What I want is simple. I want to be able to take notes on any of my devices, and then have them instantly accessible on any other of my devices instantly, and without me having to do anything. Impossible you say? Not so. I have just entered Note Taking Nirvana, and best of all, the price was free! Well, for the software anyway. This is my setup.
On my Macs I use Notational Velocity. It has fantastic keyboard shortcuts, and super simple, fast searching. I can find the note I am looking for usually with a few keystrokes. This little desktop gem syncs with the Simplenote service, ensuring that my notes propagate across all my Notational Velocity enabled computers. That would be my iMac at home, my main Macbook Pro, and even my old Macbook Pro that my wife mainly uses.
Of course, what matters here is ubiquitous capture, I need to capture the note, thought, or idea wherever I am with whatever I have. For that I have the newly updated Simplenote app [iTunes link!]. It is a free Universal Binary for my iPhone and iPad. Just in time for me to start taking notes in class, they even updated these excellent little apps with the one feature that I wanted most, full screen entry. Yes! So yesterday, when I wanted to remember a license plate number, I just punched it into my phone. When I was sitting in class, I typed all my notes into my iPad comfortably in fullscreen. It is much much lighter than lugging a computer around campus. When I got home from work and sat down in front of my computer all my class notes, as well as the license plate number of the car and an idea I jotted down on the bus, were available at the tips of my fingers. No manual syncing needed. I can go about my day in full confidence that the things I write down will be available to me anywhere. My wife’s preferred order at Firehouse subs that I took down months ago? If I need it, I can just pull it up on my phone.
In short, I am in true note taking nirvana. All my note taking is now focused on the notes themselves, I don’t have to worry about availability or formatting. Do you want to know perhaps the best part about all this note taking? Not a Marker Felt typefaced word in sight. Now that is saying something.
Long title, I know. It is something that I have always wanted to be able to do, however. Now, my dream, despite Apple’s efforts, are a reality. You need Camera+ and an iPhone 4. In Safari navigate to
camplus://enablevolumesnap
and, presto, you can now snap pictures using that super handy volume button, enabling much steadier and better shots, at least for me. Camera+ runs $1.99
Update: Camera+ has been pulled from the App Store. It was only a matter of time. Although the excuse that Apple gives that it might cause ‘user confusion’ is a little weak, when you consider that it was something that you had to go in and manually turn on.
