We’re excited to reveal two brand new features for our premium subscribers: Dropbox syncing, and support for lists.

Dropbox syncing

Synchronization is a wonderful thing. Your computers sync information with your devices, your apps sync information with other apps, and everybody wins.

We’re all about syncing here at Simperium. It’s our pleasure to announce seamless integration with Dropbox, another great syncing service (and, incidentally, a fellow Y Combinator startup company).

Dropbox is a great way to sync files. When you link your Dropbox account to your Simplenote account, all your notes in Simplenote will appear as text files in the Dropbox directory of your choice. Thereafter, your notes and files stay synchronized as you make changes. Syncing happens in both directions.

Best of all, you just need to set this up once, and it works automatically everywhere you use Simplenote: iOS, the web app, and all 3rd-party apps.

Syncing with Dropbox currently happens every several minutes. We’ll improve this approach as new syncing features become available in both Dropbox and Simplenote.

To configure Dropbox syncing, premium users can access their account settings in the web app.

Lists

Lots of people use Simplenote to keep lists. Using an iPhone or iPad, premium subscribers can now turn any note into a reorderable list of items. Go to the Note Info screen and toggle the View as List switch. You can easily edit items, rearrange them, and cross them off by swiping them.

Lists are stored as plaintext, so they also work with the Simplenote web app and all 3rd-party apps.

Price

We hope you agree that Simplenote is a valuable service. Starting today, the price of premium subscriptions will be $1.99 per month, or $19.99 per year.

Your support helps us to keep making improvements to Simplenote. Here’s a table that summarizes the differences between premium and free accounts. If you’re ready to upgrade, sign in to the web app and access your account settings.

An update for Simplenote is now live in the App Store. If you use Simplenote for iOS, download the update to get several important fixes and a small number of carefully selected new features.

This update makes it easier to use tags and sharing. Check out this post to learn how to tag people and create group tags.

We’ve also added an option to enable a passcode lock to protect all your notes. You’ll find this in the Settings screen. When you enable the lock, people can still use other apps on your device, but they won’t be able to access your notes in Simplenote unless they know your code.

Premium subscribers are also treated to two great new features: Dropbox syncing and lists.

Are you an original, paid Simplenote user or did you buy an ad-free upgrade in the past? An unfortunate bug in this update has re-enabled your ads, but we’ve got you covered. We’re giving you all complimentary premium upgrades until a fix is available. This will let you disable ads in the meantime.

Lastly, here are some fixes that are in this update:

• fixed an intermittent crash when the note list updates
• fixed slowdown when typing in larger notes
• fixed toolbar sometimes disappearing when using versions
• fixed not being able to use spaces in passwords
• word count now reports actual count rather than an estimate
• improved note list preview for notes that have a single paragraph of content
• removed redundancy in note list previews when viewing notes by tag
• fixed occasional display problems with note info
• fixed published notes erroneously disabling the sharing button

Have you tried the Simplenote web app lately? We’ve fixed and improved lots of small things there as well. Thanks for your feedback as we continue to make improvements.

People have been using Simplenote to share grocery lists, class notes, travel plans and more with their friends, family, and co-workers. Meanwhile, those with lots of notes have been using Simplenote’s tag system to help keep everything organized.

In the forthcoming update for iOS, we’re introducing a revised system for tags and sharing based on your feedback. We’ve unified these two features in a way that we hope you’ll appreciate. Here are the details:

Tag autocompletion

Start typing and select the tag you want from the live search results. Or tap the plus button to access the tag manager.

Add people as tags for fast sharing

People in your address book appear in your tag search results. You can tag people to quickly share your note with them. If they have Simplenote accounts, they’ll receive the shared note directly in Simplenote (and 3rd-party apps). Otherwise, they’ll receive an email with a link to the shared note where they can view and edit it on the web.

You can think of this as being like collaborative email where both the sender and receiver can make changes to the content, and everything stays in sync.

Group tags

You can add people to tags to create group tags. For example, here at Simperium, we have a Simperium tag that has the members of our team. Whenever we add the Simperium tag to a note, that note is automatically shared with our team.

Improved web app

Tags work better in the web app now, too. You can access all your tags (including group tags created in iOS), and you can add email addresses as tags for easy sharing. Tag syncing has also been greatly improved. The only limitation is that you can’t yet create new group tags using the web app.

3rd-party support

It’s easy for developers to add support for this new sharing system to their apps. All they need to do is support tags. Our platform does the work to figure out whether a particular tag is an email address or a group tag, and it will handle the sharing accordingly.

Coming soon

These enhancements will be available to all iOS and web users as a free update very soon. The update also has a variety of fixes and a couple more surprises.

