Justnotes for Mac

The 1.3 update is HUGELY better. It uses the updated Simplenote APIs and sync time for me (with 1300 notes) has gone from minutes, to seconds. It is way, way, WAY better.

I have been keeping my fingers crossed with the new developers' trajectory for the future of JustNotes. I want oh so, so bad for the new (post-v1.0) JustNotes to, at minimum, work as well as it did before being freshly developed (pre-v1.0) and appearing in the App Store. To be honest, I miss the days when JustNotes v0.8 just worked, but unfortunately the older version is no longer stable in newer versions of OS X. And even though it is now a much prettier and visually stunning app, there have been a handful of relatively simple yet highly relevant usability issues. Most recently, and which prompted my review, is a new "mid-sync freeze" bug, which locks up JustNotes until it finishes syncing the current note you are editing. The sync interval cannot be changed, so the user is left stuck for 10-15 seconds EVERY 10-15 seconds or so. Other usability issues, while seemingly minor are indeed much more of a problem than they seem, include: a) the inability to effectively stylize text in any manner at all which would makes sense to a human who has ever edited text before (e.g., if you highlight some text and make it bold, the entire note becomes bold); b) what happened to Markdown?; c) ineffective management of deleted notes (I have literally thousands of notes stuck in my JustNotes "Archive" that have been long deleted in SimpleNote--it would be awesome for there to be a toggle option to turn "Archive Note" off and replace it with "Delete Note" instead; d) searching notes has been rendered useless for anyone with several dozen notes or more and/or with longer notes so that when searching for a word it may appear multiple times throughout your notes--the easy solution is to simply use the shortcut CMD-G "Find next," which for for one reason or another does not work in JustNotes yet is such a universal OS X interface shortcut enabled in any app capable of searching; e) I give up--while switching between writing this review and JustNotes it crashed out of nowhere, thus marking a good place to wrap-up this review. If apps could crash themselves out of shame, well, looks like we have a winner. But, having said all of the above, I have faith in JustNotes and its developers for paying more attention to the user and overall usability. Simply listening to user feedback and suggestions is not enough--it would be a good idea to go several rounds user studies if this has not been done yet. Many of the issues found in JustNotes would become apparent early on and thus fixed more quickly.

I used to like this application but recently the syncing with SimpleNote has stopped working. I have not had any replies to my support requests

I locked in on Justnotes when it was v0.x and loved it. After trying to use Notational Velocity, NV Alt, and others, Justnotes became my only desktop app for connecting to SimpleNotes, which I depend on every day. When it went to v1.x it was initially pretty buggy, and I was bummed. However, the developer has now fixed those problems (including two I had reported to him; I just wish he'd been quicker about it). Now Justnotes works like a charm. The new v1.x features, like syncing multiple folders, have been great. I'm very happy with it, well worth the price.

Re: Robthecomputerguy's complaint about having to pay full price for a Mac App Store copy after having paid for a copy from the developer: this is widespread, and it's because the App Store does not provide developers a way to give upgrade discounts. Everyone has this same problem, no matter what the software title. I think it's unfair of you to slur the developer as dishonest for this. After all, he did provide a three-month pause before launching it on the App Store. I have no connection to the dev. or the software, I just think it's not right to blame the guy for an Apple policy that's beyond his control.