A Notable Dilemma

After purchasing my iPhone, I quickly became addicted to tapping out a rough outline of a blog post, or article, or anything I needed to write with it. Once I started to be become more comfortable with typing on the iPhones keyboard my usage of the Notes app intensified — no longer was I simply roughing outlines, but rather I was doing first and second drafts of whole articles on it while I waited for my tram, or on a break at work. Instead of just being a tool for jotting down idea’s, it had become an essential part of my writing process.

But this was just when it stopped being good enough for me. The fact that there was no synching (this was prior to OS 3.0) was a major bug bear, with the look of the app — what with its Marker Felt font, and gaudy yellow legal pad looking background — coming in a close second in the “Biggest Irritation With Notes App” stakes.

Despite the fact that it irritated me, and that it wasn’t quite enough for what I wanted, I stuck with the Notes app, simply because I didn’t know where to start looking for a better app. Then one day, very recently, I came across this old article on Daring Fireball about Simplenote.

The thought of paying for a notetaking app that didn’t provide me with plain text file notes after synching seemed ludicrous to me at first. “Why would I want to pay to have to use a webapp for my notes?” I remember thinking to myself, despite the absolutely minimal $2 cost on the app store. Sorry “App Store”. In the end, I simply decided to purchase the app to see if it worked better for me than what I was already using, and needless to say, I’m incredibly glad I did.

Simplenote did exactly what I wanted from a new notetaking app — it took everything that was great about the default app, and nothing that irritated me. Nicer interface? Check. No title required? Check. Simple to use? Check, check, and check!

Quite simply, Simplenote is everything that is great about the Notes app, and nothing that is bad about it. A simple, date ordered list of notes, without resorting to using “folders” or any other kind of organisation mechanism; no title required for your note, the first line is simply the title; automatic, over-the-air synching with the web app; and still the ability to email your notes if you need to.

That said, there is one small gripe that I have with Simplenote, which is probably an easy fix — in Landscape mode, my prefered method of input, the text does not auto-scroll soon enough. That is to say that the bottom line of text upon which you can type is the first line of text below the top edge of the keyboard. This only afflicts the app in landscape mode, and is not a major drama, as I have gotten used to typing a line without seeing what I am writing, and automatically thumbing my screen if I think I may have made a mistake — something the iPhones build in dictionary doesn’t let me do too often.