Appigo’s Notebook is one of the first purchases I made on my iPhone 2G in 2008, and so it comes as a pleasant surprise that Notebook 2.0 has been released as a free update. The two major features of this update are a switch to the plain text (.txt) format for notes and very flexible Dropbox integration – both of which combine to make the notes you create on the iPhone or iPad versions of Notebook universally accessible. Of course, there are already a number of apps out there (Notesy, WriteRoom, Elements, etc.) that work beautifully with plain text files and sync with Dropbox, so what does Notebook really bring to the table?
[Warning: Notebook turns out to be one of those apps that likes to rename your files for you if they use any characters deemed invalid by Windows. So if you keep a lot of text files with the following characters, Notebook will automatically remove them from the file names: . / : ? * < > | ]
Notebook is probably the only Dropbox-friendly app I’ve seen that syncs properly with multiple non-nested folders, making it extra collaboration friendly. This is an important feature that’s very easy to overlook. Most apps, like WriteRoom, prefer that you choose a single Dropbox folder (e.g. Dropbox/Writer) to keep your notes in. WriteRoom does support sub-folders, but it can still only see notes and folders that are inside of /Writer. Notebook, on the other hand, will allow you to pick and choose exactly which folders you’d like to sync with, and adding a folder will also sync any relevant sub-folders and notes, as well. This means that I can choose to sync /Writer and all of its sub-folders, as well as /Shopping, which is a special Dropbox folder I share with my roommate for groceries.
Appigo has also made it very easy to move a note to another Dropbox folder while viewing it, so it’s easy to move a private note into a collaborative folder, or vice versa.The only app that I can think of that offers anything similar is Daedalus Touch for iPad), although Daedalus isn’t nearly as easy to use, since it requires you to engage syncs manually.
It should also be mentioned that Notebook syncs with the online task managing service, Toodledo, as well as with Appigo’s in-house task manager, ToDo. I just don’t have much to say about these features as I never really took to ToDo’s UI, which always felt a little too crowded for me. However, if you’re the type to make specific notes into tasks, then Notebook + ToDo could fit quite nicely into your workflow.
Regardless, I think Appigo deserves some kudos here: they’ve kept a longstanding app like Notebook alive and relevant with free updates, and they’ve also made the notes that you keep inside of the app universally accessible – which, when it comes down to it, is really what you want when you take notes in the first place.
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TAGS: dropbox sync, note taking
