Fortunately for me, apparently SimpleText is being abandoned for a new better strategy that is being first implemented in a new app called PlainText that syncs with Dropbox automatically. So all I had to do was install PlainText on my iPhone and now my Notational Velocity folder in my dropbox is automatically synced on my phone and I can modify the files and even create new ones while I think of thinks on the go and this gets synced back to my NV on my Mac. Awesome! only drawback is I have to use txt files only in NV rather than RTF but most of the time that’s all I really need. The tech in PlainText will be apparently in the next major update to WriteRoom for iPhone whenever that happens.

https://www.dropbox.com/apps/319/plaintext

I tried TaskPaper, I never cared for it, for to-do stuff I use much more powerful apps, but really daily to do’s go in my paper planner that is much easier and more powerful to use than all that electronic stuff to keep me on track, pencil and paper can’t be beat.

Yes, it get’s nasty confusing. In TP it is much easier because Jesse has the tagging function installed, so i can sort them out. ]Take a look at his new product, the replacement, it seems for WR iPhone. It will be synced via DropBox, and I assume, will allow for folding at the client level.

While we are on the subject, I go hot and cold on NV. It’s cool as a drive by editor as I noted, but if you have any kind of intellectual production capacity you wiz past its capabilities to manage data in a meaningful way, rather quickly. I can add a dozen, or dozens) of notes to my info base a day, and I’m adding pdfs and images as well. So I find NV limiting. It’s funny, Merlin Mann was doing a podcast over on Mac PowerUser and was referencing my article on DEVONThink but couldn’t find the exact quote while on air. He powers up NV but because of the size of his database he couldn’t find it in that “in the stress of the situation” situation.

Where I am gravitating to, through shear weight of real world use, is using the mobile devices just as one would use a paper journal when out and about; a place to ADD new data and ideas as they come up. They then end up on my macBook or iMac, or what amberV has been recently been calling “a legitimate computer” and it is there that they reside. This work flow has been gaining points now that the DropBox mobil apps have a searching function, and now that they allow files to be opened and edited in other app on the iPad/iPhone, and developers are using that API to make their apps DropBox aware.

So, as a writer, if you think of Journaling separately from Writing (as, to my mind, you should – idea and fact capture is not the same as writing to tone and mood) then the mobile devices become a tool of capture (and a little augmentation in that window before they get moved over to the DropBox/HardDrive folders) and the ‘legitimate computer’ is where the writing takes place, as in Scrivener or WriteRoom or whatever.

I am a new iPod Touch user (3 months or so) and I have a 32GB, Gen3 one. I’ve loaded iOS4. WriteRoom for iPhone and TaskPaper for iPhone were among the first apps I loaded on the iPod. I have WriteRoom for the Mac and have recently come to the conclusion that Notational Velocity is for me. Future-proofing and all that.

I set up NV with the SimpleText folder on my iPod but then was distressed to see (obviously) that all the files showed up on my iPhone. For some reason, I hadn’t seen that part. To date, I have a dozen and a half files (slightly more) I sync with iPhone/WR/TP/ST website/ST app.

Here’s my question: when you set up WR and TP for the iPhone to be linked with your NV app on your Mac, don’t you have loads and loads of files on your iPhone? Doesn’t that get confusing? Or do you merely search for anything you need (on iPhone) and can get to it pretty easily? In NV on my Mac, I can access stuff quite swiftly. Moreover, is having all that data something you rely on when your mobile?

BTW, I am really enjoying your website. I found it through Minimal Mac, among others.

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~bederson/user-advocate/2010/01/my-personal-information-management.html

http://scraps.jackbaty.com/post/333224218/my-newest-new-system-text-files-notational-velocity

Doug

+1 on the, I don’t even know how to describe it (Hurst Thrusters?) design. But I did learn a little trick a while back. You can change any application’s icon by popping open it’s info panel in Finder and pasting in an another graphic. I’ve found some note pad like icons and use them, so the NV icon now only shows up when I delete a file or go to help.

You might want to look at an application called FastIcns for help in changing the icon. And http://www.iconaholic.com/ has some great icon designs.

Doug

Thanks for bringing Notational Velocity to my attention. I was already loving the SimpleText.ws in the cloud, SimpleText for the Mac, WriteRoom for iPhone, Write Room for Mac combo that Jesse has made possible. Notation Velocity is the nice addition I was looking for. Thanks!!! But that NV icon – oh my!