I’m currently at South by Southwest – wonderful and exciting conference, but there is a TON of material to grok. I’m a good note taker, but in a perfect world I want my notes digitized so I can have easy digital access to them later.

I’ve used the “Notes” app that comes on the iPhone/iPod Touch and found it to be a piece of junk. From the stupid looking felt tip font and the yellow notepad background to the odd syncing into Mail.app on my computer – it simply doesn’t work for me.

However I’ve tried a new combination at SXSW that has worked beautifully. I bounce back and forth between my laptop and iPhone all day so sync is fairly important to me.

This technique requires 2 apps, both are free.

On the iPhone/iPod Touch side there’s an app called SimpleNote. You sign up for a free account and it will sync all notes to their server. So you could actually stop here considering you can access your notes from a web browser. The app is wonderfully minimal and clean. You are still using the iPhone keyboard, but its the best I’ve used. No frills – it launches quickly and you can get your data written down. If typing is still tough – there’s some great cut and paste apps that I’ll talk about in another post.

On the Mac side you can either use the SimpleNote website to get your apps, or you can use a desktop app that will sync with the service. Notational Velocity works great and its free… same simple, no frills interface – its all about collecting data and this is exactly what I’m looking for when taking notes. You want to collect data, not miss data while you’re fooling around with options.

So the result is amazing. You add text to your notes (or create new ones). Both apps sync automatically to the SimpleNote server – you don’t even have to save. I just open the note on whichever platform I’m on and append to what I was working on earlier. Completely seamless and smooth.

Notational Velocity: