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).

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?

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.

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 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 :)

Dr Andus,

Care to post more details about the macros you created in CT?

Thanks,

Miles

Miles Taub wrote:

Dr Andus,

Care to post more details about the macros you created in
CT?

It's not in CT that I created the macros but in Nebulous Notes in iPad. The macros are keys in the top row of the Nebulous Notes' keyboard:
http://nebulousapps.net/screenshots/4.8/iPad/02macros.png

I simply added 3 new keys with [[, ]], and [[$CATEGORY:, so I can add notations that CT would recognise once the text file is imported from Dropbox. It's very easy to add macros in Nebulous and they are very handy.

Clever,

I bought Nebulous Notes and added my most used Categories as macros. Let's see...

Thanks for the ideas, Mark and the Dr.

Miles

Dr Andus wrote:

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.

Dr Andus, I'm glad you found in Nebulous notes the ideal solution.

Re ResophNotes and SimpleNotes I am quite surprised at your experience. I can definitely understand your reluctance to continue using that system.

I use the combination on an almost daily basis and so far have never had such an issue (or any kind of loss of data for that matter, the only exception being editing a note in AndroNote, the Android client, and not saving --my bad!). I can only think of one explanation: that you chose to have ResophNotes store its content in text files (rather than a database) and these were in a folder influenced by another application, e.g. Dropbox.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

can only think of one explanation: that you chose to have ResophNotes store
its content in text files (rather than a database) and these were in a folder
influenced by another application, e.g. Dropbox.

Alexander, interesting you mention that. Indeed, I have chosen the text files instead of the database, but the folder I selected is in my own user directory in My Documents. However, the strange thing is this: I just checked RN and it shows the database as selected. When I look in my folder though, I can see the exact same 15 topics in text files that are currently in RN!

Another strange thing that keeps happening is that sometimes when I close RN, I find another instance of the app running right under it, even though I only opened it once. So clearly something strange is happening on my system.

Dr Andus wrote:

sometimes when I close RN, I find another instance of the app running right under it,
even though I only opened it once.

I suspect that if you check the settings in that instance of RN, you'll find that it saves to text files and not to the database.

P.S. To be clear, I am not suggesting that the ResophNotes/Simplenotes combination is faultless, only that if it was generally as unreliable as you experienced it would not have stood a chance with previous users.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

I suspect that if you check the settings in that instance of RN, you?ll find that it saves to text files and not to the database.

I tried to check this theory and in the course of that I discovered that I had 9 instances of RN running at the same time! I don't remember if it was me or it's a standard setting, but "Minimize to System Tray" was set, and as I have a lot of things running, these 9 instances were hidden from my view. So every time I thought I closed the app and then re-opened it, I opened a new instance. When I started checking, some of them saved to text files, while the others saved to the database. Also, the different instances had different time periods for syncing with SN (1 min, 5 min etc.). This probably explains most of the odd behaviour.

P.S. To be clear, I am not suggesting that the ResophNotes/Simplenotes combination
is faultless, only that if it was generally as unreliable as you experienced it would
not have stood a chance with previous users.

Yes, I realise that, I respect greatly the people who had recommended it. I was just baffled by this behaviour. Thank you so much for helping me to solve it.

Clearly this was a local problem that I brought upon myself. However, it seems that there must be something in this set-up that's not entirely idiot-proof, as this has never happened to me before with any other software I use (i.e. 9 instances running with different settings without me even knowing that they are running).

Dr Andus wrote:

Clearly this was a local problem that I brought upon myself. However, it seems
that there must be something in this set-up that's not entirely idiot-proof, as this
has never happened to me before with any other software I use (i.e. 9 instances running
with different settings without me even knowing that they are running).

Definitely: it's a combination of Windows' "helpful" policy of hiding tray icons by default, with ResophNotes ability to minimise to the tray while also allowing multiple instances of the application to run (I can't even imagine why that should be possible when the program doesn't allow multiple databases like Cintanotes).

By contrast, TextPad has an option to "allow multiple instances to run" which by default is unchecked.

A review of four iPad text editors for writers/coders, including Nebulous. I haven't tried the others.

http://the.taoofmac.com/space/blog/2012/04/21/1848#ipad-text-editors--reviewed

Thanks for that Mark. Although I'm a self-confessed CRIMPer, I found this list of text editors on iOS truly frightening! :)

http://brettterpstra.com/ios-text-editors/