[Editor’s note: This article contains profanity. It’s not the kind of thing we allow on SA, and we won’t make it a habit. It just didn’t feel right without it, so I’m letting it fly. So if you’re sensitive to reading harsh language, I highly recommend you skip this otherwise awesome article.]
In this first installment of Brandon’s “How to Not Suck” series, I’m going to outline what I think it takes to be a great notes app for iPhone and the web. I don’t intend this to be a review, but more of a treatise on good design. If you just wanna know which iPhone notes app to buy, it’s Notespark. I’ll go over why I think it’s the best out there, and what’s wrong with most of the other apps on the market. That’s not to say Notespark is without flaws, cause it’s not, but it’s the best you’re gonna get right now.
Let’s take it from the top
So what does a notes app need to look like when you fire it up? It needs to be clean. Clutter is the enemy more than anything else for notes app. Ornate UIs are like cinder blocks on a front lawn. They get in the way, and lower property value. UI offenders include oversized buttons, unnecessarily large menu bars, and grid-based menus. If you use a grid based menu instead of a list, I don’t want you at my party. Like Australians in Japan, I consider you a virus and want you the fuck out of my sight. Guided Ways’ app 2Do is another good example. Their UI is pretty, and has cool drag and drop functionality, but in general it’s too much of a pain to deal with.
Notespark
There needs to be a list that has an archive of notes, a list of starred notes, list of shared notes, and a trash can. That last one is important. If you don’t have a trash can or recycle bin, you fail. Notespark has a trash can that you empty out manually, and is a godsend when you’ve accidentally deleted some text you need. Lastly, for God’s sake, take advantage of the iPhone’s search functionality. You should not have a seperate search menu in your app. While Simplenote and Writeroom have taken advantage of that, Notespark is still using its search from pre-3.0 days. It’s kinda nice cause it highlights text in the preview, but it doesn’t highlight text in the full note view, so why is it still there? It’s clutter, and if we’ve learned nothing from Leo Babauta, it’s that minimalism is everything. And that douchebag life hackers love associating themselves with Zen Buddhism.
Sometimes beautifying an app is a great idea. Tapbots made a name for themselves by building beautiful apps. Twitteriffic, by Iconfactory, is still the most visually interesting Twitter app out there. But Tweetie from atebits is still the best and most useful Twiter app because it’s simple and clutter free. Tapbots, on the other hand, require a ridiculous amount of tapping just to convert pounds to kilos in Convertbot for the sake of preserving their robot asethetic. I’d be afraid of what their notes app would look like if they made one. I’m sure it would be called Notebot, and it’d be ultra-slick, and I’d wanna put a wig on it and have romantic lady robot time with it, but ultimately the hole wouldn’t be where I’d expect it to be, and I’d get frustrated trying to pencil in something, leaving my pencil soft and unable to complete the task at hand. So no, I don’t want one of the iPhone design elite making notes apps. Go make another Twitter app.
I just want to write
Now, on to my stickiest of areas. The note composition screen and surrounding buttons. I used to love Notespark’s composition UI. Every single action you could perform on a note had a seperate button. There was a star button, a tags button, and a share button. When they added a “View Links” button to the top, they switched from having a Mail.app-style set of two up and down arrows to left and right arrows on opposite sides of the bottom menu. What was once perfection is now a mix of poor arrow placement and needless tapping through menus. I held off on updating for a while, but I loved the push notifications Notespark sends out when a shared note is updated. Even the badge updates when you star and unstar your own notes in the web app.
But what about the window I’m writing in? The iPhone’s screen space is limited, so please don’t take any of it away when I’m writing. My beloved Notespark adds a thin, but needless bar at the top, editing notes in Pastebot is a pain cause there’s an even bigger bar, and trying to write anything in that fucking Squarespace app is impossible cause they leave you with as much space as a fat guy next to you in Economy-class does. The best pure writing environment I’ve come across is Writeroom. No extra bars anywhere; just open space to jot down text. That same simplicity extends to the web app of Writeroom as well. Another awesome thing about Writeroom, and even Simplenote, is the TextExpander integration. Why every app out there, including Notespark, doesn’t have it ready to go is beyond me.
