Hasta La Gadget!

Until today, my iPod Touch (and your iPhone) has lacked a proper notes application. There are approximately one gazillion note-taking apps in the iTunes Store, but none of them has yet managed to make it easy and simple to create, search and – most importantly – sync notes with your computer. With a new update, and some rather well chosen partners, Simplenote has just fixed all that.

Simplenote as an iPhone app has been around for a while. It launches fast, and ignores fancy organizational features and other cruft in favor of simplicity. You click the plus-sign to make a new note and you type in the search bar to whittle down the list, one letter at a time, just like live-searching in iTunes. It would even sync to a web page so you could access, search and make notes from any browser.

The problem was this web app. I use Simplenote on my iPod Touch, but I have given up on the sync. The login is flakey, and browsers never get triggered to save your username or password, something that every other web login does. Worse, there is no way to scroll the list to see all the notes — you have to use arrow buttons to page through your notes a few at a time. Finally, resizing the window (so you could have a small note-window open at all times) doesn’t resize the actual list so you end up cutting the sides of it off.

These problems are still there. But a new version of Simplenote, just released, adds a few features that paradoxically make it easier to use, and also plays nice with not one but two real desktop notes applications. This last is what now makes it the killer note-taking app for the iPhone.

The new in-app features are nice. There is iPhone 3.0-style in-app emailing, support for links, email addresses and phone numbers (tap to navigate, mail or call, respectively), an option to chose how the list of notes is sorted, and auto-sync upon close. Those using the iPhone version of Textexpander will be happy to see their typed abbreviations expanded into full snippets.

But while these are welcome improvements, the syncing to desktop is the big deal. The semi-official partner application (Mac-only) is called JustNotes, and does exactly the same as Simplenote. Create, search and sync. You have keyboard shortcuts to create and navigate and the pretty HUD-style window pops up when you need it and then gets out of the way. A search bar will narrow the entries, just like Simplenote, and syncing, although not automatic, is done with a single click or keystroke.

Simplenote also has an option for a premium subscription at $10 (the app itself runs at $2), which buys a year’s worth of RSS feeds and the ability to mail notes into Simplenote from anywhere. JustNotes, the companion application, is free. And in bonus news, fans of the ultra-simple note-taking application for the Mac, Notational Velocity, will be able to use it in sync with Simplenote in a futuer (and not-too-far-off) update.

If you are a heavy note taker on the iPhone, you should check this out. And if anyone has found other applications that work with Simplenote, especially for Windows, let us know in the coments

Product page [Simplenote]

Simplenote for iPhone [iTunes]

JustNotes [Selfcoded]