If you've listened to Ministry Bits for any amount of time and you have read anything about how I like to handle text, you'll know that I love to write in Markdown. And Beegit has an excellent little cheat sheet I saw today for help in writing simpler and better.

Markdown is a simple way of styling plain text. So instead of having a .txt file, you will have a .md file that can be styled yet still be opened with any app, virtually forever. The short story is that I write in plain text/markdown because I can open the same files ten years from now. All the things I've written in MS Word in high school are completely inaccessible now, and I don't like that.

Markdwon is easy. For example, putting a single hashtag (#) before a heading makes it an H1 heading, the biggest heading. Putting two hashtags makes it an H2, a slightly smaller heading that can be used as a subheading. One asterisk indicates italics while two asterisks tells you it's bold.

Go ahead and check out Beegit's Markdown Cheat Sheet and fire up your favorite text editor (I love Brackets for Mac) and get started with Markdown today. Write simpler, write better.

For the last year, I have been looking, searching, researching, trying out, and tweaking what I thought might have been the one solution to my workflow woes. You see, what I want isn't hard - a simple synching solution for me to be able to compose classes and sermons on my computer (or iPad mini) and have them sync to my two other devices. I had some criteria when I began this mission:

1. It must sync to my iPad mini, because I do all my teaching and preaching from it. Additionally, it must look great and I must be able to format it in a way that I can easily glance at my notes when presenting. 

2. It must be on iOS. A companion Mac app would be helpful, but not essential. iPhone app is also not optional as I do a lot of tweaking on the go. 

3. It must be simple. No crazy layouts or unnecessary button on the app - just...simple. 

So, I narrowed my list down to three applications for my workflow: Evernote, Simplenote, and Plain Text. 

 

Evernote

Evernote seems like it's been around a long time, and that's because it has. It is a service that has never been accused of standing still. Evernote continually pushes new designs, additions, and features to its suite of apps which now include Penultimate and Skitch. 

Pros: Evernote is very well designed. The iPad app is beautiful on a retina iPad mini screen (and on the iPad Air as well). The apps are designed to easily do what you want to do: capture anything and everything. Evernote can capture text, pictures, voice memos, and even has embedded To-Do lists. It allows rich-text editing (bold, italics and such). It syncs fast across all devices, has a Mac and Windows app, and is also cross-platform on Android and Windows Phone as well. 

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The Evernote iPad app is gorgeous. 

Cons: For me, it seems a bit too much. I don't often need to capture photos and voice memos, only text. So I end up completely ignoring those features, mostly because I refuse to pay for a premium account ($5/month or $45/year). I did have a premium account for six months and didn't use the features. While it's a great app for 90% of people, a power user like myself who wants simplicity above all else isn't going to be using it very much. Still a great app though. 

Simplenote

Appropriately named, Simplenote is just what it says it is - simple note syncing across devices. I was just about ready to declare this platform dead when Simplenote relaunched with a new web design and app design as well as an introduction of a dedicated Mac app. I really thought this was going to be my solution. 

Pros: Extremely simple and well designed. Fonts and text look great and a retina MacBook Pro and retina iPad mini. The app is active in development and syncs well with other devices. There is no clutter to deal with in these apps - they simply allow you to compose notes, title them, tag them, export them, and pin them to the top of your list. Composing and writing in these apps (as well as the Mac app) is a joy. 

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Simplenote for Mac. 

Cons: It's almost too simple. Simplenote allows no formatting of any type and does not support Markdown editing, so if you want to style your text at all, you are limited to bullet points, numbering, and capitalizations. This sounded great in theory but I've noticed if I can't bold some text or make section headings bigger in my notes then I frequently lose my place while teaching and preaching because all the text looks the same. Tagging is great, and if tagging is your thing, you're going to love this app. If it's not, stay away, because that's the only amount of organization you get from Simplenote. All you have is a long running list of your notes, in order of what was last edited first. There's the option to 'Pin to Top' which comes in very handy.

I've run into some sync issues (as late as Oct-Nov 2013), but most of those seem to have been ironed out. The apps still crash on me frequently (once to twice a week) - I don't think a day or two goes by that the Mac app hasn't quit for no apparent reason and once the iPad app crashed on me while scrolling and preaching in front of hundreds of people (ack!). The iPhone app has a bad bug where it will crash when trying to sort changes in a note. I know developers are active on this app and I love Simplenote, I just cannot afford to use something that's unreliable. If the apps were stable enough, I might have this as my go-to platform. 

Plain Text

And here we are, talking about the joys of plain text once again. I really don't know why I migrated away from plain text, but it seems that my search has brought me full circle, back to where I started. 

You may read this and discount the plain text preference as an uber-nerd thing, but, in fact, it's really not. It just works. 

