It wouldn’t be fair to judge Vesper solely by the names of its creators. A new note-taking app for iPhone released today, Vesper has been designed by Dave Wiskus, developed by Brent Simmons, and directed by John Gruber. There’s more to Vesper than the fame of the all-star team behind it, though.
Long-time MacStories readers should be familiar with the iOS apps that I like and use for taking notes, collecting thoughts, and organizing tasks. For years, my entire workflow was based on Dropbox: I would save articles, notes, random bits of text, and even tasks in text files handled by apps like Writing Kit, TaskAgent, Byword, nvALT, and Notesy. Those are still excellent apps, but my setup is more variegate now: my daily thoughts and memories are collected in Day One; longer articles are still stored in Dropbox and edited with specific text editors like Sublime Text; my bookmarks are saved in Pinboard, while everything else – from reference material to annotated screenshots – goes into Evernote. On iOS, Agile Tortoise’s Drafts plays a fundamental role in the way it launches ready to receive any text and is capable of forwarding it to multiple destinations – all while allowing power users to achieve faster, automated workflows.
Specific apps, different services, all with a common thread: sync to a remote backend that ensures my text is always available anywhere.
If you take into account the apps that I have reviewed over the past two years, Vesper may seem anachronistic and uncharacteristically simple: it’s a general-purpose note-taking app with no sync, no URL scheme, no iPad version, and no Markdown integration. When I first tried Vesper a couple of weeks ago, I was skeptical in regard to the app’s reason of existence. But now, in spite of its 1.0 nature and many missing features, I see one – and, more importantly, I believe Vesper gets several things right. Read more
