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Yesterday, Circus Ponies made an announcement that they will be closing for good. Taking humor in their announcement, the company has posted that they have gone to “that great Alphabet company in the sky.” This, of course, refers to Alphabet Inc.; which is best known as the parent company of Google and other companies that use to be part of Google. For 13 years, Circus Ponies was in charge of developing the iOS NoteBook app and the note-taking and organizational app used in Mac OSX devices. The company was started by Jayson Adams as an app developing business, and had an office in Santa Monica, California. Adams was previously the VP of NetCode at Netscape and the chief executive of NeXT during the 90s.
In 1991, NoteBook received “App of the Year” recognition from NeXTWORLD magazine. Although it was originally written for NeXT machine, it was rewritten so it could run on OS X devices. In April 2003, it was released to the public and used on several devices. In 2010, the app was ported to the iPad. A similar clone called OneNote was developed by Microsoft in the early 2000s, as a way of trying to win customers over to their service. Unfortunately, it did not hit it off like the original NoteBook app.
Now that Alphabet has acquired the company, they do hint that they are the “C” in the list of companies that are still being compiled. Apart from Circus Ponies and Google, Alphabet has also acquired Nest Labs, Calico, Google X, Google Capital, and GV. When asked why Google had to be restructured, Alphabet Inc. Google CEO Larry Page explained that with this move, Google will be “cleaner and more accountable.” At the same time, Page wanted this move to improve transparency and oversight of the things they were doing in the company. Considering Google had already acquired several other companies, this transition into a bigger company would give them greater control of companies unrelated to Google. If you still need a copy of NoteBook 4.0 or you’re in need of some technical assistance, you can try to send an email to [email protected]. However, the company mentions that they cannot promise you will get a reply back as soon as possible, if at all.