‎Simplenote on the Mac App Store

In general, I love this app, it helps me keep my personal notes on the Notes app and my class notes on this app. However, I wish it was harder to delete the notes, OR that you could retrieve the notes you deleted. I recently didn’t realize I had selected an entire note and I pressed the backspace button and to my surprise, my entire note dissapeared. There is a trashcan button and a ‘move to trash’ option, so I didn’t realize I could delete notes this way as well. Then, because there is an option to ‘move to trash’ and an option to ‘empty the trash', I had some hope that maybe it worked like email, and I could move my note back out of the trash. The wording indicates that the trash is being saved, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to access it. If there is some way to do this, my review would go up to 5 stars.

People typically need just two (maybe three) note taking apps. They need one for more complex notes… with lots of format options, maybe even adding attachments, images, etc. For that you have things like OneNote or Evernote. [ I use these tools for taking notes about work projects ]

Then you need a “simple note taking” app for keeping more basic notes, where you don’t need tons of formatting options, or anything complex. You want these notes on all your devices, regarless of OS. Here is where Simplenote shines. [ As a developer, I use simplenote for things like “common linux commands” “git notes”, etc. For personal stuff, I keep things like notes on names of new people I meet at chuch, car maintenance (when oil was changed, tires rotated, etc.) - stuff I want around for a while. ]

The third one, is possibly a ‘quick note’ taking app for shorter things you want to remember but possibly won’t need for a long time ( eg lot me jot down a quick packing list, some upcoming birthday gift ideas, your new locker combination, etc.) [ Simplenote works peferct for this as well, it’s just I like to have different main apps based on complexity. I use google keep for the ‘quick throw-out notes’ and simplenote for the longer, yet not overly complex, notes. ]

Simplenote is a nice, basic markdown-equipped notes app with solid sync, a good clean look and feel, and unlike some others (Bear, Notes) is cross platform. This means you can collaborate on Simplenote documents with people on any platform, not just Mac or iOS. You can think of it as a much lighter weight and more streamlined alternative to bloated Google Docs.

But also, Simplenote’s got a killer trick none of the others have: the ability to very quickly publish any note with a public URL. This makes it lightning fast and easy to publish a note that’s easy to share with anyone who can get to a web browser.

Bonus power move if you use Pocket: create a note in Simplenote, publish it, and add the URL to Pocket. I’ve used this to quickly save text from a PDF or any document that’s not readable by Pocket.