Since the app store opened, one of the things that i’ve been continually swapping in and out is my preferred note taking app. I’ve used a good half dozen, but they’ve failed in some way or the other. The stock Notes app is woefully under-featured, and syncing in a meaningful way is tough. Then I moved to SimpleNote, which was great, except I want to sync to Dropbox without paying a yearly fee. So in comes Plaintext, which syncs nicely but is also very light on features. Rounding them out was Elements, which I found too buggy to rely on. Often setting the title or renaming a note would cause an error. So, finally, I’ve moved it all to Notesy.
Before we decide that I’m entirely neurotic, I have relatively modest requirements for a note-taking app:
The Notesy icon is one of my favorites on my home screen. It’s not blue, and it has a classy sort of simplicity to it. Once you launch the app, you’re presented with what is really an unimaginative notes list interface, which isn’t to say that it’s bad. I don’t necessarily want a lot of frills for something this basic. I do find it a little obnoxious on the iPad in landscape mode. It begs for the dual-pane style of Mail, for example. It looks a little awkward otherwise.
The note list interface, as well as the actual writing interface, are customizable to a certain degree. There are different fonts to choose from and finding a good one isn’t too tough, but I can’t find a background that I like. The default “paper texture” is probably the one that I like the best, but don’t quite like it.
Where I would really like a bit more gloss would be in the markdown preview. I would really like to be able to change the font in the preview.
The app works beautifully. So far, its been entirely bug free and stable for me. No crashes, no errors. I’ve written a few of the articles for this site entirely in Notesy, and it’s been a pretty solid experience. Sync is super fast, search works well, and everything is snappy.
A couple of features that I really like:
I heavily use markdown these days, and especially for just these functions. With a bluetooth keyboard, it’s very nearly easier to post from Notesy on my iPad than on the actual desktop. If I do need any sort of formatting in an email, it’s much quicker to type it out in Notesy than it is to tap a thousand times to get the formatting in Mail.app. It would be great if Notesy supported the somewhat unofficial footnote syntax for Markdown, but it’s understandable that it doesn’t.
I also really like the ability to have subfolders for notes, and have those folders at the top. Very helpful for organizing notes, and while I’ve been on OS X for the last 4 years, I’ve still never gotten used to have the folders interspersed throughout regular files. Also being able to choose the sort (I use reverse modified - recent notes to the top) makes the app much more usable than those with less customizable interfaces.
So it’s Notesy for now. I would really, really like to see an nvALT fork for iOS, but I’m not holding my breath. At the moment though, Notesy seems to be the cream of the iOS note-taking crop.
