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With the introduction of the iPhone 4S and Siri I really want to stick with notes.app on the iPhone. However I greatly prefer notational velocity on my Mac to using mail.app.

Other recommendations I've seen thus far has suggested using notational velocity on the Mac in conjunction with a third-party application for ios such a simple note or plaintext. Because of the native notes apps system level integration with the iPhone 4S and Siri I want to stick with notes.app on my iPhone while still syncing back to my computer and being able to use notational velocity

Anybody know of a way to do this? If not, let's try and come up with one as I imagine it would be useful for many people with the new iPhone 4S.

UPDATE: I bit the bullet and started using Mail.app for notes on my computer. It sucks, but is worth the price to be able to quickly add to and create new notes using Siri. Hopefully some solution to this will come along.

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    As far as I'm aware, Notational Velocity can either save its notes in its own database file, or as plaintext/RTF/HTML files in a folder. Further, synced notes (whether synced through iTunes or iCloud) appear in the OS X Mail app, thereby stored in a subfolder of ~/Library/Mail/... It's hypothetically possible you could target that folder as the source for your Notational Data folder... but even if that were reliable, the contents seem to be saved as mail messages, not text files. So this likely isn't going to work.
    – Dan J
    Oct 19, 2011 at 1:24
  • Yeah, I know. I looked into that earlier today. It sounds like that isn't the way to do it. But where there's a will, theres a way.
    – finiteloop
    Oct 19, 2011 at 2:53
  • I'm thinking maybe there is some app that lets you set up IMAP for your notes, and then saves them to a directory in .txt format. It would then monitor both the files in the folder and the files on the IMAP account and sync changes bi-directionally. I've never heard of an app to do that, but it would do the trick.
    – finiteloop
    Oct 19, 2011 at 13:48

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I use Notational Velocity and Simplenote apps on iPhone and iPad and the Simplenote web site as well and while I see you want to stick with Apple's notes.app I think you'll find Simplenote excellent, maybe better. I've been using it as long as it's been out and it's stable, simple, and has always worked for me.

If Apple mated the Notes app with something on the Mac I might never have tried Simplenote but it's cumbersome as you say to have to use Mail to deal with notes. Notational Velocity's integration with Simplenote is probably what you're looking for.

Simplenote is free, give it a go.

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    But you can't create notes with your voice using Siri while still syncing back to your mac to be used with notational velocity, which is my primary objective.
    – finiteloop
    Oct 19, 2011 at 3:01
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    Ah, sorry, I didn't read carefully enough. My iPhone 4S will be delivered in the next few days so I'll have the same issue eventually. Dictate into notes.app, select all, copy/paste into Simplenote... An awkward but maybe stopgap solution until we can dictate into third party apps directly.
    – Richard
    Oct 19, 2011 at 11:41
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    That's a feasible work around, but you lose the ability to update notes via siri. I'm going to have to keep looking.
    – finiteloop
    Oct 19, 2011 at 13:46
  • I just played yet again with notes.app on my iPhone and iPad and they do work quite well but the mail.app UI in OSX isn't great for me. I wish they'd allow us to connect it with either their own stand alone writing app (text edit with a drawer and different notes) or Notational Velocity. Until that happens I guess I'll stick with Simplenote. Thanks for prompting me to re-look at this, it's an important hole in Apple's offerings.
    – Richard
    Oct 19, 2011 at 20:54
  • Yeah, I wouldn't be looking for an alternative if Mail.app didn't suck at dealing with notes. I'll let you know if I come up with anything.
    – finiteloop
    Oct 20, 2011 at 0:16

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