I was most recently getting along with PlainText, a note-taking iPhone app that stores your notes in a folder in your Dropbox account. It’s a very simple yet powerful concept, specially for those of us who already use Dropbox. Instead of having yet another syncing environment for notes, they already take advantage of the Dropbox user base out there.

The interface is simple and visually appealing, yet out of the ordinary. The notes are always in sync between the iPhone and the computers thanks to Dropbox, and I can get to organize my notes into folders. No more nasty notes from the default iPhone notes app getting into my mail (whoever thought that notes were related to mail is insane).

But then the simple got even simpler…

Today I stumbled on a simpler and better alternative: SimpleNote. It’s an online web service with an iPhone app, an API, and a set of third-party supporting apps and tools that complete the picture.

Great features

The killer features over PlainText are tagging, versioning and sharing. Yes, you read it right.

With SimpleNote you organize your notes with tags, instead of placing them on folders. You can associate any number of tags to a single note, and you can also list all notes regardless of tagging. It’s of course a bit unfair to make this comparison against PlainText, since its Dropbox storage paradigm would not allow for anything else than folders.

You can also share notes with other people. I did not found a way to do this on the web app, although there should be. In the iPhone app you can activate sharing, and it’ll give you a URL, plus the possibility to send an email with an invitation to the share note. I haven’t tested this though because I still have no one on SimpleNote to share with.

Also worth mentioning are its versioning capabilities. You can check past versions of your notes, up to a limit of 10 versions in the past. There’s a premium non-free plan for a mere $12 a year (that’s $1 per month) which extends this limit to 30, plus extra features such as no ads, better support, creating notes by email and more.

On the desktop side of the equation

On the desktop side there’s no “official” app for SimpleNote, but on the downloads page I found a couple of third-party client applications for Windows and Mac that I am really liking. On the Mac side we have JustNotes, which syncs with the online service and supports tagging and searching. On the Windows side I was not expecting much, but it turns out that ResophNotes is a pretty good client with email, printing and Markdown support. The downside is that it does not support tagging. It did not support tagging until recently, so be sure to have the latest version.

There are some other options for both platforms, specially for the Mac, and there are options for Android as well. There’s even an Emacs package and extensions for Firefox and Chrome!

What other alternative services do you use for note-taking on the iPhone with desktop-sync support?

Well, not exactly. If you have a real device (and you should anyway, if you are developing for the platform) and this device has lots of contacts in it, then you can copy the internal address book files into the simulator’s file system in your Mac. I actually got the tip from this blog post after searching on Google a little bit, but it did not worked for me exactly that way. I’ll let you know why.

First you have to extract the device’s address book sqlite files. There are two files actually, and according to their names, one is for the actual contacts, and the other one stores the contact images. Both files are located in /var/mobile/Library/AddressBook/ inyour iPhone, so if you have a jailbroken device, then it is as simple as copying through ssh…

scp mobile@iphone:Library/AddressBook/*  ~/Library/Application\ Support/iPhone\ Simulator/User/Library/AddressBook

If your device is not jailbroken then it is a bit more complicated. The solution involves extracting the sqlite files from the backups of your device created by iTunes in your Mac whenever you sync. The blog post linked above has a nice script for doing this, although I have not tested it.

But this did not work for me right away. I copied the files into the specified directory and started the simulation just to see the same empty list. So I wandered a bit through the vicinities of that location and I realized that along with the User directory inside ~/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator, there are a few more directories whose names correspond to the versions of the SDK installed in the simulator. Since I am running the simulator on iOS 4.0.2, then I copied the files into this directory structure instead, like below

scp mobile@iphone:Library/AddressBook/*  ~/Library/Application\ Support/iPhone\ Simulator/4.0.2/Library/AddressBook

So if the User directory don’t work for you either, then try looking for the one corresponding to the SDK version that you are running in the simulator.

Actually it was very simple and required almost no work. There’s a wordpress plugin for that already, which along with a custom mobile-friendly theme gets the job done. Both the plugin and the theme are developed by Crowd Favorite, a web development company specializing in WordPress customization and enhancement. They also provide two great standard themes, including the one used in the blog’s standard interface.

Do you know any other plugins or tools to make a WordPress blog friendly to handheld mobile devices?

Meanwhile I am enjoying a similar experience. Somebody noticed out there that there are many of us with an iPad already (kind of). The iPad nano has been around for a couple of years now but with another name. And I recently got one and I am delighted with it. Why going crazy about the new one when you can have the nano version which fits in your pocket, has a camera and makes phone calls too!

iPad nano

Now seriously, after using the iPhone for some days I understand why people are crazy to experiment with its big but younger brother. Touch screens are seriously redefining how we interact with computers and from a developer standpoint it’s amazing the whole new set of possibilities that arise. And it’s not only touch screens and multi-touch, but also the ability to make a program adapt to different orientations of the device, to be able to access hardware services like a compass, accelerometer, GPS, etc.

However, I am spoiled by my Ruby on Rails background, and I started to think about ORM and ActiveRecord in no time. It turns out that, as I expected, I found a few blog posts and projects out there for this. Nothing surprising, since I’m not the only one coming to the iPhone from Rails, and I have just recently started programming for this platform. Several people have been struggling with it for some time now.

One of the most promising and wonderful projects I found is called SQLite Persistent Objects. It’s like ActiveRecord for the iPhone written in Objective-C (of course), but even better in some respects. You don’t write you data schemas first, but your classes instead. It’s the objects the ones that create the database and tables in the background as needed. It even features dynamic search methods too!

If you’re programming for the iPhone, I really recommend it (although I haven’t tested it thoroughly yet). The article above gives a link to a download, but the project seems to be hosted on google code, so ti would be presumably better to download it from there.

Update (2009-10-23): Coincidentally today the author of SQLite Persistent Objects posted in his blog that after deciding to discontinue development, another developer took over, so the project (which I didn’t know was dying) is alive again! He also links to a great presentation that get you started very quickly.