Whitespace, A Fantastic Text And Picture-Based Note Taking App

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whitespace

Whitespace is an note-taking iPhone app that kind of combines Q Branch’s Vesper with a corkboard concept (only without the actual cork texture — this is the age of iOS 7 after all). It’s slick, it works with pictures, and it’s free (ish).

I take as many photo notes with my iPhone as I take written notes, and Whitespace lets me combine the two, even in the same note. The organization metaphor for Whitespace is the card. Each note is shown as a thumbnail or card on both the main screen and in your workspaces. These spaces can also be thought of as notebooks, and they work more like Gmail’s labels than folders or books, because the same note can exist in any number of workspaces (just check the spaces you want in the drop-down chooser).

The main screen shows recent notes plus a list of recent spaces, and a quick-entry button: Hit this to add either a note or a picture. You can also create a note directly inside an existing space using the little + button by each category, or by hitting the red add button at top right. You’ll never be able to say you weren’t able to create a note fast enough.

Notes get their own mini text editor, with Markdown support (there are buttons to quick-add symbols for bold, italics and so on, with in-line preview of the results) plus a handy nubbin, a navigator button that moves the cursor around like the red buttons on ThinkPad keyboards.

Once your notes are in the app, you can search on the full text of all notes and quickly reorder items within your notes (using a list view).

I’m still digging in, and I have found a few problems, some of which might be because I’m running iOS 7 beta, but so far this really looks like it might be my go-to thing-remembering app.

It could really do with a map view to see where you took your photos. One of the main reasons I snap photo notes is to remember where something was, and right now I can’t find a way to delete a photo from a note. Some kind of sync would also be good (for using this on the iPad and the iPhone), but I can live without that.

What I really would like though is a URL scheme for creating notes. My default place to jot anything new involving text is Drafts, so I’d like to be able to send things from there to Whitespace.

Otherwise, though, the app is fantastic. As I said earlier, it’s free, with ads until you pay $2. I haven’t seen any ads yet, but I’m happy to pay up as soon as I do.

Source: Dynotes
Via: iMore

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