Simplenote and Notational Velocity

Were we twins, separated at birth? Your article reflects all my feelings about notes.

I’ve been through OneNote (when I was forced to be on Windows), Journler, MacJournal, Personal Brain, Circus Ponies Notebook, Curio, Evernote, and even Tinderbox. Loved them all for about two years apiece. (Actually, Circus Ponies Notebook and Curio lasted only as long as a second crash that lost data. Totally unacceptable, much as I loved their graphical and calendar features.)

But with iPhone and iPad, I wanted something more, and took me a while to realize what I really need:

• Fast searchability
• Lots of drag-n-drop support (Web pages, graphics, e-mail)
• Wikiness—i.e., note-note linking
• Multi-platform—Mac, iPhone, iPad

Right now, I am delighted with VoodooPad. Have been on it since October. iPad version just came out; while formatting is limited by iOS, it pretty much does the trick. It syncs faithfully by way of .Mac or a WebDAV (including DropBox, it seems).

VoodooPad automatically recognizes Address Book entries and links them.

I still use Evernote for screen caps, maybe out of habit. And of course Evernote is also Windows- and Web-accessible, while VoodooPad is not.

Gus Mueller of VoodooPad is wonderfully accessible to his customers; that’s a plus, too.

I too would love to hear from other note freaks.

—Joel Orr

• • •

Another way to use Notational Velocity is by telling it to store notes as plain text files in a Dropbox folder and using a Dropbox-aware text editor on other platforms. (I use PlainText on iOS and Epistle on Android.) That way you’ll have backups of your notes everywhere you have a computer linked to Dropbox.

However, given Dropbox runs on Amazon and Simplenote on Google’s infrastructures, I think you’ll be in pretty good shape either way.

—Nicholas Riley

• • •

Like Nicholas I use PlainText (on the iPad it looks great and works really well). The sync via Dropbox is great, and I use TextEdit (obviously in plain text format and saving to the same folder on Dropbox) on the Mac.

I’d be very happy if PlainText was available on the Mac!

—Graham Hind

OmniFocus, TaskPaper, and Things

Great article. I’ve used all three and prefer TaskPaper over the other two. As stated, the strengths of OmniFocus and Things are also their weakness. It just takes too long to get information in/out of them. TaskPaper is flexible and fast!

In addition, TaskPaper now has both iPhone and iPad apps with full synchronization between the three using SimpleText. I believe that SimpleText will be replaced with DropBox for syncing in a future release.

—Chip

Legacy Outliners

Once, a very long time ago, I used Arrange/WebArranger and liked it very much. I would like to have that functionality very much now, but I haven’t found it yet. CE Software has vanished, and so probably the code of WebArranger. Any ideas where, or who that maybe took over? Or who bought it or something?

I sent e-mail to CE Software some years ago and googled for it now and then…but to no avail.

—Leif Nilsson

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