Your best ideas don’t nec­es­sar­ily come while sit­ting at your com­puter ready to type. They might come while play­ing sport, tak­ing a shower, lying in bed, or enjoy­ing din­ner at a restau­rant.  So you always need some­thing to write on to cap­ture the ideas before they float away.

For about twenty years I car­ried a lit­tle spi­ral notepad and pen just for this pur­pose. When iPods became pop­u­lar, I named my notepad my “iPad”. Then Apple stole my brand name! Although they were low-​​tech, my iPads were extremely effi­cient and functional.

In an inter­est­ing par­ody, you can now get a real notepad that looks like an iPad or iPhone! (Click on the image below for more information.)

How­ever, I’ve sold out to Apple and use an iPhone, so it makes sense to keep my notes on the iPhone.  But the native notepad app is not so use­ful because it doesn’t sync with my com­puter. I’d like to jot down some ideas and then have them avail­able on my PC with­out any re-​​typing. The native iPhone notepad app does sync with MS Out­look but who wants to use that when there is gmail?

I’ve tried about half-​​a-​​dozen note tak­ing apps with sync­ing capa­bil­i­ties and have deleted most of them for being too slow or because the sync­ing doesn’t work prop­erly. How­ever, there are two that I think are worth mentioning.

Ever­note is a feature-​​rich appli­ca­tion that allows notes, pic­tures, audio and web­pages to be saved, anno­tated and synced online. To access the infor­ma­tion on another device, you can go to the web­site, or install an appli­ca­tion on your com­puter. It works well and is very pop­u­lar, but the rich set of fea­tures mean that it is some­times a lit­tle slower than I would like. Also, if I use some rich text fea­tures such as bul­leted lists on my com­puter, the note on my iPhone can be read but not edited as the iPhone app doesn’t allow any­thing fancy. That can be annoy­ing. I don’t care about the rich text fea­tures, but I do need to be able to edit my notes on any device. Still, if you want all the fea­tures that Ever­note pro­vides, it is a nice tool.

Sim­plenote is what I am using. It has very few fea­tures — it doesn’t store pic­tures, audio files or bits of web­pages — and there are no appli­ca­tions to install on any com­puter. It is just a very sim­ple and fast note tak­ing app. It has tag­ging and search­ing facil­i­ties so it is easy to find the note you are after, and it allows notes to be emailed. All notes are synced with the sim­plenote web­site where you can see them on your own account. Another nice fea­ture is the abil­ity to roll back to pre­vi­ous ver­sions of a note. And there is a chrome exten­sion giv­ing you easy access to the notes within Chrome.

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