My search for a good notetaking app has been a little on the obsessive side, but to me, the one thing a computer should be able to do well is take notes. I have spent 2 years on this one. I’m talking about an application where I can make a short note to myself and come back later and find it easily.

The combination of Notational Velocity on the mac, synced with Simplenote on the iphone, is for me the winner.
Step 1. Install Simplenote on your iphone.

Step 2. Sign up for a Simplenote account.

Step 3. Download Notational Velocity

Step 4. Enter your simplenote account details into the preferences of Notational Velocity.

Step5. change Notational velocity preferences to store the notes as rtf files in a folder instead of a single database file so that spotlight can find them.

That’s it! Now  all the notes in simple text on your iPhone will be synced with notational velocity on your  desktop computer.

Why I like these apps.
Simplenote is very SIMPLE, and Notational Velocity is soooo FAST. They are both elegant, and the best thing of all – they don’t get in the way.

Notational Velocity is a bit of a head spin the first time you use it. It’s so simple and it only has one box to type in – whether you’re writing a new note or searching for an old note you type in the same box!

And it is so FAST to search – the results appear INSTANTLY. It’s almost as if it’s reading your mind!

I use notational velocity for all kinds of things…

- writing down how I did something so that next time I need to do it I can remember.
- storing trivial information like the ranking of poker hands, or a list of things to take on holidays.
- lists of birthday present ideas for people
- poems and song lyrics
- lists where things are stored
- menus, letters, vision-setting, bits of computer code and so on.

I currently have 355 notes in it, and I don’t need to remember note titles, keywords or anything, I just type a word and it finds the note. It’s great.

For a long time SOHO notes was my favourite, but the worst problem is that you have to manually sync the iphone with the desktop app – I never remember to and get caught out looking for a note that is not yet synced to!

Likewise, Shovebox is a nice app  to capture notes into, but harder to search and browse them once they are in.

Like any other area of interest on the iPhone, when it comes to the Bible there are thousands of applications out there but the new kid on the block the ‘ESV Bible‘ is easily the best and here’s why…

Up until now, ‘Bible‘ has been my favourite iPhone Bible reading application. – it is simple to use and has pretty much every version you would want – NIV, CEV, NASB, ESV The Message and so on. The problem however is that it requires an Internet connection to work, and for that reason, it’s also a bit slow to use.

But having just tried out the new ESV Bible application, I have instantly fallen in love with it. Sometimes it takes a really good application to comes along to make you realise what you were missing and this is definitely the case with ESV Bible.

The navigation system is simple to use. You select a book of the Bible, it slickly pens out to give you a list of all the chapters. It’s so smooth it’s actually fun to use. To me that’s what makes the Apple experience and this app is an Apple style bible! Click on a chapter and the Bible opens at that chapter.

Click on any verse and a window slides open with cross-references to other similar verses that you can click on and navigate to, as well as a button to add your own notes to any verse, or post a verse to twitter or send averse to the e-mail app!

Click on the bottom of the screen and you have access to a ‘history’ of all the passages you’ve looked at recently – I’ve already found this very useful – and favourites section where you can add any Bible passage to your ‘ favourites’ and look it up instantly.

Of course there’s the standard ability to search the Bible, but again I like the way it is implemented with ESV Bible. The results are displayed by book of the Bible, giving you the first two results in each book, with a ‘more’ button should you wish to see more results.

You can grab it for free from itunes here: here.

Aa good storage system for IDEAS is essential.

Today the iPhone companion app for my fav desktop notes app – SOHO notes was released.

First, the good…

It has a very nice,  easy-to-use interface, including a nice search feature.

Then the not so good…

It doesn’t  have an automatic synchronisation feature like almost every other iphone app. You have to manually go into the preference window and click on the synchronise button!

If you have a note in Soho notes that has pictures or different fonts in it, the moment you edit it in notelife your pictures disappear and so do the fonts. It doesn’t even make a copy of the original notes – you have just lost all that information forever. So it’s only really useful for editing notes that are plain text notes.

SUMMARY:

A great way to access your SOHO notes on the iPhone if you have SOHO notes.

It’s not the one-solution answer to everything.

I’m beginning to think that somehow this is a limitation by apple because so many apps have come near but not quite made it. How hard can it be to have an app that lets you take notes, in different fonts, add a picture, and sync to a desktop app?