My dear readers, the perfect notes app doesn’t exist. What? You’re surprised? Come on guys, it’s a matter of fact that perfection isn’t part of this world, and as long as we can think about making something good, we’ll only be able to make something great. That’s the human nature. This concept applies to every kind of human creation: art, food, software. So what are we talking about anyway? We just strive to use / create something great, in the best way that’s possible. Back to notes, perfection doesn’t exist there either, greatness does. Well, let’s say that among 3000 notes app available in the App Store, maybe 10 of them are great. Do the math, you get the hang of how life works. But greatness alone isn’t enough: you should add a good dose of personality and usefulness to the mix. A system can be great and admirable, but it couldn’t work for someone. Summing up: I need a great notes app, it has to adapt to my personality and it should be useful. Can you believe I found all of this in Simplenote?
Disclaimer: this is my personal experience, based on 10+ coffees per day and random late night writing sessions. I don’t know if you’ll find it any useful, but the app it’s great anyway.
I used to do all my writing on my Macbook with the following apps: Text Edit, Yojimbo, Pages. Indeed, until a few weeks ago I didn’t have a note taking app of choice, I just randomly kept switching back and forth between these apps. It wasn’t exactly the best situation for a blogger who consumes tons of text every single day. Yojimbo was just too much for just taking notes, Pages was slow (I don’t know why, maybe it’s just my Pages installation), Text Edit was ok. Now, let me state the difference I apply for “taking notes” and “writing a post”. For me, taking notes is essential. I found a great app? There goes a note with url, title, developers and a brief description. Cool tutorial? Note, note, note. Writing an article, on the other hand, is a more structured and passionate experience, where I strive to remember everything I shoved in the notes, trying the write down an overview of something as much complete as possible. This usually applies for reviews and the “Stories” post.
But much like everything in my life there are some weird alternatives to this process, where a note strangely becomes an article in a matter of minutes. Example: the Nirvana review I posted yesterday. That post actually started as a note wrote on my iPhone in my friend’s garage while watching that sick movie Love Guru is. You can guess how much I was interested in that movie. Anyway, I fired up Simplenote and started writing some notes about Nirvana because I remembered I had this task sitting in my Things to do list for weeks and, having nothing better to do (no, even eating wasn’t a “better” alternative” in that moment) I kinda wrote down some details about Nirvana. Like: GTD web app, cool interface, some ideas about the introduction. It took 2 minutes to gather all the ideas I had. But the movie was rolling, I was getting bored to death and I didn’t have my Macbook. No wifi connection either to open Youtube. Hell, I was in bad situation. I started writing the full post. The note that once was a 30 words checklist suddenly became a decent article that later turned into the post you can see online here. This is the “disambiguation” I was talking about: a note becoming an article in a relatively small amount of time, using only one tool.
This “weird alternative” I’m talking about happened many times before, but you don’t want to know the details. Trust me. So I had to completely re-think my writing workflow, I had to find a unique app /service that let me easily enter some notes in a few seconds, write something more deep and have that piece backed up on my Macbook for later.
Simplenote. Screw you Pages, I won’t open you anymore. Yojimbo, you’re a great guy but you can’t be my text editor of choice. Text Edit, I’ll use you just to open Cody’s reviews from now on.
The experience Simplenote provides is great. It’s a web app, it’s a service, it’s an iPhone app, it’s got desktop apps that use its API. Hell, Simplenote has got more uses than my favorite belt. No, you don’t wanna know about that too. Anyway, let’s sum up: I needed a text editor / note taking app that could work on the iPhone, on the web, on my Mac. Simplenote is just perfect for this.
The iPhone app is rather straightforward at first sight: fire it up and it’s empty. Nothing to see, just two buttons and a search bar. Ok, now what - you may ask. C’mon, tap on that + button. And what do you get? Just a keyboard and a blank text field. That is minimalism, and that’s productive for me. Moving on with Simplenote, you’ll notice that the other button is sitting there in the top menu and you’ve never tried it. Those are the settings. “Settings for a notes app? Why would I even need Settings? To adjust the font size?” It’s a web service too, remember? From the settings you can enter your account credentials, create a new account, set up some options like preview lines and web syncing, unlock the premium features.
Unlock. Premium. Features.
Ok, you need some background about this. Simplenote used to be a paid app, but now it’s free. Also, Simplenote used to have a very few features and now has got plenty of them. People change, so do apps. Now Simplenote is a free, ad supported application but you can purchase a yearly Premium account for $4.99. The premium membership includes unlimited API usage, automatic backups, create by mail, RSS feeds, Insider access (man I love this stuff) and Premium support. Basically, another world. So I went Premium, and I’ll never regret that. Great support, backups whenever I want, no ads. And that’s it for the iPhone app. There’s no option to change text, no folders, no tags - just text. Pure, simple and plain text. Sounds good to me.
Moving onto the web counterpart, it’s definitely a good alternative when I’m at my computer but - wait: why would I ever need to access the web interface if I am at my computer, where I can use a 3rd party Mac application? Oh right, that’s meant for those people who need to store notes instead of working and they’re using a PC. Lucky me, I don’t need this at all.
And here comes the final part of this Simplenote love story, the Mac side of things. As you may have noticed following me on Twitter, Notational Velocity - the uber easy, slick and <insert another cool adjective here> app has been updated and now supports Simplenote syncing. And you know what, it’s amazing. First, I own the notes and not the cloud. For the first time in a long time here comes a developer that thinks the user should be the owner of his stuff. Second of all, once you’ve entered your account detaisl everything happens in the background and doesn’t get in your way. I write, it syncs, I’m happy. Pretty much like this. As the piece is finished, I delete the note - both from my Mac and the cloud. Next time I’ll launch the iPhone app I won’t see anything. I wish my life was easy as taking notes.
Will I stick with Simplenote until death will do us part? Unlikely. I already see a new app coming along and make me fall in love with her. But that’s how things go here: you have to get the most out of something until that something will get the most out of you. Simplenote is making me a lot more productive.