Pros: You can use a variety of text editors on all devices and plain text formats, including regular ol' .txt, Markdown, or Multi-Markdown. Markdown allows you to style your text how you want without changing to rich-text format. It uses simple symbols like asterisks to indicate bold and italics and hashtags to indicate headlines. Comes in handy when you get it down. The app I love to use on the iPad is Editorial, and on the Mac it's Byword. You can usually sync these apps to Dropbox and keep them in nested folders, easily categorizing what you need where you need it. Apps like Editorial, Nebulous Notes, and Byword are minimalistic and usually offer inline Markdown support, so you can see your bold and italics and headlines while writing. Best of all, plain text is future proof and my files are not tied to any platform, so I can move them around as I please. 

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Editorial for iPad. 

Cons: No simple "Compose it and forget it" syncing. Syncing is pretty painless, but requires a little bit of file management as well. Syncing isn't instantaneous unless you save your files in the app you're using. So unlike Simplenote and Evernote, you can't just sync and go. Plain text may not appeal to many people because it's not as simple to set up as other services. There's an extra added step when syncing to Dropbox, and you must know where your text repository folder is located. 

So looking at these three platforms, jumping back and forth between using them for the last year, I realized that there really is no "one solution" for capturing all my thoughts, pictures, and text (long or short). One solution is finding a small, precise suite of apps that fit your purposes. I'll use Editorial and Byword for all my writing (70% of the time), Simplenote for lists and occasional text capture (20% of the time), and Evernote for pics and logs (10% of the time). 

For me at least, one solution ends up being three solutions. 

As a youth minister, I take lots of notes. I jot down emails and phone numbers. I send emails. I write articles, lessons and sermons. I make lists, and lists of lists for planning projects. 

All of that involves text. 

As I am an uber-nerd, I use plain text for pretty much everything. As I type this now, I'm using Textastic on the Mac. But I store everything in plain text, and I'll briefly tell you why. 

Because plain text is future-proof. I can take plain text and put it anywhere, and I can then format that text how I want it. For example - I wrote this original post on the Squarespace internet site, and I had no backup. This post got summarily deleted because of my stupidity (and maybe a bug in the Squarespace iPad app). If I would have originally written this article in a text editor on my Mac (and by the way, if you have a Mac, everyone has a text editor - it's called TextEdit - and Wordpad for Windows) all I would have had to do was copy and paste the text instead of rewriting the post like I am now. 

Plain text is powerful because computers have been using it since their inception. I could literally take this text right now and put it on an old 1982 green-screened NCR if I wanted to. Or I could use this text in MS Word 2024 if I want. Granted, you are limited in formatting with plain text, and that's why they invented Markdown. If you really need to prettify something, a Word Processor should be your app of choice. 

But I digress. 

The reason for this post was not to tell you about the benefits of plain text, but to tell you how plain text and a little app called Drafts has changes my entire youth minister workflow. 

Drafts is a little app that does a lot of stuff, and it's highly customizable. 

The app opens ready to write - cursor blinking and keyboard ready. There's no start or splash screen - the app seems to be designed to do one thing very effiecently, and that's capture quick text when you want to the fastest way possible and send it to exactly where you want it. 

I haven't messed around with URL actions yet, but the Dropbox actions are really where I get my work done. 

I have a list for just about everything. For example, I have a text file named Log.txt and it's just random thoughts, links I've pasted in, and other stuff that comes to my mind. I open the app, type my text, hit the Share button on the lower right just above the keyboard, and I hit 'Append to Log.'

Here's the cool part: when I append a file, it simply adds that new line of text to the existing Log.txt file. I can then pull up that file on my Mac or on my mobile device and look at the list. It's incredibly helpful to be able to append to certain lists and not have to created new text files. You can create a new file, and that's what I do if I am starting an article or something. Drafts will automatically drop it into my Drafts folder on Dropbox and put a UNIX timestamp on it. It even gives you a little green bar and checkmark along with a little sound to let you know it's finished its work. 

Drafts helps me remember things so well. Riding down the road in the car, I can pull up the app, hit the Siri button, say a note, and hit 'Append to Whatever' and it's there waiting for me on the desktop when I get back to the office. I have a text file called Today.txt for my running to-do list, Camp.txt for notes regarding our summer camp this year, and a Comics.txt list that I can append to when someone tells me a great comic to buy. 

Drafts isn't limited to Dropbox actions, though. Built right in are actions to Send To services like Messages, Evernote, Elements, Email, and lots of other system apps. And by searching the Drafts Action Directory, you can find many more URL and Dropbox actions that you can install from your Safari browser. 

Basically here's what I'm saying - you need to check out this app. They have seperate versions for the iPhone and iPad, and they are $2.99 and $3.99, respectively. [App Store Link]

Try it out, and I bet you won't be disappointed.