This is why all my App Store purchases of late have been text editors with Markdown and Dropbox support.
Seriously: I have three text editors in the lower four icons of my iPad (four if the ssh client counts): one to have the important work thing open (Editorial), another with my personal note folder (1Write) and yet another for just typing text quickly (iA Writer), jotting quick lists, etc. The "office girlfriend" will often grab my iPad during a meeting to tell me something in private or start writing down notes, and she knows she's only allowed to open the third one.
Startup-er folk: pay attention to "enhanced Markdown editors" like Editorial (good inline preview) and 1Write (decent to see an entire folder at once, much like the Evernote UI), not to mention the "todo.txt" category. Make comparable desktop clients (so I don't have to muck about in Sublime Text or Notepad++ trying to reproduce the folder view situation).
Sell the world the beauty of plain text, including budding formats like todo.txt and the kind of YAML+markdown that static blog generators use.
(When I was young and very abstract/naïve, I dreamed of starting a company to sell custom DSLs. But this is the next best thing: develop text-based DSLs for tagging, todo lists, meeting notes, etc -- readable-but-standardisable standards like Markdown. Make great UIs, make them multi platform.)
I love Dropbox, but is it a platform for an investment-worthy business? Anecdotally, I know a lot of people that have a free account that's completely full and have no intention of paying $99 a year and would probably need to have their password re-emailed to them. I agree that there are potential (and actual) great apps, but this kind of onboarding experience restricts the audience greatly.
I use Workflowy for easy cloud synchronization, great mobile apps (so I can quickly pull up a shopping list I created at my work PC) and generally the way the "infinite outline" model suits my mental organization. I'd be genuinely curious to the extent that some/all of these could meet some/all of these requirement, but Workflowy is so well designed and completely reliable that I haven't been particularly tempted to look around.
1. a similar interface across all platforms with similar features and behavior (android vs desktop text editing is a very different experience)
2. tagging/enhanced search
3. hyperlinks to other nodes and the Internet. This is incredibly powerful to me for nodes that are relevant in multiple contexts. You can put copy/paste the URL of any node into any other and viola, workflowy symlinks!
4. FOCUS. I have ~15k lines of notes in workfowy, but am still able to "zoom in" and focus on the content of just one note. That is super powerful for my productivity. A text editor with 16 spaces of indent and squished text to the right just does not do that for me. In fact, that will probably stress me out more.
Seriously: I have three text editors in the lower four icons of my iPad (four if the ssh client counts): one to have the important work thing open (Editorial), another with my personal note folder (1Write) and yet another for just typing text quickly (iA Writer), jotting quick lists, etc. The "office girlfriend" will often grab my iPad during a meeting to tell me something in private or start writing down notes, and she knows she's only allowed to open the third one.
Startup-er folk: pay attention to "enhanced Markdown editors" like Editorial (good inline preview) and 1Write (decent to see an entire folder at once, much like the Evernote UI), not to mention the "todo.txt" category. Make comparable desktop clients (so I don't have to muck about in Sublime Text or Notepad++ trying to reproduce the folder view situation).
Sell the world the beauty of plain text, including budding formats like todo.txt and the kind of YAML+markdown that static blog generators use.
(When I was young and very abstract/naïve, I dreamed of starting a company to sell custom DSLs. But this is the next best thing: develop text-based DSLs for tagging, todo lists, meeting notes, etc -- readable-but-standardisable standards like Markdown. Make great UIs, make them multi platform.)