nvNotes is an elegant plain-text notes app for iPhone and iPad. It’s designed to be minimal and does a great job of staying out of your way, so you can focus on the text contained in the app. I’ve been using nvNotes over the last week and it has replaced Simplenote and Vesper on my phone for the most parts.
If you couldn’t already tell, the name nvNotes comes from the brilliantly executed legendary apps like Notational Velocity and nvALT. I used to love using these apps for their simplicity back in the day, but slowly moved to Simplenote, especially after Automattic acquired them. nvNotes reminds me a lot of the simplicity and ease-of-use that these apps offered, but it is also a lot more polished as an iOS app and offers many more nifty features.
nvNotes puts the focus on your content. The UI is bare minimum and you can choose from four available themes — Light, Dark, Sepia and Charcoal. No matter what theme you choose, you get the same sense of minimalism throughout the app. nvNotes supports Markdown formatting and offers a Markdown keyboard with a custom top row for basic markdown formatting. There’s also a Markdown Preview button included, so that you can toggle between the preview and edit modes with a single tap. You can also use syntax highlighting for the nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives in your notes. At the bottom left corner, nvNotes displays the count of total words and characters in the current note. When you double tap this, it shows you the total approximate time you’d need to read the note. The app uses Dropbox to sync your content, so you can use it in combination with any other app that supports Dropbox syncing. My only complaint with the app is that the touch targets for Syntax Highlighting, Markdown and Share are really tiny on the iPhone.
nvNotes is a Universal app and available for $9.99 on the App Store.