Wow, #1 in tech, thank you so much for all the kind words and comments—this app is about 18 months in the making, so it's been surreal to watch it blow up like this over the past week.
I'll hang out here and answer questions where I can. If anyone would be interested in beta testing upcoming releases, particularly as we get closer to iOS 10, would love to share what's coming.
Thanks, everyone!
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@chrisladd congrats
1) given you sync via iCloud does that mean that notes created with this also appear in apple notes?
2) I love the app slapshot. It could be great if the "reminder" function could email me a reminder instead of creating an iOS reminder
@_jacksmith
1) nope, unfortunately Apple notes doesn't have an API that I know of—I would have loved to go the other way, to make it easy for folks to import their stock notes.
2) interesting. I'll check it out! One thing I'm always struggling against is simplicity—I feel like that's actually the most important thing to guard in an app like this.
For example, I built a social collaborative system into Better Notes, twice.
In one case, you could tag other @people in notes, and your notes would appear in their stream. In another (more recent) branch, I wrote true collaborative editing, where multiple people could edit the same note at the same time, and it would diff out the changes, and do the right thing. Just like Apple's new feature in iOS 10.
In both cases, the extra interface required to support these features, and the cognitive overload required by the user to understand them, just wasn't worth it.
These are obviously heavier interactions than the one you're mentioning, and there are lots of things that are planned for Better Notes to make it robust. Just pointing out that I'm trying to be very careful about what makes it into shipping versions.
The betas, that's a different story. ;)
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@chrisladd sure. the people mention wouldn't be interesting to me. if you check out the slapshot app, it's actually the most simple app you'll ever use. you open it, take a note, then close the app. it will email you the note ~12 hours later. awesome for taking down reminders
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@chrisladd Basically, the reminders just aren't working for me. I had a todo list created for yesterday that never went off, a single note for today that didn't go off, and one on last Friday as well. Not sure what I'm doing wrong. All other functionality is working great though.
@nostradamion Yikes. I doubt you're doing anything wrong.
Only thing I can think of—is there any chance that at some point you denied notifications permissions, or turned them off? You might check the device settings.
In any case, I'll file a bug—yes, I file bugs for myself :)—and see if I can figure out what's going on. Thanks for letting me know!
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@chrisladd No problem; please keep me posted. Also, I'd love to be added to your beta if you have room.
The PH Tech Digest says that this app organizes notes into hashtags, and then asks "why hasn't this been done?!" Well, it has, check out Workflowy. It's amazing how it can be so simple, but so powerful. It's literally just a bunch of nested lists with #tags and @people, but I use it every day, for everything!
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Love the clean UI. How is this comparable/better than Google Keep? It has hashtags/labels, lists, cloud backup and cross-device support.
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Great app! Love the simplicity. I'd really like to see 3D Touch interactions implemented soon. It just calls for a 3D Touch on a note to swipe it up for quick actions, like deleting.
@cezar_capacle nice idea!
you know, in an early version of Better Notes (back when it was called "SFN" for "Simple @#$ing Notes") you would swipe the notes off the screen to archive them, but it made the app too complicated.
I'll play around with it!
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this looks awesome. i love the animated screenshot demo of the features on their homepage. what I like about apple 'notes' and what I'd love with this, is if it could seamlessly sync to the web/desktop.
This is the notes app whose time has come. Ive been hopping between Evernote and onedrive and headaches. Bless you for plain text notes and simplicity, @chrisladd! Would love to beta the desktop.
Better Notes
