The JAiB Brain Trust met last Tuesday at the offices of Googlius Male to discuss the recent rise of note-taking applications on the iPhone platform. Unfortunately, no consensus was reached, as each team member insisted on naming a different note-taking application as their favourite.

In an effort to appear as though are still deserving of their lofty positions, the members decided to throw all of the names of their favourite note apps into a list and publish them on site. The group has decided to reconvene next Tuesday to discuss another important topic relating to iPhoneology, but until then, maybe you’ll want to read this.

Thomas suggests: Simplenote
Of course you knew I’d be talking about this one – I’ve done so before, so I’ll be quick about it. Simplenote is a free notes app that keeps in constant sync with a web app at www.simplenoteapp.com. There are a few native Mac clients available in the Extras section of the website, but nothing for Windows at the moment.

I like Simplenote for its minimal interface. It doesn’t take all that much to create a working notes app, but after using Simplenote for a while, other apps start to feel a little crowded. There’s something elegant about having just a New, Delete, Mail, and Done button, and then never having to worry about syncing or saving.

Diego adds:
…you could [add] that there’s a widget for osx dashboard called
Dashnote, it’s awesome and good looking. It replaced Notational Velocity on my mac.
The widget is here.

Patrick suggests: Notes Pro and Evernote
I’ll offer two, both of which I use daily: Evernote and Notes Pro.  Evernote because it is my ‘throw everything into it’ storage bucket that follows me across web, desktop and iPhone.  (just as an aside, it’s really everything non-confidential that I throw into it)  Notes Pro offers much (MUCH) nicer text input and editing than Evernote, and it exports to Google Docs, which I find quite useful, although they’ve been promising (and not delivering) proper two-way sync for ages.

I’d love to see either of these two things happen so I’d just need one of these:
Evernote finally makes a ‘not horrible’ interface for its text input on the iPhone.
Notes Pro adds a  ‘Send to Evernote’ type feature.

Josh suggests (in a mini review sort of way): Notemaster – not to be confused with Note Master
I use NoteMaster for my note-taking app. It has an excellent interface, easy to quickly add new notes, including section headings and pictures from the camera roll or camera. The reason I use it over any other note app is the excellent bi-directional syncing with Google Docs. You set it up to sync all your notes to a particular Docs category. The interface is very simple, but very powerful at the same time.

You can choose fonts and/or backgrounds for individual notes or just use the defaults. You can add multiple images effortlessly inline with with text, as add section headers, which all sync perfectly to Google Docs. If you change or delete a note in Docs, it will reflect in NoteMaster the next time it syncs.

Why do I like it so much? Because when I’m out and about, I want to take quick, easy notes, add a snapshot of whatever i’m noting, and have it immediately in the cloud. Not only for backup purposes, but so that I can access the note from wherever I am. Since I’m already a heavy user of Google Docs, it only makes sense to sync my notes up to it. Then, I can just drag and drop the text and images from the notes into whatever document I am using them in. For a $4 app, it’s priceless!

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