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ResophNotes and Simplenote
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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).
Posted by Dr Andus
Apr 20, 2012 at 12:52 AM
Basically I’m just looking for a very simple system where I can take notes on the go (on iPad and iPod) and have them synced automatically with my desktop, so I can recognise incremental notes and import them into ConnectedText. While there is a lot to like about Notebooks for iPad/iPod, notes are placed in a hierarchical folder system (its main selling point), the downside of which is that it’s not that easy to see on the desktop in Dropbox when new notes have been placed into folders within folders within folders… etc.
The only other option is to revert to my initial system, which now in combination with CT suddenly makes more sense. Namely, using iPad and iPod’s own Notes app, which lists notes in a chronological order, with the most recent one on the top. As it didn’t have either tags or folders, I moved to Notebooks for iPad, as I couldn’t see the forest from the trees. However, now I can see the beauty of that simplicity. As the iPod’s own Notes syncs automatically with Gmail’s Notes category, I can just import the new notes straight from there by using CT’s Clipboard Catcher. While there is still no alert of incremental new notes, at least the new notes sit in Gmail in reverse chronological order, so as long as I remember to check them periodically, I can see the new notes in one place. I can probably even add some category tags in ConnectedText’s own notations when taking notes in iPad/iPod.
Any other possibilities?
Posted by Dr Andus
Apr 20, 2012 at 01:45 AM
Actually the problem of recognising incremental new notes in Gmail is not such a big issue, as I can use Gmail’s labels to tag the ones that have been already imported, so the new ones would be more visible. So all I need to do is remember to check Gmail’s Notes folder periodically.
Posted by Gorski
Apr 20, 2012 at 01:56 AM
> Basically I?m just looking for a very simple system where I can take notes on the go (on iPad and iPod) and have them synced automatically with my desktop, so I can recognise incremental notes and import them into ConnectedText
How about just taking text notes in a single folder in Dropbox and importing those into ConnectedText?
There are a number of plain text editors for the iPhone/iPad that work with Dropbox. I use Nebulous Notes (http://nebulousapps.net/), which I can recommend. With Nebulous you can create macros to insert CT markup into your notes as well should you wish, though I don’t use that feature myself.
Since they’re text files, you can import them into CT easily, with the topic name based on the file name. And you can choose to append to an existing topic on import.
Posted by Dr Andus
Apr 20, 2012 at 02:38 AM
Mark wrote:
>> Basically I?m just looking for a very simple system where I can take notes on the go (on
>iPad and iPod) and have them synced automatically with my desktop, so I can recognise
>incremental notes and import them into ConnectedText
>
>How about just taking text
>notes in a single folder in Dropbox and importing those into ConnectedText?
>
>There
>are a number of plain text editors for the iPhone/iPad that work with Dropbox. I use
>Nebulous Notes (http://nebulousapps.net/), which I can recommend. With Nebulous
>you can create macros to insert CT markup into your notes as well should you wish,
>though I don’t use that feature myself.
>
>Since they’re text files, you can import
>them into CT easily, with the topic name based on the file name. And you can choose to
>append to an existing topic on import.
Mark, thank you for this great suggestion. Nebulous is fabulous! I immediately created macros for [[, ]] and [[$CATEGORY: Piece of cake! It could only get simpler than this if now Eduardo releases an iPad app for CT :)