We just flipped the switch on a shiny new Simplenote web app design made by Eric Grossnickle over at Mighty Dream! Eric is the creator of the popular Simplenote Restyled theme. Using Restyled as a starting point, he put together a new design that is just as simple as our old one, but far more elegant. He does great work. Thanks Eric! Here’s a screenshot:

By popular demand, we also added a landscape mode for the web app that shows more notes and gives you a larger typing area. This new mode is great for widescreen monitors and should also work well on most laptops. You can switch to the new landscape mode by visiting your account settings in the web app.

Let us know what you think of the new design!

Lastly, you know the legendary Notational Velocity notes app for Macs? Well, we’d like to announce that the Simplenote team and the Notational Velocity team are working together to bring you tight integration. Awesome! There’s no release date yet, so you’ll have to wait awhile, but it’s on the way.

While the next update for Simplenote awaits Apple’s approval, we’d like to share with you all the core changes we made to the app.

We’re very careful about making changes to Simplenote. We’ll never add new stuff just to make our feature list longer than someone else’s. Instead, we’re committed to keeping a laser sharp focus on what Simplenote does best: text notes.

You can now sort by modify date (the default), creation date, or alphabetically. Web syncing can be disabled if necessary. And if you’re reading or writing in bed, or hanging upside down from a tree, you can lock your current orientation so it doesn’t flip unexpectedly. We wouldn’t want to make assumptions about where you do your best work!

You can also change the number of preview lines in the notes list to anywhere from zero to five, and you can display an abbreviated modification (or creation) date.

Notes can now have web, phone, and email links that you can tap in order to launch the corresponding app. And you can now email notes from inside the app. These were by far the two most requested features for Simplenote.

Furthermore, our design conscious users will appreciate a number of subtle aesthetic improvements, including a new animated search bar, smoother page transitions, a standard trash icon, a standard colored area above the search bar, and better formatting.

A huge thanks to Nick Farina over at Spotlight Mobile for helping us with his keen eye (and even some code)! His involvement helped us really polish these aesthetic changes.

We made a couple of great speed improvements as well. The app loads even faster now. If you leave a note open before closing the app, it will appear almost instantly so you can start reading it right away. Your position in this note is remembered now, too. And we’ve improved search-as-you-type so you can find notes quickly even if you have hundreds of notes on an older, 1st-generation iPod touch.

Last, but not least, we addressed some unfortunate problems: we fixed some missed syncs by syncing when the app closes, we fixed the “+” button not appearing sometimes, we fixed a rare text overwrite that we missed the last time, and we fixed support for international time formats.

We hope you like these changes. As always, please let us know what you think so we can continue to improve the Simplenote experience. We have more to announce in the coming days!

We’re really excited about the next Simplenote update. It’s been submitted to Apple and it’ll hopefully be approved within a couple weeks.

With this update, everything about Simplenote gets better. And it all starts here with our website. As you can see, our latest redesign is now live, and its clean and simple layout will set the stage for our forthcoming announcements. We’ll post all the details here over the next week or two!

Thanks to all those people who have contributed feedback and ideas to Simplenote. We think you’ll be happy with this update.

Last night, from 5pm PST to 7pm PST, our backend systems had a period of maintenance followed by an update to prepare for the forthcoming release of Simplenote 2.14. Unfortunately, due to an error, some note data was lost.

We fixed this error and updated our systems as soon as we became aware of the problem. Thanks to the handful of people who helped verify a solution.

If you notice any data missing from the web versions of your notes, please launch Simplenote on your iPhone or iPod touch and perform a full sync. Your notes will be sent to the web version and fully restored.

If you made changes via the web app without syncing them to your device, it’s possible that a sync will not restore your changes. Please email us at support@simplenoteapp.com if you think this situation applies to you.

We’re very sorry for this error. We take pride in Simplenote’s syncing and we do our best to make sure it “just works” without you having to think about it.

Your note data is already redundantly stored on your device and on the web, but in the near future, we’ll also be performing secure, off-site backups on a regular basis to add an extra safeguard against potential data loss.

 

Simplenote has joined the esteemed list of apps over at App of the Day.

We’re happy to share a new, community-created Simplenote Extra that lets you sync notes between Simplenote and the popular Yojimbo text editor for Mac OS X. Check it out on the Extras page.

Meanwhile, the fine folks at iProng magazine have reviewed Simplenote, saying it’s “much better over the default Notes app since there’s cable-free syncing. The future updates will only improve an already great app.”

Hmm, what could iProng know about a future update?

A small update has been approved. It fixes the problem mentioned previously where text can get erased if you start editing a note immediately after opening it. We have also improved our backend to speed things up even more.

John Casasanta over at tap tap tap wrote this lengthy article detailing the evolution of Simplenote’s icon. He summarizes some of the controversy surrounding it and describes the process of how it was designed. Thanks, John!

Apple has approved an important maintenance release:

• fix for a sync problem related to international time/date formats
• fix for cursor disappearing in landscape mode
• fix for “upside-down” orientation

Version 2.13 will be a maintenance release as well. It will address the problem where a small (but annoying) amount of text can be erased if you start typing very quickly after creating or editing a note.

The folks over at MacApper.com love Simplenote! You can read their review here.