The Holy Grail Of Ubiquitous Plain-Text Capture | Lifehacker Australia

minimalmac:

minimalmac:

Ubiquitous capture — that is, the ability to snag any thought or idea any time and anywhere it happens to crop up — is a key component to nearly every productivity philosophy. You want to capture those fleeting ideas before they’re gone, and you don’t want to waste brain power obsessing over remembering it until you can write it down somewhere. Below, I’ll walk you through the best ubiquitous capture system I’ve ever encountered.

Great writeup on how to use Simplenote as a hub to get your plain-text files available to you anywhere. This is pretty much the setup I roll with but, as you may have read in a recent interview, I take the added step of storing my .txt database in Dropbox. This gives me the added bonuses of deletion protection and versioning.

I also use Notational Velocity and Simplenote on my iPhone. There is one critical difference between my objective and what Adam Pash describes in the article. Pash thinks about writing and synchronising plain text files, while I just want to deal with plain text. I am glad to not deal with the filesystem.

I had not thought of using Dropbox for versioning. I can revert to previous versions of notes using Time Machine or the Simplenote web app (with a premium account). Neither is particularly convenient, but fortunately I don't think I have ever had to use this facility.

Pash describes Simplenote for iPhone as "fast" and "snappy". This is not my experience. I find it sluggish. Still, I have not found a better complete setup than Notational Velocity and Simplenote.

(Reblogged from Minimal Mac)