So what can I do with my notes?
You need to be able to organize these things. Creating one huge list and relying on search alone is a terrible solution. Sometimes, I just wanna see all my notes in a particular area. So folders would be a good solution, right? They’re okay, but tags are a far better solution. In a way, they act like folders, but you can assign multiple tags, and associate numerous topics with your notes. But I also think it’s invaluable to have starring in a notes app. I use stars in Notespark as part of my GTD workflow. Instead of leaving crap in my inbox, I send it over to Notespark as a next action. If you have no starring, and no folder/tag system, trying to find important notes can be next to impossible.
Getting your notes out to people who need to see them is important too. Fundamentally, every notes app must have the ability to email notes. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why Simplenote didn’t have in-app email until a couple weeks ago. Forcing me to leave your app to email something is inexcusable at this point. Any developer not integrating email into their app doesn’t deserve your money when there are other developers out there who care enough about making their products better.
The Desktop Connection
Where this all ties together is on the web. Aside from having your data backed up in the cloud, the the biggest benefit to syncing your notes to the web is accessing them on your computer as well. All these apps have web versions of varying quality. I’ll go ahead and say right now that I don’t like Notespark on the web. It’s slow and clunky, you’ll click on stuff and you can’t tell sometimes if the click took or if God’s just laughing at you. Simplenote’s web interface is good, fast with good search, but since it lacks most of the features Notespark has, so who cares? Once again, the most pleasant web app to write in is Writeroom’s. It creates an OS 9-like menu bar at the top, and gives you a bunch of space to type away in. You can even connect to the iPhone app directly over wifi so your notes don’t even need to sync. It’s a great writing interface, but once again, its note management sucks, so why use it?
Then there’s Evernote. It’s literally the elephant in the room. I wish somebody would just poach the motherfucker and be done with it. Evernote is a great idea. But the execution sucks. In their attempt to do everything on every platform, the fail to do anything exceptionally well. I’ll give you that the text recognition is great, but the desktop app and iPhone app are junk. I hate having thumbnails for text. The menu, no matter which way you tilt your iPhone is hard to read and cluttered up by the thumbnails. I’ll thank you very much to keep photos away from my text. The two should be kept seperate, and I only use Evernote as a dump for photos and PDF files. Get one of those design wunderkinds to redo Evernote’s apps and we’ll talk.
Lastly, the cost of this stuff is all over the place. Notespark is a steal at $5, Evernote’s free unless you want power user stuff, which will run you $45 a year, and Simplenote is $2 for the app, but if you want their premium features, that’s $10 a year. I don’t mind services charging people a fair price, but Christ, Simplenote wants to charge you extra for an email address that you can mail notes into. Notespark does that for free. You can even mail note+star@notespark.com and it’ll star the damn thing (which was my idea BT dubs). And Evernote lets you email photos and PDFs into its system for free. Simplenote’s doing text only, and you can’t even share the notes!
Best of the average
I’m pretty sure the only reason anyone gave Simplenote all the attention it undeservingly got was because of John Gruber. That goober told everyone how much he loved Simplenote (he admited he hadn’t heard of Notespark) and the Apple fanboy masses took his word as gospel. And it broke my heart to see my very own Smoking Apples publish a notes app round-up declaring Simplenote the winner. [Snipped]. I still can’t read anything by that guy.
You might think I’ve gone overboard in my disdain for notes app thus far. And I still haven’t found the perfect one. Even with the flaws I’ve listed above, I still believe Notespark is the best. I believe in the vision of Notespark. I just wish they’d update the fucking thing more often. I’d drop money for a yearly subscription. I don’t want a great app to get stale.
