Simplenote - Notes and Memos at Mac App Store analyse

It’s a great App I used vor several years. It stores notes and let you focus on the text. Its quite fast and has working search options. When I came to more notes I used nvalt to backup my notes offline. And there’s the problem. I fould no way to sync my notes automatically for offline use. The main reason why I am using textfiles/markdown is to be independent from properitary software. With simplenote I cannot access my content without simplenote or an app which supports simplenote. All I want are simple text files. The combination of nvalt (for backup) and simplenote (for wirting) was not appropriate for my usecase. Thus I switched to Ulysses. It stores my Textfiles on Dropbox, iCloud, GoogleDrive, whatever and let me accass the files with a plain, simple Textedit if I need to. If you don’t care about accessibility this program is your choice. It’s one of the best, give it a try :-)

Important: notes are stored unencrypted in their servers. Really?? In 2016?? There is no valid excuse for this (they claim there is, but not really). The minor issues is the lack of support for rtf (fonts, tables,...) and small attachments (images, etc). So a nice and fast app but only 10% as useful as it could be and a very unsafe app to store things that matter.

Simplenote works cross-platform on every device I own. The bells & whistles are minimal: It will look the way I want it to, period. For me, this is the primary note-taking app. When I need to refresh my imperfect memory, this is where I go. When I know I wrote notes on a procedure but can’t retrieve them, this is the first, and almost always the last stop.

This should serve as a survey of users as well as a review of an excellent app. Can’t give it 5 stars for one simple reason: search on the Mac doesn’t work anywhere near as well as on an IOS device. This is why: On IOS, user enters a a search term and is presented with a listing of the text entries that include the search term. By clicking on a text entry, this marvelous app takes the user to the first instance of the search term and highlights it. Beautiful! Subsequent returns scroll to any additional finds in that entry. This is the way search of many entries should work. But on the Mac version, no such experience exists. Enter a search term and the user is presented with a list of entries, same as on IOS. But that’s it: click on and entry and user is left to scroll through it - looking for the search match. Sad, inadequate, and impossible, in long entries. Being a long-time user of SimpleNote, I’ve brought this to the developers on two occasions. I’m not sure why they find this so difficult, or why they don’t feel this is important. You decide. As a result of this parity omission, I simply don’t do searches on my Mac. I’m curious though - make your own review, and if you feel this omission is worth a look, include it in your review. Maybe the developer with pony up with a fix.

I have used both the iOS and Mac versions for a few years now. The app (Mac and OS X) are great, however they still stumble over each other syncing. For example, I made some changes to a note on my iPhone last night. Today, I launched SimpleNote on my Mac to add to the list, but instead, it overwrote whatever was in the cloud with what was cached locally on my computer. Therefore, the additions I made last night were overwritten wtih stale data from the last time I ran the app on the Mac. Sure, it’s simple enough to go to history and retrieve a previous copy, but I shouldn’t have to. It should be easy enough for the app, on launch, to determine if the version in the cloud is newer or older, and take action accordingly. Unfortunately, this happens A LOT. I’ve submitted bug reports, but the problem still hasn’t been solved. If this syncing issue was resolved, I’d easily give this app 5 stars.

This app and syncing across platforms is peerless. Fantastic app, used daily. Ten out of ten.

Simplenote for iOS and the Simplenote web version have very good note search. On those apps a search for “jack jill” will find “jack and jill”. That won’t work with the Mac version (this app). It only does what’s called “phrase” or “substring search”. It doesn’t do the kind of word search we’re used to in any modern application. It makes the app almost useless. I use nvAlt when I need to find things, or I use the web version. This bug is a frustrating limitation for people who use Simplenote the way it’s intended to be used — as a memory extender.