Simplenote: Better Late Than Never

A couple of weeks ago, I realized that I needed a better way to collect and organize notes and checklists. I am grateful to the guy who posted the following on a writers' forum: "I have a notes app on my phone for when I need it. I use simplenote on both computer and phone so it syncs."

I already had a notes app on my phone, and a way to sync it with my computers, but the notes app is somewhat cumbersome and Syncthing is both slow and has issues with conflicting files just often enough to be annoying.

Might a better notes app help? I thought. I'd heard of Simplenote -- It's been around forever -- but had always assumed it was part of the Apple ecosystem, and so had never looked at it. And this guy wasn't talking about his iPhone or his Mac, as so many of Apple's customers are prone to do.

So I looked into it and learned that it is compatible with everything I care about, as well as having a very good web interface, and it seemed to live up to its name. It's also free -- except possibly for iPhones, for which you may need to pay the princely sum of $2.00.

Among the reviews I found was one by Mac enthusiast John Gruber, who said "it might be my favorite third-party iPhone app, period. It's that good."

And so I installed it on my phone and gave it a try.

That Simplenote opens quickly and is both fairly intuitive to use and well-supported already made it better than what I was using for dealing with ephemera on the go, but the near-instantaneous, trouble-free propagation of changes fixed lots of issues, including a few I didn't fully realize I had.

Gruber gets into this in his review:

Another advantage for web-based syncing is that your data is always up to date everywhere, almost instantly. As with MobileMe, you don't need to manually initiate a sync with Simplenote. When you launch it, Simplenote checks with the server for changes. When you make changes on the iPhone, they're sent back to the server seconds later. The only way your data can get out of sync is if you make changes on the iPhone while there is no network available; in that case you simply need to relaunch Simplenote once network access is available. [bold added]

On top of this, it's also easy to import and export things, making it easy and useful to back up the notes regularly.

My biggest reservation about the app is that it is no longer in active development, although it is being maintained. My plan it to continue using it, while keeping an eye out for forks or other similar alternatives.

-- CAV

P.S. For its purpose of dealing with simple text notes, I'd call it finished software, because it is that good at dealing with small text files.