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?

Since I don’t have $14 to spare on this app, and I also do not really think it’s worth it, I went on to find some alternative softwares for this. This wonderful website alternativeto.net allows you to look for software applications on certain platforms and find out about some other softwares that could serve as alternatives or equivalents, either in the same platform but free, or perhaps because you are looking for an alternative to switch or use in another platform.

In this case I wanted to find an alternative to Divvy also for the Mac, but free as in beer. I didn’t really care that much if it was open source, although it would be a plus. Thankfully I found ShiftIt, wich is not only free and open source, but also even better than Divvy in my opinion.

ShiftIt, just as Divvy, sits unobtrusively in the menu bar. It would be nicer if it had an icon instead of text, but that’s a minor complain. What makes it great is that it already comes with sensible default shortcuts for positioning windows in logical default locations, such as covering the left or right halves of the screen, or top, or bottom. Plus covering the four screen areas formed by dividing it in four parts: top left, top right, bottom left and bottom right. And of course, two more options for full screen and center a window respectively.

When I saw this I immediately uninstalled Divvy. I found in ShiftIt preconfigured what I was manually configuring in Divvy just a few minutes ago. Exactly those very options, perhaps with some similar shortcuts I invented. Somebody would say that ShiftIt should allow you to customize the shortcuts and/or allow you to add some other configurations, but I guess they just want to keep it simple, and as simple as it is, it is still useful and able to replace Divvy 90% of the time.

I also found out about other similar alternatives, like SizeUp, Cinch, etc. But I only really tried the free one, as this was my goal. But maybe you want to try them all and stick with what you think is the best. And don’t be shy about making any suggestions here, either free software or not.

Do you know about any alternatives to Divvy and ShiftIt, be it for the Mac or not? Maybe with better or different features?

Google Chrome running on Leopard

I received with great joy today the news that Google’s web browser, Google Chrome, has been officially released for Mac (and Linux), even if it is still tagged as beta.

Since its first appearance in the web browsers scene more than a year ago, Google Chrome has been a source of innovation the area, with isolated processes per tabs, a revolutionary javascript engine, and the great news that its source code would be freely available as open source.

Sure that many were worried by its controversial privacy-violation practices, but the openness of its source code will always allow anyone with the know-how to modify it to their own needs, and that of the worried ones (me included to some extent, I’ll give you that). Indeed there’s a project called Iron which offers precisely that: Google Chrome for the privacy fanatics.

But just as about anything that’s new, Chrome for the Mac and Linux has several shortcomings compared to its Windows version that most people are accustomed to. The Apple Blog notes a few of these issues, at least those that affect Mac users, which are probably the same features not present yet in the Linux version as well. The most striking absence, at least for me, is Gears, of which I have become extremely dependent since Gmail offline appeared. This one even comes as a great negative surprise, since Chrome is the only browser that comes with Gears bundled, and being both (Gears and Chrome) from the same provider, I kind of assumed that they were inseparable

Not everything is bad news though. Google Chrome for both platforms integrates itself very well, or so they say. At least for the Mac I can confirm it. Google Chrome feels more like a Mac app than Opera does, which is kind of surprising if you take into account that Opera has been around for the Mac since, well, forever, I guess. And according to the official announcement in Google Chrome’s blog post about this beta release, Chrome seems to blend just well with a variety of GTK themes.

I really hope that this browser and the open source project behind it continue to improve. This news today is indeed a big step, and I’m sure those differences in feature sets will become smaller with time. I also hope that projects similar to the Iron alternative appear for other platforms too. Its open source nature makes it possible for this to come true.

Having migrated to Mac not so long ago, I am aware that Apple’s default picture managing software already had this feature, although I cannot really say how it worked. I did try iPhoto for a few hours on my first days with my new MacBook, but I immediately hated it for trying to hide my pictures from me. Picasa at least respects my organizational scheme at the file-system level, instead of imposing me one, and I am still able to access my pictures through Finder.

As Picasa recognizes faces, you can add information about this people as you tag them. It can even use (and sync with) your Google Account contacts if you are signed in to Picasa Web Albums. It would be nice though, if it gave you the choice in Mac OS X to use the system’s address book instead, or alternatively. And as a side note, face recognition is not the only new feature of Picasa 3.5, also including in the package geo-tagging with a Google Maps panel withing Picasa’s interface, and more. For the time being, this new version has only been released for Windows and Mac in its English version. Non-English speaking users, or Linux fans, will have to wait a bit. Not to say that Mac people should be completely happy though, because I am still waiting for Picasa to port the very nice picture viewer that it installs on Windows.

In the mean time, I can enjoy watching a slideshow of pictures with me and my girlfriend in it, or detailing how my niece’s face has changed over time since she was born just a few years ago. Face recognition rocks. But beware, if you are a fanatic of organization, it can get become addictive!

PS: I wanted to include a screenshot, but I don’t feel right to publish an image with lots of pictures of faces and names of actual people, without their consent, and painting black areas over names and faces renders the screenshot useless for its original purpose. So I am going on without it. If you want to see it working, download the program and give it a try.

My new MacBook seen from behind

I finally ended this mac envy that has been consuming me for the last few months. Being a Ruby on Rails developer for some time now, all those screencasts and tutorials always based in MacOS X and Textmate have had an effect on me. Although it seems that I’ll be playing mostly with xcode instead of Textmate for some time, but it’s sexy to have Textmate just an inch away in case I need it.

PS: For the couple of friends of mine that already had a Mac, my envy was not malicious.