This has become the perfect storm for tools that can all work together seamlessly to meet all of my text management needs from pretty much anywhere/anytime/any platform.
The tools
Now I know that there are some people that swear by a Evernote for this kind of thing, especially since it can handle various types of files, but I find the interface too heavy. As an old command-line kind of guy, I like having as much of my content in plain old text (granted, UTF8) since it’s the most portable and safe format available. Notational Velocity is an excellent note manager - lightweight, fast with almost no overhead and something I can imagine easily as an iPad application. I love that there is no save button. You type and that’s it. I’m just starting out with it, but am very happy so far. It fits my needs for keeping track of little command-line snippets, small useful scripts (perl, bash, etc.) and the like. Now it’s not going to replace BBEdit as my script development tool since there is no color syntax highlighting, no sftp for updating files on remote servers, but for content and information it’s really slick. Amusingly, I still find myself reflexively hitting Command-S every so often even though I don’t need to. DropBox is what the iDisk should have been. A transactional, cross-platform, highly efficient means of synchronizing a set of files and folders. I really wish that Apple would use some of its war chest to buy them out and replace iDisk to get rid of the clumsy disk image synchronization process that we’re currently stuck with. I have to admit that since moving to DropBox, I don’t use my iDisk at all other than for sharing large files with clients that won’t pass via email. TaskPaper is a nifty little app to keep track of various projects, lists and todo items. The very nice part is that underlying the TaskPaper interface are straightforward text files that are structured with hyphens for indicating todo items, @tags at the end of lines for tagging, etc. While the TaskPaper app makes the presentation and manipulation of these files very easy, you can still open them directly from Notational Velocity or any other text editor. SimpleNote is a web enabled text editor similar in form and function to Notational Velocity on the desktop. A minimalist interface and there’s an iPhone application that auto synchronizes as well. Not absolutely essential to using the three previous products, but the interest is that ubiquitous web access to my notes, in an efficient way. DropBox offers a web interface as well, but it’s for dealing with files, not for managing and editing notes. This is perfect for the times I’m on someone else’s computer and I want to grab a code snippet or command-line script for them without having to resort to mail. This synchronization setup is pretty much overkill and I’m curious to see which interfaces I end up using the most over time. What I like about this is that the data is stored in the cloud, but I’m not 100% dependent upon it as there are local copies of all of the data. In addition, since DropBox uses a folder on my local hard disk, it all gets backed up via Time Machine automatically, so I’m not stuck depending on the reliability of any of the online service providers.