App review: Simplenote

review by Christine Chan and Eric Nguyen

Christine Chan’s take:



Apple has a great interface for their Notes app, but there is one major shortcoming: syncing. If you want to get those notes on your desktop, you have to sync via the USB cable with iTunes, and then those notes are viewed in the Mail app (at least on Macs). Now there’s a note taking app that is the perfect replacement for Apple’s own, that combines simplicity and minimalism with an added bonus – wireless syncing.

Simplenote’s interface is the extreme minimum, which provides a clean and simple interface for you to work with. Just like the default Notes app, there are no folders for organization, all your notes are just in a list based on when they were created/modified. There are no titles for notes, just like Apple’s Notes, so the header that you see in the list of notes is simply the first line of the note. No formatting options, no fancy backgrounds, just simple black text on a simple white background. Minimalism is all you need if you are just looking to write a quick snippet of info in a hurry.

Syncing within the app itself is done after you make changes to a note and return to the main screen (list of notes). You will then see a spinner at the top which is letting you know that it is saving all changes you have made. Every time you go back to the main screen, the spinner will appear to make sure that any changes will be saved. Better safe than sorry, right?

The wireless syncing is done through a webapp, but even the webapp keeps the simplicity and minimalism of the app itself. Simply create a login, and then when you view your notes, you’ll see a search bar at the top, a list of your notes below, and then a space to view selected notes below that. The list can only display seven notes at a time, but there is a link that will take you to your older notes. Within the webapp, saving of any changes to notes is done instantaneously (you’ll see right below a note if it’s ‘Saving…’ or ‘Saved’) whenever you add or delete text.

Both the iPhone app and webapp have the nice little search bar. This will quickly go through all your notes and pull up any notes that have the search terms you enter into the bar. Very nifty to pull up small tidbits of information that can easily be drowned in a larger collection of snippets and notes. The search pulls up notes as you type out search terms, so there’s no need to have to type in one thing and then hit ‘search’ or anything like that. Even the search is minimal and quick, just like the rest of the app.

There are no 3.0 features such as data linkage (phone numbers, emails, URLs), but the developer has also told me that this will be in the next update (after the bug-fixing one) so don’t worry, they are already working on it.

Despite this flaw, the app is still much better over the default Notes app since there’s cable-free syncing. The future updates will only improve an already great app.

Eric Nguyen’s take:

By my count, there are at least twenty note-taking applications in the iTunes App Store right now. It’s really ridiculous how many different ways there are to do such a simple thing. Depending on what you’re looking for, Simplenote may be the answer to your note-taking problems. To get the obvious question out of the way: yes, it’s probably the simplest note-taking app out there. There’s only one font (Helvetica), no picture/video notes, no folders, and no voice notes. But when it comes to text-only notes Simplenote is probably the most polished app out there.

Since each Simplenote note is just text, it’s really easy to search for the note you want: just type the word you’re looking for into the search bar on the app’s home page. The home page also displays the first two lines of each note. The first line of each note is bolded, which makes it pretty easy to navigate a large list of notes. The notes list is sorted by date, meaning that the most recently modified notes are at the top of the list. Between all of these features, it’s really easy to find the note you’re looking for.

A couple other useful features include the landscape mode keyboard, and note emailing. However, the blockbuster feature of Simplenote is note syncing. By purchasing the Simplenote app (currently $1.99), you gain access to Simplenote’s web app. Any time you make a change to a note in the app, that change will be automatically be uploaded to the web app, where you can retrieve it on any computer with a web browser. It also works in the reverse direction —any change in the web app will be automatically synced to the iPhone app. The web app is nearly identical to the iPhone app, so it’s like using the same program.



This is really useful — say you’re on a computer at work and want to save a link to look at later. You can simply go to the web app, save the link in a new note, and look at it on your iPhone at your leisure. The best part is, access to the web app is entirely free after buying the app. That’s a pretty great deal, considering that the app developers are continually taking care of storing and syncing your notes. 


The only concern with this arrangement is that your notes are in the hands of the Simplenote developers. To most people this won’t matter (nobody would really care about my grocery shopping list, I hope) but this might be of concern to some users. The syncing process is encrypted, however, so the only other party that might possibly see your notes is the developers.

By now it’s probably obvious that Simplenote was designed to do text notes, and only text notes, extremely well. It could benefit from a few more features, but only if the basic act of writing and syncing notes wasn’t compromised. For example, it would be useful to have a couple more text styles (bold/italic) to make things stand out more in a note — right now, a long note begins to turn into a wall of text. Likewise, it would be nice to have some sort of picture support — that way, you could take a picture on your iPhone camera and append it to a note. However, this would have to be done in a way that would keep the simplicity of the app intact. Because of this lack of features, though, Simplenote is likely the best text-only note editor in the App Store.

Simplenote is available in the App Store.