In the broadest sense, the content of a note is whatever you need to remind you of its meaning later. Deleting or archiving notes should be treated as a common, encouraged user action.Īt this point, the dozens or millions of notes app developers reading this post are like, “That’s all you got, wise guy? I thought you were gonna teach us something about notes, not describe our own app to us.” But bear with me. A note must be theoretically permanent, in case the user is a big-time procrastinator, but keeping notes forever is not the ideal use case.
A note must be easily and clearly summarized, so that it can be displayed in the list of existing or “active” notes. Once captured, a note must be retrievable by the relevant metadata, even if it’s just order of creation.
Vesper simplenote nvalt software#
In software terms, a note is a single persistent file with some basic contents and simple metadata. Ideally, unless one is a hoarder, one disposes of the note after its idea is realized. Later, when it’s time to act on the idea, one retrieves the relevant note from the pile and turns it into a more permanent, full-fledged Thing of some kind, rendering the note itself obsolete. The thought that triggers the capture of a note is, “I need to remember this right now!” Once captured, a note goes into a pile. In human terms, a note is a captured moment of inspiration on which one hopes to act later. I’m talking about the short, quick, discrete, personal scraps of information we know as notes because that’s what Apple’s built-in Notes app tells us, and Apple knows how everything should work. That’s its own category with its own design nightmares. The “notes” for a session are all its important points at once collected and organized in a single document. “Taking notes,” whether it’s in a class or a meeting, takes place all on one sheet. My problem is that I, a mere layperson, have a better answer than any app offers, and now I have to write a tech nerd blog post about it. I know because I’ve tried every notes app I’ve ever come across, and most of them answer it differently. What is a note? For all the effort going into so-called notes apps, I don’t think the software industry has a coherent answer to that question.