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.

• carbon copy cloner

See the entry on backups, this application allows you to make a bootable backup of your hard drive. Superdooper, a newer program, seems to be a more popular backup program and simpler to use, but it’s not free so I still use CCC.

• skype (voice over IP)

Skype allows you to speak to other skype users anywhere in the world for free over the internet. Simply download skype, create yourself a ‘skype name’, this is your unique skype name, and you are away. You don’t need to pay any money unless you want to make a call to a normal phone number. If you have an imac or a powerbook or ibook you can use the built in microphone and speaker, but for better results use a headset microphone which will stop any ‘echo’ you may experience. Your friends need to have their computer on when you search for them in skype for the first time, or skype will not find them.

• textwrangler

A great little text editor, like textedit, but many features such as search and replace on multiple files without opening them, automatic formatting for html, compare two different text files and show the differences, open and edit text files over ftp, if you’re not sure why you’d need those features, stick with textedit!

• mac the ripper

Allows you to capture a DVD from your DVD drive, then view it in quicktime. Good if you just want to watch one chapter of a DVD, or if you want to watch a DVD in the car without running your laptop battery flat – it uses much less power to watch a DVD from the hard drive than from the DVD drive.

• quicksilver

Fantastic application, hard to explain how to use it and what it does, but I use it probably at least 20 times a day. It allows you to do many things at the press of a key, like a shortcut, but without you having to remember what key does what, because it guesses what you want to do by what you type in, and it learns, very clever. It takes a bit of learning, but the time you save after learning it is well worth it. http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver

• combine pdf’s

As it says, allows you to combine multiple pdf documents into a single pdf documents. For example, combine a single page pdf from pages with a pdf printed from a screenshot with a pdf from illustrator all into one document of three pages.

• Cocoa booklet

Cocoa Booklet takes a multi page pdf file (eg 16 pages long), and makes it into a booklet by moving all the pages into a different order so that when you print it double sided and staple it into a booklet, all the pages are in the right order – like Microsoft publisher does on the PC. You can reduce the size too, ie make an a5 booklet from a4 pages.

• Audio hijack

Allows you to record any sound from your computer (skype conversation, itunes song, streaming audio, movie soundtrack etc) to an mp3 file. THIS IS NO LONGER FREE.

• LAME engine for itunes

See separate entry under music, this imports your itunes songs at a better quality than the itunes encoder.

• Online Bible

A free piece of bible software, easily the most simple to use, now available for OS-X as a beta release. Does searches on words in english, or greek/hebrew. A good cross reference system. Allows you to paste bible text into any application (eg Pages) with a hotkey.

• Audacity

A full-featured audio recorder. It can record audio with a level indicator, then process the audio (speed it up, slow it down, raise or lower the pitch, compress, normalise etc) and then export to mp3 or other formats. Stick with the simpler ‘soundstudio’ if you don’t need these features.