At Townsville Nerds we like to test out new apps and anything that can make a busy day much easier.

Productivity Apps are a great way to do this and most applications these days which are based in the cloud (on the internet, easily accessible) are be used on multiple devices, like IPhone, Smart Phone, Mac, Linux or Windows PC.

Goodbye Evernote

Simplenote is one of these apps and even though I have talked about Evernote before which busted open the note sharing idea on multiple devices a couple of years ago, Simplenote is simpler.

Over the years I have become more and more annoyed by Evernote and its problems with text on my smart phone taking to long to type. I thought it was just my phone but I have had the same problem on two more Android phones which has forced me to look at alternatives.

For me personally I have just found it too buggy and I just want a simple note taking application which isn’t laggy and I can quickly add and remove notes on multiple devices when I need to.

Simple note can be downloaded here.

Pro’s of Simplenote

Simplenote supports Markdown

Markdown can be used is perfect for people who want to write text and have it formated and set up correctly to easily be put online and made available for web readable content like on a web page.

Open source and Free

Simplenote has made its code readily available on Github where anyone can read, and change or experiment with, Its all open source and free for people to see and change and play with.

Collaboration

If you and a bunch of colleagues, friends or developers are working on something together you can all contribute to the same documents, no matter where you are, in the same office, in the same country or anywhere in the world.

Multiple people can contribute to a document in real time and see each others changes.

URL Publishing

With URL publishing you can quickly publish your Simplenote document online with it own unique URL (web address) for everyone to see with a click of a button. This is perfect to share with other people out of office and with people who do not have (free) Simplenote accounts and people are are not collaborators.

Tags

Tags are great for helping you with reference points in or with reference to a document. You can simply add tags to a document (key words what the document is about) to find later on when searching for or grouping documents of similar interests when needed.

Pin Notes

Kind of like favourites on Internet Explorer you can Pin notes you use more frequently to the side and top of Simplenote to easily and quickly find when you use it. This is great for me as I use Simplenote everyday and have a list of customers I will be seeing that day.

In an instant I know where my customers note is and I can access it quickly and easily to add or remove customers straight away.

Con’s of Simplenote

Some people mind find that it has less functionality when it comes to formatting text, bold, colours etc. For me this wasn’t a problem because I was looking for something fast and simple for my main device I use, my smart pone.

On your computer this might be an issue where you are used to using something like Google Docs or Microsoft Word.