ResophNotes and Simplenote

Posted by Dr Andus
Apr 20, 2012 at 12:35 AM

I heard so many people rave about ResophNotes in combination with Simplenote recently that I thought I’d give it a try. I’ve been looking for a replacement for my cross-platform mobile note-taking system, which consists of Notebooks for iPad and Notebooks for iPhone, synced with my PC via Dropbox. It sounded like RN+Simplenote would save me a step, as it would sync with a desktop app automatically, rather than having to open or copy and paste from Dropbox. Plus I think there are some Python scripts to get text straight into ConnectedText from RN, which is the ultimate aim.

Unfortunately RN+Simplenote turned out to be a huge disappointment. Within the first 10 minutes about 20 of my notes I had just entered into RN disappeared, leaving me with 6 notes. Also some of the tags I added to these 6 notes disappeared. When I checked the web, iPad and iPod apps, there were 9 notes sitting in those, regardless how many times I synced between RN and Simplenote. Eventually I found the lost notes sitting in the iPad’s Simplenote Trash. When I restored them all, I ended up with 40+ notes. Then I saw that there were several duplicates or even 3 or 4 versions of the same note. While I was contemplating what to do, 20 notes disappeared from both the iPad and the web service from in front of my eyes. When I synced back with RN, only 16 were brought back in. All of the recovered notes lost their tags. After my last sync, I have 15 in RN, 18 on the web and the devices, and loads moved back into Trash (that I don’t want to be in Trash). But the numbers of the notes are changing every few minutes on the various devices, without me doing anything.

So, it is a total mess and doesn’t look like a reliable system to me. In fact I used autosync on Notebooks for iPad as well, but after some strange behaviour I reverted to manual syncs. So either I’m doing something horribly wrong or the time of automatic syncs hasn’t arrived yet (for me at least).