Goodbye to an Old Friend

 

Screen Shot 2012 12 08 at 11 54

I’ve finally had it with Simplenote sync. 

I’ve been using Simplenote for several years, and have gladly paid the subscription fee for the Pro version two years running. At $19.99 a year, that’s a lot to pay for an app that doesn’t provide much that the likes of IA Writer doesn’t. The latter doesn’t feature tags, or the brilliant search mechanism that Notational Velocity on the Mac made so popular, but that’s fine. I can still use Notational Velocity with Dropbox sync.

The great thing about Simplenote sync was that it was instant. If you think Dropbox is fast, you haven’t experienced the wonder of making a change on a Mac and knowing that the changes are already on your handheld before you’ve had a chance to pick it up to check.

Right now I’m sitting through a Simlpenote Dropbox duplication sync and watching duplicates of files appear over and over. NVAlt, a popular fork of Notational Velocity, also seems to be having problems with Simplenote sync of late and I think Brett Terpstra has pretty much given up on it. When Michael Schechter of A Better Mess wrote this, I decided to clip it and come back to it later to finally kick the Simplenote habit, which I did today.

Of course, given my “one-more-go” nature, I decided I’d have another look at the Simplenote Dropbox sync to see if I could get it to work. I copied my notes into a new Dropbox folder, pointed Simplenote at it and watched as it duplicated everything religiously and I got notification after notification of files being added to Dropbox. Enough is enough.

So, given the issues with the sync, and given that this was the only real benefit of Simplenote, and despite the fact that my subscription is paid until august 2013, I’m going to have to say a sad goodbye to the longest lived piece of 3rd party software on my iPhone.