Simplenote was my favorite note taking app until it lost notes of mine a few years back.
I decided to give them another chance recently--hoping that these syncing issues had been cleared up--and Simplenote lost even more notes. It hasn't been dependable at all in my experience, and that's a shame because I love the interface and its focus on simplicity.
I'm excited that parts of it are going open-source. Hopefully the server will be made open so some of these core issues can be addressed.
Just as a counter data point, I've never lost a note and it's been very dependable for me for at least 5 years or so. Still makes me nervous though now and then.
But if you're worried about it you can set it up so that it keeps a local copy of your note library as well, just in case.
Yeah, it's funny I had the same experience with Evernote. Erased some notes during sync and I noped out of there. Went to Simplenote, which has been flawless for me but obviously your experience shows that the service isn't flawless.
I just wish there was a note company who made "don't lose data" the #1 priority and built the architecture around treating that concept like a religion.
Definitely something we haven't heard lately. Every version of every note is saved, so if something goes wrong with a bad client you can always log into the web interface and look up the history. If it ever happens again contact support and we can look into the specifics.
> You can mirror all your data to your own backend, but it's not yet possible to host Simperium yourself. We're open sourcing our client libraries, protocol, and a reference service implementation that will allow you to host your own service in the future.
In fact, Simperium was originally created to provide the syncing features of Simplenote and then generalized to work as a service for anyone who wants to sync structured data.
I hope this means that an actual developer API is coming soon.
Their developer page[1] still says "The current version of the Simperium API does not allow for 3rd party development of Simplenote apps at this time."
I'd love to have something like "Append to a Note" in IFTTT that behaves like the "Append to text file in Dropbox".
Unless I misunderstand, this looks pretty much one-way street for me. What's in it for developers? The server's not open source, all this is is just a wrapper around their proprietary api.
I understand that, but I am talking about now. There's no point (other than marketing and free labor purposes, which is what I'm criticizing) in open sourcing their client app when the server is not open source. What purpose does it serve? I mean, how do you expect to use this code other than hooking up to Simplenote?
I remember this company called Layer, they "open sourced" their "messaging UI framework", and I first thought it was something like JSQMessageViewController where you can just take the library and really build your own chat app, but turns out it's just a shell to connect to their layer.com server. Again, what's the point? I can't help but wonder what's going on in these people's minds when I think of all the time they would have taken to clean up code and prepare to announce their open source.
Someone that motivated would be better off building their own client as well. In case of Simplenote, server is the most important part, client is just a thin wrapper.
I hope that is not bad news, i.e., I ope that open sourcing the Simplenote client does not means less love from Automattic for the software. Search in the Mac version for example has had issues for a long time …
Would be nice if the Landing page actually include some screen shots, so i know what sort of App it is, instead of describing it with words and I have to dig all the info up in the blog section.
As others have noted, Simplenote (in its various apps and platforms) works just fine offline. I work for days without a connection and then it syncs to the server whenever there's a chance.
I decided to give them another chance recently--hoping that these syncing issues had been cleared up--and Simplenote lost even more notes. It hasn't been dependable at all in my experience, and that's a shame because I love the interface and its focus on simplicity.
I'm excited that parts of it are going open-source. Hopefully the server will be made open so some of these core issues can be addressed.