Blog*spark

Hi folks.

I don’t know if this was the cause of the AppStore issues, but it turns out that the build of Notespark that we submitted to the store doesn’t launch on 3.0 and 3.1 devices. I don’t know if this is why it stopped being downloadable from the store (it could be that someone at the store decided to pull it, or it could be something totally unrelated) but in either case, we’ve decided to pull Notespark from the store until we can fix the issue.

Once the issue is resolved, we’ll resubmit. For those of you who were incovenienced by the 3.0 / 3.1 issue, please send email to us at bugs@notespark.com and we’ll sort you out.

Lots of people have been emailing us to let us know that they’re not able to get the Notespark update from the AppStore. We’ve contact Apple to try to resolve this, but for now, we have no idea what is going on. We will keep you posted.

Woohoo! The new version of Notespark (mostly to support the iPad) has been sent to Apple!

There is also a new version of the website to go along with the new iPhone app, which you can use starting today. The new website uses ajax for just about everything, so it should be much snappier. Also, you no longer have to explicitly save a note. It just syncs up as you type.

The new website also supports the following keyboard shortcuts:

1. up and down arrow keys to navigate around the note index
2. return to start editing a note
3. ctrl-s to save the note
4. ctrl-shift-n to create a new note
5. ctrl-shift-f to find a note
6. ctrl-delete to delete a note
7. delete (or backspace) to delete a note

Try it out! Send all feedback (good, bad, or ugly) to feedback@notespark.com

Enjoy!

[update: the ctrl-delete keyboard shortcut is a standard shortcut for "delete word" on windows, so we got rid of it. Instead, we use the delete key by itself. This keyboard shortcut (like the up and down arrows) only works when you are not in the middle of editing a note.]

Ryan Hicks (from Adobe’s XD team) designed our new icon for us.

He did a writeup of what the design challenges were and how he approached the problem. Check it out.

Hi folks.

Mike and I have been working for the past year on a new startup, called Phile. We’re opening it up as a public beta starting today. We’d love for you to check it out!

Phile continues our obsession with making better use of information, but it takes it to a whole new level. Phile gives groups of people a permanent place to share information with each other in a better way – like a wiki, but more social and more structured.

The easiest way to get a sense of how Phile works is to watch the video.

You can find out more about how it works by reading our learn more page and you can get some background on why we thought this was an interesting project for us to do by reading our about page.

For an outside perspective, you can read the VentureBeat article on us.

As you can imagine, we are very excited about this. We hope you check it out, and we’d love to hear your feedback.

[obligatory Notespark news] As for an update on our last post, it turns out that our launch week for Phile was kind of quiet, so Mike is putting the finishing touches on the iPad version today. If all goes well and we don’t find any more bugs, we should be able to submit it to the AppStore in a few days.