One of the difficulties of having many devices, in my case Mac, iPad & iPhone, is where to take quick notes. Notes that I then access from any device. In reality this mean that I want to capture a note or save a reference when I’m on my iPad or iPhone and then easily access them on my Mac. So my problem is not to organize notes but to easily capture them.
There many note taking tools available, for example the built-in notes app, simple note or Evernote, but for one reason or the other they haven’t really worked for me. So for capturing info from blog posts, twitter, feeds etc I’ve been using Instapaper for stuff I might want to read later and emails – yes, plain simple emails that I send to myself (to a special “reference/todo” account) – for stuff I should do. This works pretty well since most iOS apps include the possibility to send emails with links, photos, etc.
However, it’s still a bit cumbersome to write short notes to myself. I could launch email, fill in the correct email address and write an email to myself … but I’ve always found it too cumbersome. Fortunately I one day found a tweet/post that mentioned Captio and I had to try it it out. And it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.
Captio does one thing and one thing only, when launched it pops up a window that lets you write a quick note – you can include photos if you want – and when you press send it will write the note directly to your predefined email account. Perfect!
Captio on the iPad with keyboard closed
Captio on the iPad with open keyboard
Captio on the iPhone
This means that I now save capture info as before using Instapaper and emails to my myself + writing quick notes to myself using two taps – one for launching Captio and one for sending it.
It has worked well and replaced a few other solutions I had but – there is always a but – there is one small bug in the current version, v2.1, that prevents me from using it as much I would like to do: if I write a text that includes non-ASCII text like “gräsfrön” then the message I see in Mail will be shortened by two characters so it becomes “gräsfr” (the general case is that the number of missing chars will be the same as the number of non-ASCII chars in the note). When this is fixed Captio will be perfect for me.
Update: The latest version of Captio has fixed the missing characters bug and Captio is now perfect for my purposes.
