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:

1. On-device-renaming — it’s coming in version 1.1
2. (Full text) Search on the iPhone/iPad
3. 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.

Setting up Notational Velocity to sync with Elements

A couple of steps are necessary to make Notational Velocity play nice with Second Gear’s text editor for the iPhone and iPad:

1. Install Elements on the iPhone/iPad and log into your Dropbox account; the application will add a folder called Elements to your Dropbox.
2. Disable Synchronisation with Simplenote, if you have been using it.
3. Tell Notational Velocity to store your notes as ’Plain Text Files’
4. Navigate to the Folder Notational Velocity stores your notes, it’s located at ~/Library/Application Support/Notational Data by default.
5. Copy all the notes from this folder to the Elements folder in your Dropbox.
6. Tell Notational Velocity to read your notes from the Elements folder in your Dropbox.

Done. Now you can either re-enable Simplenote synchronisation, should you want to have this service as a backup, or delete you notes from the Simplenote servers, which is what I’ve done.