appearance of its main screen, like changing the view mode to Journal.
My only issue with the program is that you need to update the program after installing it in order to get access to the latest version of Findings. However, it doesn't take long to complete this task.
In conclusion, Findings is the must-have tool for any researcher or scientist who wants to easily keep track of research material, work notes, and meeting data. It's easy-to-use, feature-rich, and affordable.
v2.1 [Sep 20, 2018]
Findings 2.1 brings new ways to visualize your research notes and protocols:
- Collection colors. Findings offers several pre-defined colors you can apply to a collection. Any entry or protocol in that collection will then be displayed with that color.
- Dark Mode. The entire appearance of the application can be switched to light or dark mode, or simply follow the system preference. Best of all, the feature is available on all system versions. When supported by the operating system, Findings will also use the system accent color.
- Sticky colors have been improved to stand out, yet be more legible and easy on the eyes.
- Entries with active content for the current day now stand out thanks to a prominent 'TODAY' badge.
- And many other small improvements to improve the user experience.
We also fixed a number of bugs and issues:
- Correct formatting of date intervals, for users who set a custom date format in the system preferences.
- Wrong sorting of entries by date.
- Contextual menu for the entry list now properly triggered by control-click.
- Issue when typing using a keyboard input source (e.g. Japanese, Korean, accents, etc).
- Select the 'Timers' item in the sidebar when creating a new timer, so that the new timer is actually visible.
- Properly locks title and summary fields based on status (not just the body of the document).
- Properly locks experiments marked as completed in Findings 1.
- Clicking on newly created attachment was wrongly and confusingly invoking the open file dialog.
- Crash when navigating the entries very quickly.
- Crash with import of some Word documents.
The complete release notes are available from the Help menu.
Enjoy and make sure you rate the app and tell us what you think!
