It’s Free: Instantly Make And Find Notes On A Mac

How do you manage notes on your Mac? Word? Pages? TextEdit? What Mac utility do you use to keep little snippets of valuable information?

Do you store them nice and neat and Monk-like in your Documents folder? Do you have a standalone note utility? Or, do you suffer through a screen full of Stickies, those digital Post-it Notes that Apple gives us for free on our Macs? I like free.

Free And Easy Notes

Despite living high on the hog of the digital age, many of us still do some things the old fashioned way. By hand.

Personally, notes are easier and faster when I use a keyboard. I can’t type as fast as I think, but I type faster than I write.

What I look for in Mac note taking apps is simple. Free. Easy. Fast. Oh, and something that syncs nicely with my iPhone. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of Mac utilities which handle notes.

From snippets to bookmarks to images to videos to sound, there are many Mac tools to store and retrieve anything that crosses your Mac’s screen. None are easy. Few sync with my iPhone. Even fewer are free.

Open Source Me, Baby!

Enter the worst name ever for Mac note taking tool. It’s fast. It’s furious. It’s instant. Yes, friends, here to rescue us from the mundane displeasures a Mac screen infested with Stickies is—Notational Velocity.

No. I’m serious. That’s the name. Notational Velocity. Truly this is a name that didn’t make the cut for a new super hero at ComicCon. It doesn’t matter. Notational Velocity is an open source note taker, par excellence. Maybe all the good hero names are taken already and we’re stuck with eight syllables.

Look at how easy Notational Velocity works. Type in a title. Start typing your note in the section below. Done.

NT (I’m going abbreviation on you to save myself from syllable inflammation) saves what you type instantly. The Title window is also the Search window. As you type, anything related pops up in the window below.

That’s it. Notes go in as fast as you can create a Title and start typing. Saving is ongoing, so there’s no need to hit other keys to Save now and then. Searching is easy, too, just enter a search term or keyword in the Title/Search field, and results pop up below.

The Complicated Set Up Process

Anything this simple, this elegant, this productive must have a lot of baggage sitting in some digital closet, right? Try the Preferences.

Not much there, eh? The General setting gives you text size, a shortcut, and an option to change the color on the Search highlight, and a few other things.

The Notes option in Preferences reveals a touch to the future and one of my more demanding attributes for Mac apps and utilities—the ability to sync data.

Yes, friends, the note taking super hero, Notational Velocity will sync to other devices so your notes go where no notes have very gone before.

Sync Me, Baby, One More Time

File and data sync is a big deal for me. Yes, Have iPhone, Will Travel is my mantra, so good Mac and iPhone citizens are those tools which give me my data wherever I be at the moment.

NT syncs with SimpleNote, a clean, neat, fast, and fully mobile note taker that’s—here it comes—also free.

That means your notes go pretty much wherever you go—Mac, iPhone, even to a PC using the web interface.

With a name like Notational Velocity, you know there’s not to be more lurking under the hood, right? Check the Scrodlog for a few interesting facts about the marriage of NT and Simplenote.

In the interim, try NT. It’s free. It’s fast. Notes are instant. Search results are almost as instant. Did I mention that it’s free?