A short take on Second Gear’s Elements
Late yesterday evening I found out about Second Gear’s latest software release on The Loop. The application is called Elements and is a text editor with Dropbox synchronisation.
Having been quite happy with the system I use for note taking right now,
— Simplenote (iPhone) + Simplenote cloud sync + Notational Velocity (Mac) —
I still liked the prospect of having one less service in my workflow, without sacrificing efficiency.
After having used Elements throughout the day, I have to say that I really like the app: It strats-up quickly, the interface looks nice and nicely customisable to fit my needs.
This 1.0 release it’s still a bit flaky — I’ve encountered a bug that crashes the app when you scroll to the bottom of the list— and for me (YMMV) it’s missing a few key functions to make it as useful as Simplenote:
- On-device-renaming — it’s coming in version 1.1
- (Full text) Search on the iPhone/iPad
- The ability to sort the file list by creation date or name. Though to be fair, Simplenote doesn’t have this ability either.
Nevertheless, Elements has already replaced Simplenote on my iPhone 4.
If you want to, you can check out the quick guide I wrote, explaining how to synchronise notes between Notational Velocity and Elements.
