“I want to put a ding in the universe.”
“We will be as big as the Beatles, if not bigger.”
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
What do these three sentences have in common? First off, they’re all quotes – hit your favorite search engine to find out where they come from. But as far as the iPhone tech-savvy user is concerned, these quotes can be neatly organized in Quotebook, an iPhone app I’ve recently stumbled upon thanks to a friend’s recommendation.
Quotebook is a very simple and straightforward, albeit the goal it aspires to accomplish is perhaps greater than the average iPhone app’s underlying concept. Quotebook is a lovely and safe place for your quotes, regardless of their relationship with life, design, sports, achievements, love, or whatever you feel inspired by to save in a digital notebook. Personally, I’m that kind of tag junkie that keeps quotes and other digital memorabilia stored in his Evernote account – I can see, however, Quotebook’s appeal to someone who prefers to keep inspirational quotes in a separate place other than the default archiving system, be it Evernote or other solutions like Yojimbo.
Quotebook’s greatest strength is that it’s built for quotes, and nothing else. It doesn’t want or need to be a replacement for your notes and daily thoughts. The interface has been designed to make it easy to jot down a quote, and set correct attribution like author and source, or perhaps fiddle with ratings. The app goes one step further and makes it super-simple to import quotes found in your iPhone’s clipboard, and plays nicely with @author names, automatically opening a Twitter profile within a web view. That’s very nice of the developers – this got me started on saving some tweets I find inspiring. Quotes can be searched and filtered, shared on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, or browsed by author and tag using the buttons in the bottom toolbar. Pretty standard stuff for an iPhone app.
Quotebook, though, had me at the auto-suggest feature, which looks up on the Internet for incomplete quotes or attribution details. The app will give you its best recommendation for an incomplete quote you’ve inserted, guessing the author as well if an entry is found.
I like Quotebook. It’s simple. The latest version comes with a handy option to export and import notes (plain text is fully supported), and you can even find out more about an author or source using Wikipedia and Wikiquote. If you have an iPhone and you want to keep your quotes organized in a dedicated place, I strongly recommend Quotebook.
