I meant to blog about something geeky and exciting. After starting to re–organize my slew of notes in Simplenote1, I decided to write about this instead.
Let’s call this a very tiny weekly review. 😉
(No, come back! Phew. Thank you.)
Simplenote feels like the perfect fit, and it doesn’t hurt that the guys that started it are super rad. (Hi Mike and Fred!)
So, I love the speed and flexibility of plain text, as well as Markdown. I’m also really glad WordPress.com finally supports Markdown, too.
Here are a few ideas on how I use Simplenote:
- Agenda notes for coworkers, family, friends.
- Tasks (personal or shared).
- Blog post drafts.
- Inventory.
- Tracking data that doesn’t need to be displayed in pretty graphs.
- Health notes, so you can discuss issues to your doctor, dentist, or optometrist with a shred confidence.
- Restaurants. (A whitelist. These dishes are delectable! Or, a blacklist. That place was not good.)
- Business hours of places you frequent (e.g. stores, malls, mechanic).
- Late–night sparks of inspiration.
I also love how you can use other apps with Simplenote, like:
- nvALT for Mac, which I previously used.
- Listary for iOS, which Amy and I use to share a few todo lists.
Things is still my main task manager. When talking with my coworkers, in the flow of typing within Simplenote, I sometimes slip the word “TODO” inline with the note, which I can quickly find later and import to Things with more context.
Pro tip: Date everything. You never know if you’ll need it later, and you can always cull or delete later.
Brett Kelly raves about Drafts for iOS (which I finally bought last month and still use), and it feels like Simplenote opens and works just as fast.
If you’re curious about “embedding” images and files, I’d suggest uploading them to your favorite file sharing or hosting service — like Cloudup! — and paste the link into your note.
Is your brain percolating? Do you have any other ideas to get the most out of Simplenote? I’d love to hear them. 🙂
- The Simplenote Mac and iOS apps are gorgeous! ↩
After using Simplenote for years, I’ve recently started playing around with Google Keep, which is great for temporary notes and reminders, but not for keeping longer notes meant for long term access. Ultimately I think I’ll keep using Google Keep for short/temporary notes and reminders and Simplenote for longer notes, even though I don’t like having to use multiple services to accomplish similar tasks.
What would make Simplenote even more perfect, though, is if it offered 2-step verification for additional security.
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I agree about two–step verification. 🙂
Why can’t you use Simplenote for short/temporary notes?
How about a “Temp” prefix (or tag) for those types of notes, then clear them out periodically?
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I coudn’t resist posting additional thoughts on the two services: http://thoughts.nickhumphries.com/post/72342525063
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Right on, I dig. Glad you compare Simplenote to a Moleskine notebook! 🙂
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