Nebulous Notes – As recommended by a crazy guy.
Nebulous Notes as recommended by a crazy dude
I was listening to a podcast and the person being interviewed recommended Nebulous notes. It is not a free app but I decided to give it a try seeing as it was not expensive. I wondered later if I should have followed the recommendation when the guy referred to himself as a person familiar with using the services of a shrink. So that is what the world has come to now. I am taking advice from a mad man. Does that make me crazy too? Probably.
I have Textastic, the iPad code editor, SimpleNote, Edito, Noterize, Evernote, Plaintext, Notes and now Nebulous Notes (for Dropbox). I even can write things into index card apps. So why noter with another notes app? One thing that is totally excellent is that I can save and open files with Dropbox. I now have 10Gb space on DropBox and less than 10% of it used so I should certainly do more with it.
Nebulous Notes
I like the thing they call Macros. When you switch on the macro toolbar there is an extra row of keys to put text into your document. If I type in DA it will fill in my name for me. There are some time stamps that you can use to put in a time or a date. There are some macros already in the app but then you can add more. It is supposed to work with Text Expander which I have installed. Seems like I have the two apps set up right. There is a switch in the menu of Nebulous which I switched on. Then you have to switch for sharing snippets in Textexpander. Should work after that, but no luck straight away. I found that I had to close both of the apps then open Nebulous again and then I had my snippets from Textexpander working within the app. Cool!
In the bottom right hand corner although you can see it if you tap there you get a menu and a chance to go full screen if you not full screen already. Well it gives you the bar at the top with an ‘Open’ button a ‘New’ Button and on the far right a button for ‘Upload’. Pretty self evident what they do, although the upload button is what saves the file into Dropbox.
This is the menu you get in the right lower corner by clicking on where it has the Aa . Underneath is the button for going full screen. As you can see from the themes that are there there is some evidence that they are aiming this at the coder types too. There is no reason why you can’t use it for straight forward notes though.
You can see there the button for turning on TextExpander. Also it is good to have a word count to see how the cords are all adding up.
When you click on the menu to see the Macros menu you get the options as in the picture below with your choice of whether to have the macro tool bar on or not and the ability to add new macros if you want to. If you need to edit the macros you have made already just hit the small blue circle button with the arrow to the right. Go in there and make the changes you want to.
There are a lot of options with Nebulous and I am loving it for the macros and the Textexpander features. With doing a lot of writing lately it is handy to have a good tool that helps with getting the text in there more efficiently.
When you can see the full screen with the menu bar type area at the top of the screen you can also tap on the name of the files and see more things you can do. ‘Hide Doc’ Takes you to a screen so that you can open up a file from DropBox or start a new file. ‘Preview Markup’ shows you how the doc will look when converted to html from markdown. Not sure if you can do anything with the markdown in this app. You could open it in Textmate on your Mac and have the markdown converted into html. It works well doing that.
I thought I could get it converted in Scrivener which lets you bring in Markdown files. May be it does but I need to explore it a bit more.
Do I recommend Nebulous Notes for working with text? Even though I heard about it from a mad man first? Well yes I do, it has many good features. I do like that it handles Markdown so that I can write for web pages and combine with actual html code too if I want. Another good point is the price. Only €1.59 for me and for that I will be using it instead of Simple note. Although Simple Note does sync with Scrivener. Maybe I will have to use the both applications. Next thing to look at is to have a look at applications that do handwriting recognition for iPad. There a few applications that do iPad handwriting recognition and PhatPad is certainly in the list when looking for the best handwriting app for iPad.
17 thoughts on “Nebulous Notes – As recommended by a crazy guy.”
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Actually, Nebulous Notes works great with Scrivener if you use Scriveners Sync with External Folder feature, which was in large part designed to make integration with Dropbox aware plain-text editors easy. Basically you tell Scrivener to set up a sync folder somewhere in Dropbox, tell it to export plain-text files, and then off you go. Nebulous can browse your entire Dropbox hierarchy and edit plain-text files with ease. When you return to Scrivener and load the project, by default it will scan for changes made to these files and sync any text alterations back in. This part is just like Simplenote sync in that sense—it just uses files instead of Simplenote notes.
From what I can tell, NN is a great companion for Scrivener. Being able to put common Markdown punctuation into the macro bar is great, and if you use the Markdown based workflow in Scrivener, the whole production is seamless.
Thanks for the input.
I will certainly give that a go. I love using Scrivener and I am still learning more about it as I go. Same with Nebulous which I have only had for a couple of days so far.
I am saddened that there will be no Scrivener for iPad. The sync feature is a great idea but there are no apps that support RTF natively so I end up losing my formatting.
This forces me to export to Word format, which everyone supports. I would, therefore, suggest you add the .doc format to the sync option. That will streamline the workflow.
There could be a Scrivener for iPad eventually – but not in the near future. One of the main ideas of using Scrivener is that you ignore the formatting to a large extent because it is the words and the ideas that the writer is creating that are important.
A good work flow would be to use the iPad for creating the text when out and about and then use Scrivener for the full job when working on your main Mac computer. From Scrivener you can out put to what ever format you like.
Have you tried to use Pages on the iPad as that will retain any formatting. I still think that the formatting is not what Scrivener is about. It is not a word processor to produce pages of formatted text. You do that stage of the job right at the end when everything else is done and not when you are likely to be moving text on and off the iPad. The Word format would just introduce a pile of unnecessary coding within the document, bloating it out of proportion to the actual text in it.
I would love to hear about what you are trying to do and come up with some more specific suggestions.