Web-based note taking and writing apps are a dime a dozen these days. There is no dearth of choices irrespective of whether you want a quick & simple note-taking tool or a feature-packed writing app with more functionality that you can shake a stick at. Then there are bells & whistles like mobile access, synchronization with cloud services and more.
Wri.pe is a fairly new app that tries to do a lot of those things in the attempt to become your go-to service for all writing and note-taking needs. It is a simple, web-based, mobile-device ready note taking tool with a page-full of features to boast of. I took it for a drive to see if it replaced any of my staples. Here’s what I thought.
Core Features
One look at the wri.pe homepage and you can tell that this is one feature-packed app. There are a ton of things the app does already, with a few more features listed as coming up in future updates. Log in with your Facebook or GitHub ID, and you can straightaway jump into writing your notes. The interface is modern and bold with a list of your documents front and center, ways to access them on the left and helpful tips off to the right.
The notes list
The editing interface is super-minimal with a big huge text area and a preview pane on the right. The preview updates in real time as you start writing your note and recognizes markdown as well as html syntax on-the-fly. The Help tab provides some helpful tips for editing your note and the Settings tab lets you choose fonts and turn autosave on or off.
The minimal note view
Pretty much every part of the app is accessible using keyboard shortcuts which are conveniently available in the right panel. You can close the widget once you get used to the shortcuts. Within the notes themselves, you get pretty good Markdown support, live previews, the ability to turn on per-minute autosave for each note, and more. What surprised me most though, was that fact that the app recognizes and parses HTML within a note, including CSS definitions in the head or even inline.
One killer feature is a Calendar view that shows all your notes in a calendar view. The app recognizes dates in your notes and automatically places them on the calendar accordingly. Of course, this does not matter if you don’t bother mentioning a date inside the document. Besides, if you have two different dates — let’s say one for when a note was created and one for when it was last updated — the note appears on both days in the calendar.
The notes calendar is an interesting feature that may appeal to some
Bells & Whistles
There’s the usual set of features you should expect by default in an app like this – full text search, the ability to archive notes so they don’t end up cluttering your Notes list once their purpose is served, etc. If you are particular about your ability to back up and take your content with you, they have daily backups to your Dropbox account once you have authorized the app to do so. The calendar feature also goes a step further with iCal support, meaning you can integrate it with your calendar app of choice.
Dropbox backups can be turned on or off
There are also some very nice touches that add to the experience. Character, word and line counts are always available in the bottom-right corner when editing an app. You can manually resize the preview pane according to your preferences. Most importantly, the website works perfectly on mobile devices. Simply log in and start editing your notes, no matter what device or screen size you are working with.
Shortfalls
The app does a lot, but unfortunately not everything is as rosy as it seems. My biggest concern by far was the performance. Editing just doesn’t feel snappy enough. It is probably the live preview, but the fact that the app freezes for a few microseconds every time I write something makes it virtually unusable if you are keen on a distraction-free, snappy writing experience.
Apart from that, there are some glaring omissions — like the lack of offline support, collaboration and no way to organize your notes whatsoever. You get two buckets — Notes and Archive — with no folder or tags to categorize your notes. This can get frustrating very quickly as you add more and more notes.
There are also a number of minor niggles. Standard formatting shortcuts like Ctrl+B for bold, etc. don’t work. Clicking the Bold icon in the formatting toolbar doesn’t make the selection bold, rather adds a word “bold” with the formatting so you can go edit the text.
Promising Future
Although the app makes a very promising start, the lack of certain features, those niggling issues and most of all the laggy performance are a huge let-down. The developers promise that a number of features are coming soon though, and going by the periodic updates it is clear that the app is being actively developed.
Wri.pe does what it does pretty well, and might work for you if the missing features don’t matter as much. For me, the search continues.
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