Mon, 01/30/2012, by Calvin

Notebook 2.0

When we went back to update Notebook, before writing or designing any part of it, we decided to define a mantra for Notebook. I have a saying written on my wall that says "Keep the main thing the main thing". Notebook's mantra is "Simple Notes. Anywhere." There were two major decisions we had to make in order to support that mantra.

        1. What format will we support
        2. How will the notes go anywhere

Plain Text Format
TXT files have been around a long time and can be read, created, edited, and searched by almost everything. The funny thing is there really isn't much on iOS that handles these files well. The built in notes app handles them, but to get them to any other device you either need to email them or sync them to email using iCloud. There are other apps but most of them have proprietary formats and can only be modified (or even viewed) in their app. That doesn't work well for "notes anywhere." In the previous version of Notebook we started down that path by allowing some basic HTML codes in the notes. This took Notebook down the path of being complicated and proprietary. Notebook 2 saves it's files in Plain Text Format. They are simple and they go anywhere.

Dropbox
"Simple Notes. Anywhere." also means the notes need to easily move on and off the device. We didn't just want a way to send notes to the desktop (email). We wanted notes to coexist on the desktop and iOS. Dropbox was clearly the answer here. We were already using Dropbox to store and move Todo and Corkulous data around. Dropbox now works even better with Notebook.

While those were the two most important decisions, we did slip in the extra feature of collaboration. Because Dropbox allows users to share folders, Notebook does too. By selecting a shared Dropbox folder for a Notebook collection, the collection becomes a collaborative solution for notes.