I really don’t know how many note taking applications are available for iPhone. I guess Steve doesn’t know either. But let me guess..
A lot.
Seems like together with Twitter clients and feeds readers, that of notes apps is a profitable market, or I couldn’t find an explanation for these thousands of similar apps floating around in the App Store. But you know what, amongst ugly and bad developed applications usually lie the awesome gems I review on MacStories. Speaking of note taking apps, John Gruber was the first to talk about Simplenote, and everyone started loving this app, which consists of an iPhone client and a web service. Simplenote is powerful, and the recent update made it am outstanding piece of software - built with power users in mind.
Today I’d like to talk about an application that has a similar purpose but takes a slightly different approach, focusing less on the pro features and more on the user interface. We’re gonna take some Synotes.
Synotes is the application from Syncode I previewed a while ago here. It basically lets you take notes on the iPhone native application and retrieve them later on the dedicated webapp. Both the apps share the same UI elements (icons and colors) but the iPhone app is obviously optimized to run on your 3.5 inches screen. Synotes is very simple and straightforward: once you choose to create a new note, you just have to enter a title and some text. That’s it. To make things nicer, you can assign a custom icon to the note choosing from a good selection of well designed little icons.
You can search your notes and even edit them in offline mode on the iPhone. Notes are encrypted at 256 bit to keep them secure and there’s also support for Conflict management when the iPhone and the webapp don’t share the same notes. This means you won’t lose anything, so don’t fear.
Overall, Synotes is a good application and comes at $1.99 in the App Store [iTunes Link]. If you still don’t have purchased a 3rd party note taking app and you’re looking for a service that lets you take notes on the go and edit them later while at home, you should consider this one. At the same price of Simplenote, it’s just your personal preference.
