Synotes: Beautiful Notes App for iPhone

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.

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It Could Be a Mac App: Zootool, the iTunes for the Web.

I daily look for new Mac and iPhone applications I can write about and promote on MacStories. I’m subscribed to hundreds of blogs, post on many forums, browse Emberapp and read tweets so that I can keep up with the newest releases in the development scene. But sometimes, and this seems to happen very often recently, it’s not a Mac or iPhone app I want to write about, but it’s a web application.

Web applications are great. And useful. And powerful. Sometimes they’re not as polished as native Cocoa software, sometimes they’re not even fast and stable. On the other hand, sometimes they’re amazingly feature rich, gorgeous and blazing fast apps. “This could be a Mac app”, I say when I stumble upon a webapp like that. And that’s why I decided to start this new series on MacStories.

“It could be a Mac app” will feature beautiful web applications that yeah -  they are as powerful, sexy and yet simple as a Mac app should always be. You can either run it in your browser or make it a Fluid app, it doesn’t matter. The first app I’d like to talk about is Zootool, a young startup from Germany, which in my opinion will revolutionize the way we collect data and information on the web.

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Showcase Your iPhone First Page: #sharethe1st [Jan 14th]

I am always curious about how people effectively manage their Macs or iPhones. As a matter of fact, I’m always looking for suggestions, idea..inspiration. To satisfy my curiosity, I made a quick poll on Twitter and I asked my followers to send me their first page of their iPhone springboard, including the #sharethe1st hashtag.

So, feel free to @reply me on Twitter with a screenshot of your 1st Springboard page. Please also include the #sharethe1st hashtag. The pics you send me will make it into a post, together with a link to your Twitter profile and website. Even you’ve already sent me a screenshot but you made some changes, you can send me the new one.

Enjoy!

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A Day’s Sales For Haiti

Link & Link

“In the spirit of OneFingerDiscount and MacSanta, I’d like to aggregate all of the participating companies onto a single site that customers can go to, see the products being offered and make their purchasing decision. You would handle the sales of your product on your store and at the end of the day donate the sales to your charity of choice.”

Now you understand why the Mac community is so great. Looking forward to January 20th.

LittleSnapper: Putting Finder to Shame Since 2008

I knew this was going to happen. The day my “Images” folder would become too big to manage in the Finder and I should switch to a 3rd party software to collect and organize all the images I have on my Mac. I’m that kind of guy that saves very cool and interesting image he finds during the day: it could be a screenshost of an app website, it could be some “fail pic” found on Twitter or even a screenshot of a bug somewhere on a web app. I save everything on my hard drive and organize the new stuff before going to sleep. Then, it came the day I realized I needed a more powerful and efficient tool to manage my Library (yeah, as time passed by it became a library of lots of GBs) as the Finder didn’t offer the features I wanted in order to effectively sort thousands of images and screenshots. I felt the need of tags, a more structured folder organization, I wanted to be able to quickly attach metadata to everything in a few easy steps, I wanted to divide all the files into “type”.

Turns out LittleSnapper was aimed at me.

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A Case for Mac OS Consistency

There’s something many Mac-heads love about Mac OS X, and that’s consistency. Consistency in the UI, consistency in the applications, consistency in how users can perform a large variety of actions in different applications - in the same way. Take a look at Smart Albums: you can create them in then same way in every app (including the Finder) that supports them. Regardless of the reason you want to create a smart collection on your desktop or in LittleSnapper, Mac OS X presents you the same menu.

But when I switched to Mac OS, I just didn’t notice this.

I didn’t even understand why I should actually create smart collections, when the good old normal folder structure was still working fine to me. And that’s the case of many users out there: they don’t get the importance of an operating system that can guide them through the process of having a consistent experience, no matter what they’re doing or would like to.

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