Simplenote for iOS version 3.0.6 has been released. It has full translations into French, German, Spanish, and Dutch. Many thanks to those who helped:

• Alexandre Testu (French)
• Bernd Folberth (German)
• Michiel Houtman (Dutch)
• Arturo Martín (Spanish)

This update also has the following important changes:

• fixed text and notes sometimes getting duplicated
• fixed bug where edits could be lost if you create a new note quickly after making changes (iPad)
• fixed tags not being removed properly after a sync
• fixed a problem with pin syncing
• fixed note list flickering after a sync (iPad)
• fixed tags not visually updating on the selected note after a sync 
• updated to latest version of TextExpander
• improved Default.png (iPhone)

Meanwhile, we’ve been updating the Simplenote web app on a regular basis with fixes and small improvements. For example, you can now change your account address from the settings page if you need to. And a warning will be displayed if you try to navigate away from the web app before your note’s contents have been saved.

Lastly, Simplenote 3.1 is under development for early 2011. We’ll announce more details closer to release.

Some of you may have noticed there’s a new little status indicator in the Simplenote web app. This is the first of a few important fixes we’re working on. These will be released over the coming weeks. We’re also aware of some potential issues with Internet Explorer 8. We’ll take a look at those as well.

Thanks for your patience while we make these improvements.

Thanks everyone for your patience while we roll out some important fixes. The latest update for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch is 3.0.5. It has a variety of fixes for unfortunate problems that some people were experiencing.

The complete list of changes is:

• fixed bug that could cause syncing to stop working
• fixed bug that forced you to sign out under some circumstances
• fixed bug that could cause recently entered text to duplicate
• fixed tag reordering
• fixed an instance where tags could disappear
• fixed searching on iPad (portrait)
• assorted reliability fixes

Now that we’ve brought Simplenote’s sync reliability up to a more acceptable level, we’re working on a few remaining problems: a text duplication bug that can happen when locking your device, some remaining problems with synchronizing tags, and some problems with note sharing.

We’ve also released our new API to select developers, so you’ll start seeing more support for features like tag syncing in the coming weeks.

We’d like to apologize for some recent, intermittent problems when signing into Simplenote and syncing your data. The root cause is a problem at our hosting provider that is beyond our control. Thankfully, a large number of very smart people are working to solve that problem urgently.

An unintended side-effect is that, when one of these intermittent problems occurs, some of you are occasionally forced to sign out of your Simplenote accounts. This is a problem with the current version of Simplenote that we’re working to fix. The only circumstance where you should ever be forced to sign out in this way is if you change your login information.

Please bear with us as we work through these problems, and we’re sorry for the inconvenience in the meantime.

A critical Simplenote update has been released for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. It contains the following fixes: 

• fixed a problem that could result in data loss if you updated but had not yet created an account
• fixed a problem that could result in data loss while working offline
• fixed some problems with tags (although tag syncing is not yet perfect)
• fixed problems with searching in portrait mode (iPad)
• moved the Sign Out button
• only display Sync Now information once

We wanted to push this update as quickly as possible. As a result, it doesn’t contain a large number of fixes. The next update, 3.0.4, is already nearing completion. It will have additional fixes for synchronization, tags, and a fix for Japanese keyboards.

Thanks for your patience as we iron out these issues.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to apologize to those people who had been using Simplenote as an offline-only application. Early this year we decided to make Simplenote an online-focused app. We didn’t realize some people were still enjoying it as an offline-only app, and as a result, the major update did not go as smoothly for these people as it did for others.

If you’re among these offline-only users and you’re unhappy with your experience, please contact us at support@simplenoteapp.com so we can help you.

 

Our update went live several hours ago and we’re buried in feedback. Most of it is very positive, which is extremely rewarding for us. Thanks everyone for your kind words.

We’ll be going through it all in the coming days. This will take some time as we work through the backlog.

If you unsuccessfully tried sending an email to support@simplenoteapp.com, please use support@simperium.com instead until our domain transfer is complete.

We’re already working on another update to address some of the problems people have found. We appreciate your help.

We’re proud to announce that a major new version of Simplenote is just around the corner. It should be available in a matter of days. In the meantime, we’re temporarily absent from the App Store. We apologize for that. We encountered some unfortunate problems with a new App Store release process.

But the update is coming, and soon! We’re not revealing all the details until it’s live, but we’d like to at least prepare you for what to expect.

Simplenote has been growing fast. Over the months, we’ve received all kinds of great feedback. We processed this feedback, pondered it, prioritized it, and came up with 3 areas of focus for this version: reliability, organization, and sharing.

Importantly, we’ve also put a lot of effort into preserving or improving Simplenote’s speed and elegance. Our number one piece of feedback is consistently this: please keep it fast and simple. So we did.

For those of you who use 3rd-party Simplenote clients, you’ll need to wait a little while before new features start showing up there. 3rd-party developers will need some time to work with the new version.

We’ll let you know when the update is available, and we look forward to sharing all the details!