Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

There’s an application on the iPhone called “Notes.” Right now the icon just links to a placeholder. Let’s assume that the Notes app is some kind of a metaphor for a notepad, where we can use the keyboard to type in snippets on the go. Big deal, right?

But it could be much more than that. Evidently Leopard — the next major release of OSX — will have some kind of a Notes capability attached to Mail, and other apps; select some text and paste to a new note…

Now, fast forward a little and imagine you’re reading a lengthy online article in Safari; you don’t have time just now so you select the unread text and save it as a new note. The note automatically picks up the web-page’s title as its own.

That’s all you do. The next time you charge your iPhone, it syncs and picks up all new notes on your Mac; there’s your article, ready to read in bed; on the bus; whatever…

It gets better: jump out of the Notes app to make a call, or listen to music, and when you go back to it — Notes has remembered your place in the long article.

Right now I use a Dell Axim VGA-screen PDA. On it I have an app called Haali Reader. It displays text files full screen, and it remembers where I’m up to in those files. With a pixel density of 220 per inch the fonts are, essentially, perfectly rendered, without the need for font smoothing to cure the jaggies.

This setup works so well that I can read from the small screen for hours at a time — without any eye strain. The only hassle is saving text on the Mac (in its current OS version) as named text files, and then copying them manually to the PDA’s SD card. If the iPhone can do the same thing — albeit not quite at the same pixel density — and with virtually no effort required to sync the files, this will be huge.

It doesn’t sound like much of a feature, but once you’ve tried Docs on the run, presented in such a ridiculously straight-forward interface — there’s really no looking back.