Simplenote will be unavailable in the App Store for a short period of time. We apologize to our potential new users. You’re welcome to create an account in the meantime and we’ll let you know when we’re back.

Sometimes everything happens at once. That appears to be the case with Simplenote clients for Android this week. Suddenly, out of nowhere, there are now three separate notes apps for Android that work with Simplenote. Great! We’ve added them to our Extras page.

These are fairly basic offerings at the moment, but hopefully they’ll continue to evolve over time with your feedback. If you’re an Android user who has been waiting for Simplenote access, give these a try and let the authors know what you think!

mNote

AndroNoter

SolidNote

If you’re not already a Simplenote user and you need to create an account, you can use this makeshift signup form. It’s ugly, but it works. We’ll be improving that soon.

Also, did you hear that Adam Pash over at Lifehacker has declared Simplenote to be The Holy Grail of Ubiquitous Plain-Text Capture? Strong words, Mr. Pash. Love it.

Today, Simplenote will be working in read-only mode for about an hour, which means syncing won’t work during that period. Then, over the next week, you might find that syncing isn’t quite as fast as usual. And lastly, exactly a week from today, there will be one more scheduled maintenance period.

This maintenance is the result of work that Google is doing inside their datacenters to make services like Simplenote even faster. This is good news. It allows us to keep growing without any problems.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

Some people have been asking about whether or not we’ll support Apple’s latest operating system, iOS4, and the new, higher resolution iPhone 4. The short answer is yes!

Actually, Simplenote already works with both iOS4 and the iPhone 4. But there are some improvements we can make. In particular, we’ll improve the quality of some of the icons, and we’ll try to make multitasking work as seamlessly as possible.

If you have any other requests, please let us know in the comments, by tweet (@simplenoteapp) or by email at support@simplenoteapp.com.

We’ve decided to focus full time on Simplenote. Henceforth, we’re elevating Simplenote from its humble status as one of several side projects to the lofty position of core product and service.

This has several implications. Administratively, and less importantly, we founded a new company. Simplenote is now brought to you by Simperium (@simperium on Twitter). So when you see the name Simperium here and there, don’t worry: we’re the same people.

More interestingly, we can now give Simplenote our full attention. But we’ll be careful. It’s called Simplenote for a reason, right? We won’t add new features or user interface elements unless they survive a rigorous gauntlet of checks and balances.

On the other hand, we do believe there’s a lot of room for innovation in the realm of productivity apps, and we’re excited to start exploring that in earnest. Our goal is to push boundaries while preserving simplicity. Our greatest reward has been hearing all the ways Simplenote improves people’s lives. We want more of that.

A huge thanks to everyone who uses Simplenote. Your support and encouragement are inspiring.

Mike and Fred 

Apple has recently approved a maintenance update for Simplenote that fixes several problems:

• fixed auto-opened note not syncing on iPhone and iPod touch
• fixed iPad not scrolling properly with physical keyboards
• fixed incorrect list selection after editing a note from search results
• fixed crash when tapping trash button with no notes
• fixed corrupted ad display in landscape mode (iPhone)
• updated to TextExpander 1.1.4
• tidied up the startup images

Thanks to everyone who took the time to describe these problems to us. We appreciate it!

We’ve been very hard at work on some new stuff for Simplenote. We look forward to sharing more details in the coming weeks.

Earlier today our update for Simplenote was approved bringing with it native iPad support!  We’ll have screenshots up shortly but for now you can see what it looks like by visiting the iTunes page here – just click on iPad in the Screenshots section.

We’re really excited about the upcoming release of iPad, and we definitely plan to support it. Having said that, Simplenote for iPad won’t be available immediately. We’re going to spend some time working with the hardware first to make sure everything flows as expected.

After we do some more testing in the coming weeks, we’ll submit a basic, working version that should hopefully become available within a month or so. This version won’t have much extra in the way of features just yet, but with time it will evolve based on your feedback, just like we did with Simplenote for iPhone.

We know that a lot of you plan to buy an iPad, and we appreciate your patience while we anxiously await our own devices. In the meantime, the iPhone version can be run on your iPad if you’d like, and our web app in landscape mode fits quite nicely on the screen inside Mobile Safari as well.

To those of you receiving your iPad soon: have fun!

Some users who have been active in the past 12 hours have experienced duplicate notes appearing in their accounts due to a problem we introduced in a backend update. We’ve addressed this problem and it’s now safe to sync again.

For the majority of people who encountered this problem, you shouldn’t see very many duplicate notes, and you’ll be able to remove them manually without much effort. However, if you experienced a large number of duplicate notes, please contact us and we’ll help you automate their removal.

Our apologies for the inconvenience.

The “Detect Links” feature in Simplenote uses the built-in capability of iPhone OS 3.0 to automatically detect web addresses and other info in your notes, and convert these into tappable links. This feature will be disabled as of the next update. For those of you who rely on link detection, you’ll be able to re-enable it, but it will behave differently. We’d like to take a moment to explain all the details.

The short story is that Apple’s built-in text controls do not fully support our desired behavior. In particular, they don’t support the ability to tap-to-edit your text and detect links in your text simultaneously. The reason, presumably, is that tapping to edit, and tapping a link, are two potentially conflicting actions. (For the record, we don’t agree with this reason considering Apple’s own Notes app handles the potential conflict just fine).

Other apps get around this limitation by giving you extra, separate buttons for editing your note or toggling link detection. We don’t like extra buttons.

We had implemented a satisfactory workaround, but it didn’t strictly adhere to Apple’s API guidelines, so they requested we remove it. As a result, we had to implement a far less satisfactory workaround.

After the next update, if you choose to re-enable Detect Links, then the process of editing your note will change slightly. After you tap your note, it will start editing either at the top or bottom of the note depending on whether or not you had scrolled down. Thereafter, you can tap again to put the cursor exactly where you want it.

This is far from ideal, but it’s the only quick solution we could find that avoids adding another button to the interface. If you have another idea, please let us know. In the meantime we’ll do our best to find a better workaround for the long-term, and we’ll continue to seek a proper solution from Apple.