Spot The Difference: Nottingham Clones Notational Velocity

Left: Notational Velocity, right: Nottingham

Tyler Hall, the developer behind Nottingham is quite clear: he loved Notational Velocity so much, he wanted to make a version of his own.

He makes it very plain right here:

“I didn’t start out to write an app like NV, I started out with the intention of literally copying what they had created and then improving upon it.”

Some of you Notational devotees out there might argue that the original needs no improvement, but wait: Tyler has some good ideas.

He’s changed the look of the notes and the search wrapper, because he thinks Notational Velocity is “ugly” (I disagree). But he’s also added support for synching notes with the Simplenote web service and associated iPhone app. Suddenly, Nottingham looks a lot more interesting.

For those who haven’t seen Simplenote before, it too was partly inspired by the beauty and simplicity of Notational Velocity. It syncs notes between mobile and desktop in a completely hassle-free manner, and is a much better solution to mobile notes than Apple’s own built-in Notes app, despite its own sync-with-Mail feature.

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Nottingham (+10 points for the name) might not offer much that Notational doesn’t already; Tyler says he’s added rich text support and a “Date Modified” column, but both of those are already built in to my copy of NV. The web preview is new and can cope with notes written in Markdown, which might come in handy.

But it’s that Simplenote feature that’s the story here, and what makes Tyler’s clone a very tempting purchase at just 15 dollars.

Over to you, notepad fans. Would you stick with NV, switch to Nottingham, or perhaps use both?

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