Tsaiberspace

The Palm “Memo” app is much better than the built-in iPhone “Notes” app, except for the small matter of PalmOS being discontinued. My requirements for the iPhone “Memo” app replacement:

• Categories – or “folders”, or “tags”, or whatever. Single-tags is sufficient, multiple tags per memo is not required.
• Per-note password protection. The Palm “Memo” app allows for individual notes to be password-protected so that one doesn’t have to password-lock the entire iPhone.
• No cloud-service requirement. The existence of personal data in the Palm Memos makes synchronizing with a cloud service a deal-breaker. Notably, this excludes Google Docs (popular with many apps) and the apparently-popular EverNote, Notespark, and Appigo/Toodledo.com apps.
• Data Portability. I need to import 400+ memos from my Palm.

The app I settled on is called Notes+, which at $1.99 on iTunes is very reasonably priced compared to other apps. Aside from meeting all of the above requirements, it features a freely-downloadable companion desktop application (a super-stripped-down Palm Desktop “Memo” application) which can synchronize with the iPhone, and, most importantly, stores its data in a very developer-friendly SQLite3 database.

Palm Memo notes can be exported by Palm Desktop 6.2 as a CSV file.

I wrote memo2notes.py to read this CSV file and put its contents into the Notes+ SQLite3 database. Finally, I synchronized the desktop app contents into the iPhone.

The Notes+ app itself is fine; I only have a few small complaints:

• Category navigation is not as good as in the Palm app. It has the same “category” button at the top of the screen. On the Palm, tapping this button yielded a dropdown for category selection (either to change the browsed category, or for changing the category of the viewed memo). However, in Notes+, clicking this button brings up a category chooser at the bottom of the screen, requiring that the finger move from the top of the screen to the bottom of the screen.
• The index of notes doesn’t use screen real estate as efficiently as in the Palm. In the Palm, the index view uses a single row of text per note. In Notes+, each note in the index takes up two rows: the subject (just like in Palm), and a second row for the note’s category. This is somewhat understandable because having only a single row would make things difficult to hit with a finger (since iPhone users don’t typically uses styluses). But it would have been nice to have a single-row option.
• Starting up the app is delayed with a splash screen. It looks nice, but it gets in the way, and is seems gratuitous. The app is already paid for, it’s not like this is a free app trying to upsell you to a paid app, or showing some advertising.
• On Windows, the desktop app doesn’t minimize into the system tray; it takes up Taskbar space. It is nice that you can leave this app running so that the iPhone can back up its data without having to be plugged into iTunes. Unfortunately for Linux geeks like me, there is no “headless” non-GUI version of this app.

Other Palm refugees will hopefully find this tool helpful.

(I am not affiliated in any way with SEPV Corporation, just a satisfied customer.)