14 DAY TRIAL // Parsnips is a strange program. It is a personal information manager, but it's quite different than other PIMs. It does not keep track of your contacts, schedule or to do list. It was designed to keep track of clippings of information, store them and provide a convenient means of finding anything fast.
First impressions When you first open up Parsnips, you see the main window, with the quick start guide displayed in the results list. The program has a distinct non-Mac look about it, the icons being very PC-like and not at all intuitive. Furthermore, the fact that the right pane looks like a edit interface, very similar to a Compose Mail window, while the right half also looks like a text edit field, with the Quick Start guide shown there, only serves to create more first impression confusion.
Working with it Parsnips was designed to collect your data, store it and then let you find it back quickly.
Getting information into Parsnips can be done in several ways. The first and most basic is adding the new entry by hand. The second involves drag and drop, and you can drag just about anything into either the left half of the Parsnips window (the result list) or the little target icon window.
You cannot drag and drop onto the dock icon, you can only drop into the results list, dragging anywhere else in the window has no effect whatsoever, and the little floating target window has no option to always be on top. All this having been said, the methods of getting information into Parsnips, although they are there, are less than optimally implemented and quite limited.
You can add any type of file or folder or clipping but only text is handled well by the application, meaning that anything else will be nothing more than a link to the file. You can even drop entire web pages, but, again, the program will scan them and only retain the text which is more often then not, structured differently and extremely hard to follow.
When you actually start using Parsnips, the left half becomes the search result listing where you can see the title, URL, created and modified dates of entries, as well as the first words of the entry, where applicable. One of the first things I noticed, that really bugged me out, was the fact that this list is split into pages. That's right, it does not spread out forever but is instead split into pages, each containing a customizable number of entries. While this may seem silly and limited, it is not. Imagine if Google returned all the possible search results in one big page that stretched out as long as necessary to hold them all.
So why use it? After everything I have said so far, this program might look like something you should stay away from... it is not. Parsnips, despite all the limitations it has if you try to use it like any other PIM, is still a superb program if you need it. Now this is a very big if... If you have several thousand text clippings and bits of information or files you need to keep track of, than you need this. If you want a program in which to dump all sorts of things, along the lines of ten a day so you can sort through them at the end of the day, especially if it is non-text information, or information that needs to retain the original look as much as possible, then you are better of with something like StickyBrain.
Parsnips truly shines when you have tens of thousands of entries and you need to find something quickly. The search language it uses is very complex and supports advanced things like Boolean Operators such as AND, OR and NOT; wildcard and fixed wildcards (which are basically one character wildcards); fields which means that besides searching the content of an entry you can also search in the Title, URL and Keywords fields; and grouping, which allows you to create complex, mathematical like formulas using parentheses.
It uses the Lucene search engine, and while that name will probably not mean a lot to most people, and I cannot go into a detailed explanation of exactly what it can do and how it does it, I will say that it is a full blown search engine with all the trimmings.
The Good A great search engine hidden underneath everything else. If you have a huge heap of information you need to work with and want to find things easily, this might be for you, especially after you get used to the search syntax. The database file is 100% cross-platform.
The Bad Pretty much useless for the average user, there are many PIM programs out there that are more user friendly and feature packed.
The Truth A very specialized tool, although the developers do not market it so. Like all specialized tools, it all boils down to whether you need it or not.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
