Notacious- App In Focus

Notacious for iPhone ($0.99) by lepidu development is a simple note taking app for your iPhone with online syncing capabilities.

Notacious requires an account to use, much like my personal favorite, Simplenote. Creating an account is fast and easy, and best of all, is free to use. From the login screen to account creation and others, you can tell that there was a lot of thought put into the design of Notacious to make it look great.

Once you create your account and log in, you’ll be greeted with a default “Welcome” note. This note will give you a basic guide of using the app.

The notes listing is the main screen of the app and allows you to view the note title, when it was last edited, and the first line of the body text.

Creating a note is very simple. From the note listing screen, tap that + button to create a new note. A title can be entered for easy organization and reference later. Then simply tap the text area beneath to start typing out your note. The interface is clean and pleasing on the eyes. When you’re done, a tap of the Save button will save all changes and take you back to the note listing.

Be careful to hit the Back button before saving changes. There will be a prompt that will ask you if you want to discard all changes – if you tap Yes, all progress will be lost. If you tap No, you’ll remain on the editing screen until you hit the Save button.

If you view a note, you’ll have a couple of options at the bottom. The ‘i’ will pull up Information about the note, which will only show when it was created and when it was last edited. The button that resembles a “download” icon will allow you to copy all the body text of the note to your iPhone’s clipboard. This way, you can share your note by email or whatever other methods you prefer. The trash can, of course, deletes the note, but not without another prompt to prevent accidents.

Notacious has a few tweaks that the user can change in the app settings, accessible from the main screen. The Readability settings are probably the one you’ll want to try first, because this is where you can customize the app’s editing interface to your own liking. Choose from five fonts, three text sizes, and three text colors. I’m usually a Helvetica kind of girl, but I’ve taken quite a liking to the “Noteworthy” font, especially in dark grey. There’s also a Reset Cache option if you need it.

The biggest thing you’ll probably notice in the Settings is the Account Type at the top. Notacious has two account options – free and premium. The premium version allows the user to lock notes and share them (instead of copying the text). Currently, these are the only additional features of a Premium Notacious account, but the developers have more planned for the future.

This Premium account costs only $2.99 and is a one-time purchase from within the app. Once you get Premium, that’s it – it’s not a recurring annual subscription fee like Simplenote. However, if you try to get a Premium upgrade from the web app at notacio.us, it seems that the price of a premium account is $5.99 there, for whatever reason. If you want to save a few bucks, then get the upgrade from the iPhone app.

While I’m digging the interface of Notacious, I’m finding the saving method a bit cumbersome. The app does not seem to automatically save changes in timed intervals, and you have to watch the app finish saving changes before you can do anything else. I would much prefer if the app can save automatically or not lock me out of anything else when saving changes.

I would also like to think that the ‘i’ option on a note should include something like word and character count, because that may be more useful to me than just knowing when a note was created or last modified. I’m also not sure why but it seems that the text that serves as a preview of a note gets cut off randomly, making it look awkward. I’m sure it’s dependent on the first few words of a note, but still, it bugs me seeing something like “We’d like to take th” instead of the complete words with a “…” at the end if there’s more text.

One more thing that the app is missing – landscape. So if you prefer that long horizontal keyboard for your note taking on your iPhone or iPod Touch, then you’ll want to hold off for now.

While the app is pretty good overall, I can’t see myself replacing Simplenote with this just yet, even though the premium upgrade is cheaper. All your notes are only stored on Notacious’ own servers, with no option for something like Dropbox, which is an option for premium Simplenote subscribers. I also can’t use Notacious as a replacement unless there’s an API for it like Simplenote for use with desktop applications, such as Notational Velocity.

It’s a good app, but still has a way to go before I can replace Simplenote with it. However, it seems the developers have plans for an iPad and Mac version, so I’ll play the waiting game.

You should still check it out though, since it could be great for those that don’t already use Simplenote.