Metanota, A Mac Simplenote Client With Folders

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Metanota brings folders to your Simplenote notes.

If you want a great Simplenote-compatible, note taking app for your Mac, then you should download the free and excellent Notational Velocity. If you want a harder to use, bigger and — some might say — uglier app to do the same thing, then Metanota is just the thing for you.

Metanota is a free, ad-supported app (you can pay $5 to remove the ads) which syncs with your Simplenote account and lets you search your notes and create new ones. The app is presented with a mail-like three-pane interface, and it’s here that we see the app’s gimmick: it presents Simplenote tags as folders. Or it says it does: they’re actually presented as brightly-colored dots which have the names of the tags written next to them. Click one and you get a list of the notes “inside.” Click one of these and you can read the note. Any tags the note has are shown at the top of this note view. Searching works within the context of the current folder, and new notes are also created inside that folder. The whole thing works just fine, but compared to the elegant brilliance of Notational Velocity, it just seems big and clunky, and those colored dots are enough to burn out even the toughest, most design-blind retinas. Right now Metanota will only work with a Simplenote account, but future updates promise iCloud, Evernote, Gmail and Dropbox syncing. Still, for some people it might be the perfect desktop solution for taking and syncing notes. Available now on the Mac App Store.

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