Review: TapNote for TouchPad

I’ve been a big fan of Evernote since its early beginnings and depend on it daily for both personal and work related document duties. Naturally, I was excited to see it come to webOS in the early days of the first generation Pre’s and beyond. The updates to the app were few and far between after that, and then it seemed they had stopped developing for webOS altogether until they broke their silence earlier this year. Well, here we are hot and heavy into the release of the TouchPad and we’ve yet to see an updated version- enter TapNote for TouchPad.

TapNote for TouchPad (One Crayon $5.00) takes the cloud sync ability of Evernote, the convenience of Dropbox, and ties them both together to make a rather capable document editor for the TouchPad complete with cloud sync. Throw in the fact that TapNote also has a version for the Pre family of smartphones and you get the best of both worlds with access to all of your documents straight from the cloud on both devices. Although I’ll be touching on TapNote for the TouchPad in this review, the phone client works in the very same way plus or minus an option or two. Any changes done in the TouchPad version will be synced to the phone and vice versa.

To take full advantage of TapNote you’ll need a Dropbox account, which is free for the first 2GB of space. Dropbox is not needed, however, since documents can be edited and stored locally. Once TapNote is linked to Dropbox, a folder is created named “TapNote” where all of your documents are synced in the form of .TXT files. The app itself has a fairly simple layout with the document list on the left pane, and the editing window on the right which can be expanded to full view or popped out to a new card. The bottom bar has options to create a new doc, manual sync, trash, email forward, and print. A handy tip for Evernote users: Use email forward to forward your notes to Evernote using your Evernote email address for further editing on your desktop. The majority of this review was done in TapNote in this same way.

TapNote begins to sync your document list when it’s first opened. The sync feature is only manual as of this writing, and although I’d like to see a timed sync of some sort, the system in itself is done rather well. I’ve tried a number of times to make it lose my work by minimizing the card and throwing it away. The app actually does an auto-sync when the card is minimized and swiped away; I never once lost any work. Of course, you can always head to your desktop to open the TXT file and copy the text to almost any editor out there to continue working on it. You can also sync documents from your desktop to the TouchPad by simply creating a text file and saving it in the “TapNote” folder in Dropbox. The file will appear in the app when a sync is done.

The text editing features leave a lot to be desired at the moment. There are no options to format text or insert images for example. It’s as simple as a simple text editor can get. It does, however, have a convenient time and date stamp feature that can be used to track editing changes and the such. Preferences include options to change the size and appearance of the font, but that’s about it. Another handy option is Just Type support which allows you to create a new document or append text to an existing document on the fly. Lack of editing options aside, features such as pop-out card support giving you the ability to work on multiple documents at the same time really shows the beauty of multitasking in webOS on a tablet. TapNote does a marvelous job of it.

Grab TapNote for the TouchPad today!