I already know what you’re thinking: “Justnotes looks a lot like nvALT.” You wouldn’t be wrong in thinking that Justnotes is visually reminiscient of Notational Velocity and its poweruser fork, nvALT, but it wouldn’t be fair to judge without getting hands on. I’d posit Justnotes as an alternative to TextEdit on OS X — it’s a container for creating, sorting, and archiving text files. Otherwise, Justnotes is simply the desktop counterpart to Simplenote… With a twist.

(more…)

At some point during a writing career there comes that moment, in which you have to decide how to sync your text to all your devices. Some people use Dropbox; others, like me, prefer Simplenote. Metanota is a “new & noteworthy” OS X client for Simplenote which enhances the service’s feature set with different organizing possibilities on the desktop.

My reason for sticking with Simplenote (and Notational Velocity as a Mac client) instead of Dropbox is pretty simple: it’s easy, and it works. There’s a feature, however, that’s lacking in Simplenote — a feature that Federico also pointed out as an advantage of Dropbox: organizing your notes. Especially when you have to manage many lists, information, and text, Simplenote through Notational Velocity can get pretty cluttered and confusing, despite its powerful searching feature, which doesn’t just titles but content as well. Often, I get overrun by my own notes.

Metanota has decent search abilities, and although its note creation is not as smooth as in NV (which incorporates the search and creation features in one single interaction), it possesses a comfortable writing environment. While using Metanota and NV in parallel, text was not always synced properly with the first try, but the app did not create duplicates or deleted notes. Its design isn’t really pleasing, but it’s functional and serves the basic needs of a good note-taking app. Metanota can sync automatically every 20 seconds, 60 seconds, 5 minutes, and 60 minutes; with automatic sync in the background, notes were quickly synced to the Simplenote web app running in my desktop browser. Notes deleted on Simplenote’s website were deleted automatically on Metanota, and, similarly, updates made to a note from the Mac app were saved as “versions” on Simplenote’s website.

I want to focus on the most advantageous feature the app has to offer: sorting notes in folders. Simplenote itself features note tagging — these tags are also shown in the sidebar and on top of any tagged note in Metanota as folders. I believe tagging is not incorporated well in NV, where you just can sort notes after their tag, but not list only those notes with a specific tag with one click. Metanota imports Simplenote tags and allows you to create your own “folders” in the sidebar: these will be synced to Simplenote as tags, but Metanota doesn’t (surprisingly) lets you drag & drop notes between “folders”.

Overall, Metanota is a visually well-arranged Simplenote client with the biggest feature in its two sidebars. It more or less seamlessly syncs with the Simplenote service, it offers some nice features to cope with a large amount of notes and with the task of organizing them, but it doesn’t come with more advanced features such as Markdown support or keyboard shortcuts.

You can try Metanota for free on the Mac App Store (the built-in, unobtrusive ads can optionally be removed through a $9.99 in-app purchase).

I’m a huge fan of Simplenote, the free web service that works anywhere and allows you to create and sync notes across the web, iPhone, iPad and desktop computers thanks to a plethora of native third-party apps. In fact, I believe Simplenote is the easiest, yet most powerful note-syncing tool currently available on iOS devices: forget MobileMe’s notes, Simplenote is elegant, minimal, and when unlocked at its full potential with a $19.99 Premium account it allows you to do some nifty things with your notes like turn them into plain text lists, back them up on Dropbox (thus opening a whole new layer of possibilities) and create a personalized RSS feed. Simplenote works well as a free service, but it becomes a powerhouse of notes when using it as a Premium subscriber. It doesn’t surprise anyone that in the past year dozens of apps that sync with Simplenote and also sport Dropbox integration have been released in the App Store. Thanks to all these apps (including the excellent Notational Velocity for Mac), users have found a way to keep notes in the cloud, and have them always available, anywhere, on any device.

