Interesting: Notational Velocity + Drop Box
Notational Velocity is a Mac desktop app that put simply, speeds up the writing process. With a little investment into how it works, thoughts can be put down in text form almost as fast as you can type. But its real killer use is in combination with DropBox (another service recently given the thumbs-up).
To start writing a new document, type a title in the top field and hit return, which takes you into the document’s body. Type away. To edit an existing document, type its title in the same field at top and your saved articles appear in a list, immediately below. So the top field does double duty as search or starting a new file — fairly brilliant.
All notes are saved automatically, so you can forget about file commands. You can set files to save into a designated folder, so you can forget about file management.
Now add in DropBox. Under Notational Velocity’s preferences, you can define a particular folder for Notational Velocity to save all of its documents to. Set up a sub-folder within DropBox. DropBox automagically uploads said files to the web, plus syncs the files across your computers, and even allows viewing via the iPhone.
Other nice features: Notational Velocity can save its files in text format, so they can be edited in other programs (and also be found in Spotlight), tags, lightning fast find/search/replace across files, spellcheck, and URLs are automatically active.
I’ve been testing Notational Velocity by editing blog articles across two Macs, and it’s worked flawlessly. Enough so, that I’m actually moving content out of Google Docs and into this desktop app. That may sound like a step backwards, but while the cloud is great for storage and syncing, a UI rendered in a browser always runs the risk of being slower than that of a desktop app. Using Notational Velocity plus DropBox means writing is as fast as possible, while the file management capabilities of the cloud do its syncing magic in the background.
Anyhow, if you haven’t completely given up on solid desktop apps for the cloud, give Notational Velocity a try.
Get Notational Velocity
Get DropBox
Don’t forget to heed the warning about combining Dropbox with Simplenote here:
http://wiki.github.com/scrod/nv/synchronizing-with-dropbox
Thanks for the tip!
Giving it a try, thanks! This sounds pretty neat.
iPhone integration is always excellent, too — particularly excited about giving that a try. I wish the Dropbox iPhone app included basic text editing functionality — I’d prefer not to pay for SimpleNote.
[…] an earlier post I mentioned playing with Notational Velocity on two Macs, synced with DropBox. This worked really well, but I then wondered if I could edit the same notes using the iPhone. The […]