iPhone 3.0 Notes Sync? Sure, But Evernote is Still King

by Andrew Lunde on 06/07/09 at 9:21 pm

iPhone 3.0 Notes Sync? Sure, But Evernote is Still King

Andrew Lunde is an iPhone and Internet applications developer. He is the President of Lunde Cognitive Effects Inc. and a Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.

In April, I wrote an article about notes synchronization on the iPhone titled Want iPhone Notes Sync? No Problem for Evernote. Since then, iPhone OS 3.0 has emerged and now that I’ve had a little time to play with it, I wanted to revisit the subject and see how Apple’s solution compares.

One thing that is clearly missing in OS X, is an application to sync notes. You might think that the obvious candidate for this would be to build a “Stickies” application, but for some reason Apple decided not to go in that direction. On the PC, Outlook is the natural candidate with it’s Notes feature. In OS X, Mail, iCal, and Address Book are all separate applications. Rather than develop a separate Notes application, Apple decided that Notes belonged in Mail, in a special type of email folder. This makes sense since notes (as well as todo’s for that matter) can be easily formatted as special email messages that the Mail client could intercept and deal with properly. This allows the mail transport mechanism to sync notes in the same way email is updated. However, if I create a note in the iPhone’s Notes application, it doesn’t automatically sync with Mobile Me and my Mac. While you can now email a note from the iPhone Notes  application, it just puts the contents of the note into a regular email, but that really doesn’t solve the problem. Another annoyance is that notes created in Mail show up as emails on the iPhone.  This might be nice to at least have a copy of it on the iPhone, but does little to forward the organization of your notes.

I found that the notes I created in the Mail application wouldn’t sync via Mobile Me. Apparently, the only way to get sync to perform is via iTunes. Here is how to do it. First launch iTunes and connect your iPhone. Select your iPhone device and go to the Info tab. Near the bottom of the page is a Notes section with a “Sync Notes” checkbox. Check it on and do a sync. Now you’ll find that notes created in (OS X) Mail will appear in the iPhone’s Notes application and visa versa. While, still tethered to your Mac you can continue to create notes in either place and the normal the MobileMe syncing process will cause the Mac/iPhone notes to be updated without having to do a full sync via iTunes. Technically this works and for folks that have many notes that they’d like to manage and are connected to their Mac often, this is just fine. However, I really got used to the Outlook/Exchange way things worked where I could created notes either place and they would auto-magically synchronize.

In my opinion, even with the release of iPhone OS 3.0, Evernote Evernote is still a far superior solution. Even if Evernote only did text notes (it does pics and voice memos too) it is still far and away a much better solution.

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About Andrew:
Andrew Lunde is a senior iPhone and Internet applications developer. He is the President of Lunde Cognitive Effects Inc. and a writer for iPhoneCTO.
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  • Thanks for the article. I actually have a 1st generation iPod Touch at the moment. I did upgrade it to OS 3. I am not exactly sure what did the trick, but I do see the notes from my Touch are in the Mail app. I do not see any section on notes or in the Info tab in iTunes when I select my Touch device. So I never chose an option to sync notes, but somehow it did so maybe it's just automatic now. Perhaps you were writing about an earlier version of iTunes than I have. The only time I see anything about Notes is if I sync to Mobile Me. I added the Touch to the mobile me sync/backup and it said more than 5% of my Notes had changed. When I log into the me.com website, however, I can't find the Notes to view. Perhaps it is useful as a backup for a restore, but it is still pretty obtuse. I am switching to Evernote but wonder if there is a way it can import all your Notes or if you just have to copy and paste them from Mail app to Evernote app on OS X.
  • jtth
    Evernote is far too slow and crash-prone to use as a Note-taking application. I've been using it since its inception and its stability has stayed the same, crashing about 10% of the time, while its feature set has grown to impressive proportions. I use Evernote everyday, and I'm paying customer. But it sucks as a Notepad.

    That's why I use SimpleNote (http://simplenoteapp.com/). It's a very simple text-only notepad that syncs with a web app. It does not mess up, crash, or in any way act slow or unresponsive. I capture what I want in SimpleNote and, if necessary, copy it to Evernote later. Evernote is a terrible Inbox, and its issues with Snow Leopard (it doesn't sync notes created in the EN client) make it even worse. The only real reason I'm still using it is because of the image-OCR support, the source metadata, and geotagging. And the fact that it cannot export anything in any useful file format. So I pay and wait, and my hate grows.

    If someone writes a native Mac client that behaves like a Mac program should, they could charge $100 for it and people would pay. DEVON Technologies should just link DEVONthink to it. I'd renew my license for version 2.

    We're too used to the awkwardness to notice a lack of grace.
  • My experience has been entirely different than yours. I've found Evernote to be solid, robust and fast. The fact that they update their application as often as they do, says to me that they are committed to improving it and they have. I use Evernote on the desktop as well as on my iPhone. They are a perfect match. And no, I haven't received one penny from Evernote for any of our posts. On second thought, maybe I should ask them for a cut ;-)
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