Listary, a new iPhone app by developers Portmanteau, wants to turn Simplenote into a list management tool without requiring a Premium subscription. With an elegant interface and the use of its own plain text syntax to recognize new and completed items, Listary works on the iPhone as a native app but can be accessed by any other Simplenote app, text editor or web browser. It basically works like this: once logged in with your Simplenote account, Listary will look into your note database and asks you if there’s any existing note you’d like to turn into a list. (more…)

Notational Velocity is a huge productivity tool for keep tracking of internal notes with tags and content linking, and followers of Brett Terpstra are probably already big fans of the nvALT project that’s designed to add power-user friendly features to a favorite text client. With help from ElasticThreads, nvALT 2.0 has been released which highlights lots of killer features that can be added to Notational Velocity. I’ve listed just a few below (I encourage you to check out Brett’s site and the project page) for a quick taste of what nvALT 2.0 has to offer.

• Textile and (Multi)Markdown support with Preview window (hold down Control to view temporarily)
• Custom HTML/CSS templates can be included in saved output from the Preview
• Convert imported URLs to Markdown, and optionally strip excess content with Readability
• Word Count (hold down Option to view temporarily)
• Full-screen mode

As a fork of Notional Velocity, nvALT is a keyboard-focused text editor that’s being improved to deliver rich features that writers such as myself rely on to get things done, take notes, and quickly exit ideas from my brain box. If you’re already familiar with Notational Velocity, it works with Simplenote on your favorite iOS device, and it can be extended thanks to the great nvALT project Brett and other volunteers are working on. It doesn’t replace Notational Velocity, but runs alongside it with it’s own set of preferences and additional features.

[via Brett Terpstra]

Over the past few weeks I’ve been testing a new version of Simplenote, which just went live in the App Store. The new Simplenote, which reaches version 3.1, is a huge update that adds many requested features and a great surprise from the developers: the app now comes with native Dropbox support, configurable in the Settings. Simplenote can now sync text files back to a “Simplenote” folder in your Dropbox account (you can rename it), and syncing sessions happen every several minutes, but can be triggered manually. Dropbox integration is a feature exclusive to the Premium subscription, which can be purchased for $12 a year. In my tests, Dropbox syncing has been very reliable and now allows me to natively integrate Simplenote with a plethora of other iOS and Mac word processors that support Dropbox. (more…)

Nottingham is a note taking application for the Mac we first reviewed more than a year ago, and lots of things have changed since then. The application went under a private beta testing stage, and Nottingham 2.0 is now finally available as a public beta. Nottingham, for those who missed it, is a desktop app that plugs into the popular service Simplenote (which we love here at MacStories) to retrieve notes stored online and continuously backed up through the cloud.

Version 2.0 of the app, released a few minutes ago, adds a completely redesigned user interface that’s heavily inspired by the iOS Notes app with yellow notebook-like background and the possibility to switch between landscape and portrait mode. The notepaper design can be disabled in the Preferences and you can switch to the Notational Velocity-like vertical layout using a button in the top toolbar. Not very intuitive at first, as it looks like a “sharing” button. The app can sync with Simplenote and pick any folder to read notes from — put the folder in your Dropbox and you have cross-platform syncing with Simplenote and Dropbox at the same time. Similarly to Notational Velocity, the app can read multiple file types and be assigned a keyboard shortcut. The app is entirely keyboard-friendly and the developers promise more features will be added in the final release.

You can download Nottingham 2.0 public beta for free here.

Previously known as MobileDL and now available at $8.99 in the Mac App Store, NoteTote is an interesting solution to trigger downloads remotely on your Mac using the iPhone, iPad or any other device that has access to Simplenote. For as simple as it sounds, all you have to do to start a download on your Mac is paste a URL into a specific note. NoteTote, in fact, upon logging into the service with your credentials will create a “special” NoteTote_Downloads note that will always stay there, monitored by the app running on your Mac’s menubar. While you’re away from your Mac and you want to start a download remotely, open the Simplenote app, paste the link and that’s it. On a regular interval (which can be adjusted in the Preferences) NoteTote will look for URLs inserted in the special note and try to download them. All of this while you don’t have access to your Mac. (more…)