Tech Blog

[#1]

I know that Simplenote and Notational Velocity are awesome apps, and Catherine swears by them, I haven't taken advantage of them terribly much until now. I have a couple projects on the go where having synced notes on various places/platforms would be a very good thing indeed. Over the weekend I was writing about back-to-school apps and Simplenote was one of the key ones. As it happened, Simplenote said a "great new version" was coming so it wasn't in the App Store at the moment. Now, having been in a software company and work on my share of beta test programs, I take pronouncements of "release any time now" with a hunk of halite (i.e. Bigger than a grain of salt). Well the new Simplenote dropped today and … wow

Simplenote is one of those "must have" iPhone/iPad apps. It's free, it syncs to the cloud, and there are a myriad apps that also sync with it on desktop machines. Essentially if you want to have that running list of notes or the "If I just jot down these thoughts for later…" space, Simplenote can't be beat. Catherine uses it on her iPhone, I use it on my iPad and until now this was great, but we couldn't really share the notes terribly easily.

Until now.

Sure we can email notes back and forth, but that's annoying. Now, and we just tested it out, we can share a note via an email link. This note is then also synced up with our local copies of Notational Velocty…so now Catherine and I could share notes on projects or even work on a basic text document collaboratively. All with simple tools that can be applied a hundred different ways. No, Simplenote isn't fancy. It isn't meant to be (hence the "simple" part of the name). We, I think, have become rather caught up with getting the latest and greatest. The most complete solution, when often a basic text editor wins the day.

As for other features, Simplenote now has tags (which may or may not be supported in a desktop app), some premium features…what I gather is that the app was very much a entire revamp/rebuild…and man it's awesome.